Kinetics of Interactivity

August 26th, 2010 researchTags: architexture, city, haunted space, interactive, kinetic

Thinking about “Public Interactives” implies thinking about interactivity as an activity that occurs preeminently in space, and more specifically, in a locale.

Ludologists tend to understand interactivity as a product of systems, an interlocking mechanism of a series of actions performed by the player in response to a set of rules, whether these are the implicit logic of a game of tag or the constraints built into the virtual environment of World of Warcraft. Rules constitute both allowances and boundaries. They channel a flow of movement that keeps the game in motion, but that also demarcates possible actions from impossible ones. This flow has been characterized as the feeling of irrepressible rightness that sometimes accompanies the accomplishment of procedure (Salen and Zimmerman, 2004); “ludos”, to reprise Roger Caillois’s term for this type of rule-based play, is always spatially and temporally choreographed.

Interactive systems also seem to work best when they strike a sort of golden mean with the player: neither too difficult (which would lead to frustration) nor too predictable (which would lead to boredom). Interestingly, frustration and boredom are emotions that express stasis: they are stoppers of flow, they end the interaction. Emotional momentum, on the other hand, sustains play, and expresses itself in a feeling of elation, control, expectation, curiosity.

Not coincidentally, many games, including digital ones, place momentum at the core of their gameplay – whether kicking a ball across a field in soccer or sliding down a series of icy chutes in Mario. The emotional consequences of physical or virtual movement initiate a feedback loop that is self-sustaining, while the player’s struggle for control gives a shape or a purpose to this experience of free motion, thus prolonging it. In this perspective, the systems-oriented view of games is already a view that places kinetics – the study of “bodies in motion” – at the center of the definition of interactivity.

Kinetics is about ambulation: movement through space. Systems and spaces are surprisingly symmetrical concepts that allow different kinds of metaphorical transformations into each other; the popularity of using architectural terms to define software structure testifies to this.

Systems are defined by an operational terrain constituted by logical connectors that set up the permissibility of certain actions as opposed to others. Actions are open or closed depending on coextensive conditions articulated in discrete statements. In a similar way, spaces are built out of jointed negative and positive spaces that permit or restrict passage. Space has its own logical statements in connectors such as corridors, bridges, paths, conditional spaces such as balconies, mezzanines and rooftops, logic gates such as doors and windows. This makes the kinetics of a system and the kinetics of space strikingly similar.

Moreover, for the player / ambulator, navigation requires a certain prescience or foreknowledge about the system or space’s hidden topology. In negotiating a system a player struggles to acquire a degree of foresight in order to map out subsequent moves and plan ahead; correspondingly, the visitor of a space finds the view equally revealed and obstructed by her own singular perspective. Game studies scholar and designer Steffen P. Walz points to the interactivity inherent in spatial experience – an experience of point of view and obscured typology – in his discussion of architectural kinetics: “The way we move through a designed environment is responsible for our expectations of that environment. Thanks to material and immaterial emphases and the ordering of interior and exterior space, movement affects, shocks or surprises us, reveals secrets, and most importantly, asks us to actively participate in a space intellectually, physically, and relationally” (Walz 2010:30).

Shivers: synesthetic interactive panorama

August 13th, 2010 researchTags: ambiance, flaneur, kinetic, play

I think of the puzzles and spaces of the 1995 Sierra game Shivers as an extension and ambient accompaniment to the game’s soundtrack. No game that I have since played captures mood so well – the sound and feel of mystery, danger, anticipation, uncanniness and solitude. The rooms are themed exhibits in an abandoned museum “of the Strange and Unusual”. They recall a very Museum of Jurassic Technology-ish type of eclecticism, mixing anecdote and legend with fact, preferring poetic allusion to information visualization.

Most delightful of all, various classic puzzles often inspired from ancient devices act as the gatekeepers to the microworlds of each exhibit. Sound plays a key role in evoking the tactile and kinetic qualities of these mind-toys – the sound of clicks and whirs and small metal balls rolling down granite passageways. The patient mechanical unfolding of the puzzle processes the ambient soundtrack, so that solving the puzzle becomes a means of listening to the music, the way dancing offers a solution to a beat. Here, the player experiences the sound of thinking.

Fischli and Weiss ” The Way Things Go”: inflatable and inflammable cause and effect

April 5th, 2010 researchTags: architexture, detournement, experimental circus, haptic, kinetic

The most hardcore of mouse-traps on a human scale, with various inflamable materials, ballons, liquid helium, fire, bubble, tires, mutilated furniture, using the principles of inertia, wheeling in symetrical patterns, explosion, aerodynamics, the centripedal and centrifugal forces and many others. More grungy, more dangerous, more punk rock than the famous recent “This Too Shall Pass” video by OK Go,  looking back at an experimental classic.

TORUS: conceptualizing my installation for Burning Man 2010

March 24th, 2010 germinating ideasTags: ambiance, architexture, body, city, espace heureux, experimental circus, kinetic, maze, noise, play, utopia

Torus is a bouncing castle, an inflatable tunnel, a crawl space to rest and socialize, and a novel. After enjoying the buoyant properties of the platform at the center of the structure, revelers enter the darkly glowing, semi-translucent tunnel that circles the ring. Comfortably wide, and yet not large enough to allow you to stand up straight, the tunnel is a tautological maze that amusingly, gently disorients. Its elastic, squeaky walls have the consistency of a balloon and make for interesting reclining, lounging, splaying and contortion of limbs. Strangers meet as they crawl or wiggle through the tunnel: talk, experimentally intertwine, explore the space together. A system of fans keeps the air of the labyrinth adequately fresh and oxygenated.

The secret of Torus is in the speakers embedded in its walls: the tunnel is divided into four quadrants. Each quadrant broadcasts a section of a short novel narrated by the novel’s protagonist. Like in one of Borges’ fantastical stories, the novel has neither beginning nor end – it is literally a circle!

The torus itself is a geometrical object with fascinating psychological properties…sound travels elliptically through it, allowing visitors to experience the ambiance rather than the letter of the novel.

Sonic and Synesthesia: archaic utopia and toy emotion

February 18th, 2010 researchTags: body, cyborg, espace heureux, experimental circus, immersion, kinetic, maze, music, play, utopia

As a child, I spent hours with my Sega Genesis or (Sega Megadrive, as it was marketed in Europe) developing digital motor reflexes meant to ensure my survival in a colorful 8-bit world. Rolling up in a little ball to zoom through transparent tubes or accelerate and fall in not-quite-Earth-gravity parabolas became second nature. Sonic introduced me to the delights of a sacharine electronic soundtrack that made the hard primary colors of Sonic world’s shimmer and subliminally controlled my minute pushing and pulling of the tiny joystick. Sonic is a masterpiece in synesthetic design: visual, aural and kinetic mesh together to create a re-embodied experience, more akin to telepresence than manipulating an avatar.

Apparently, other fans who still have dreams of pinballing through Sonic levels and have developped an automatic  jump and bounce response to hearing repetitive synth melodies  have posted these walkthroughs of Sonic 1 and 2…a nostalgic flashback to an archaic utopia.

FUN FAIRS AS MEGALOMANIAC SCULPTURE GARDENS

February 9th, 2010 germinating ideas, researchTags: architexture, city, detournement, experimental circus, interactive, kinetic, play, space

Think of these rides as INTERACTIVE SCULPTURES : again, breaking down the false-ontological barriers between the cultural practices of high art and “low” entertainment. pop culture is the avant-garde !

Architexture VII: Peter Sarkisian and the spherical arcade

February 9th, 2010 referencesTags: architexture, experimental circus, haptic, kinetic, machine, noise, play, uncanny

Peter Sarkisian, Extruded Video Engine n°=1. the impersonation of the arcade mentality! a new techno-animal emerges from this fizzing bleeping volumetric toy…

Peter Sarkisian at Volta NY
Uploaded by C-Monster. – Independent web videos.

The Playground as Art Practice: Kinesthetic Art II

January 28th, 2010 referencesTags: architexture, body, espace heureux, experimental circus, kinetic, play, space

note how the documentation is edited to techno! The correlation with dance culture is a phenomenological one.

Noise II: “…a wiry noise, with single barbs projecting, sharp edges running along it and submerging again and clear notes splintering off – flying and scattering”.

September 24th, 2009 researchTags: body, cyborg, haptic, kinetic, machine, music, noise, shock, space, time, visceral

Peter Bailey in Breaking the Sound barrier quotes Robert Musil on the ‘sonic shrapnel’ produced by the motor car: “…a wiry noise, with single barbs projecting, sharp edges running along it and submerging again and clear notes splintering off – flying and scattering”. Two synesthetic attributes stand out in this remarkable description. First, there are haptic qualities to the noise, translated in terms of texture: how the sound would feel (“wiry”) if you could probe / test it with your fingers, in effect uncovering an auditory topology by using the body as contact surface with the sound (“sharp edges running along it”). Then, Musil recognizes the noise’s kinetic attributes: the sound is in a continuous process of shattering, “flying and scattering”, throwing its components into the world (into the ear) like so many projectiles.

As Bailey notes, sound is vibration (“palpable”) – a series of minute but tangible displacements of matter. Unlike light with its strictly scopic / analytic affordances, the flow of sound modifies physical reality, rearranges the world. As such, the haptic domain – texture – already contains the possibility of sound; noise starts to exist when it can extend itself kinetically, across a spatial and temporal axis, when it becomes a conductor for change and entropy. Musil’s rapprochement between hearing and touch alerts us to the fact that sound unfolds in space concomitantly with its unfolding in time: it travels, working on the body as much as on consciousness.

Consequently, Noise (meaning sound in its raw form, an amalgamation and meshing of vibrations not synched into discrete units of order) seems to have an intimate relationship with affect that expresses itself in the body, namely (Bailey argues) laughter and terror / the instinct to flee-fight. Both of these proto-emotions (or simply motions) are brought together to powerful effect in the tradition Bailey calls “rough music”: “rough music was excessive, repetitive and sustained noise, combining high spirits with a sadistic edge”. Participating equally in a Bakhtinian culture of carnival and a history of institutionalized insanity (Bailey disarticulates the etymology of “bedlam” as the hubbub of the Bedlam inmates), rough music is produced for social purposes of ritual or regulation. Interestingly, Attali links music to the sacrifice of noise and its appendage of violence on the altar of (social, scientific) order. From there, one realizes that to listen to “rough music” is to witness noise coagulating into music or inversely, music decaying into noise – an exhilarating experience of liminality, teetering between forgetfulness (chaos) and culture.

Rough music has many splendid contemporary descendants (Noise, the more distorted forms of techno), thanks to the industrial revolution and the musical avant-garde that sought to rehabilitate or take control over the kind of sonic environment produced by the accelerated motion/collisions of more bodies and machines. The “future sound” that John Cage celebrates highlights the same attributes that Robert Musil discovered in sounds of technology: texture and kinetic force. Cage discusses these as “overtone structure” and “percussion music”, respectively.

“The special function of electrical instruments will be to provide complete control of the overtone structure of tones and to make these tones available in any frequency, amplitude and duration”: overtones are what gives each instrument its particular timbre i.e. the sonic texture that differentiates a violin from a piano; certainly electronic and digital music take advantage of the fact that they can give voice to an infinity of imaginary instruments, in effect to an uncategorizable cacophony of overtones. Allied to the emphasis on “percussion” (“a contemporary transition from keyboard-influenced music to the all-sound music of the future”), Cage’s future sound heralds key components of contemporary rough music in this evocation of tonal din and “repetitive noise” (repetition being primarily structured by beats/percussion). Compared to its 18th century manifestation, Noise engages the confused ear in the gears of a machine in order to better manufacture its violent/euphoric interface with the body.

Architextures4: Bouncing Blind, Feeling Sound in Your Bones

August 28th, 2009 germinating ideasTags: architexture, body, database, experimental circus, haptic, haunted space, inanimata, kinetic, maze, music, play, trap

Chris Donham sparked this thought:

embed pressure sensors in walls and floors of the bouncing castle. A DATABASE of SOUND (music, sound effects, words) is released. The player bounces her way through an audio narrative/journey. IMMERSE CASTLE IN DARKNESS. you have to FEEL your way THROUGH and OUT/IN.

The castle is a MAZE populated by crawl spaces and up and down passages.

HAPPENINGS: dirty habitat risk and fear banana peel perishable state of mind

August 24th, 2009 researchTags: ambiance, body, contingency, detournement, experimental circus, haptic, immersion, inanimata, infrastructure, interactive, kinetic, mapping, material, music, play, shock, space, visceral

Allan Kaprow: “Happenings” in the New York Scene

Andy Warhol's "Exploding Plastic Inevitable"

“In both cases the interactive method comes from outside the community, and because the organizing principles are not within the audience’s sphere of influence, one might next ask whether interactivity of either of these sorts actually goes beyond what Jean Baudrillard calls “reversibility” – processes like sending letters to the editor to the newspaper – and rearranges communication in a fundamental way”. What if participants designed their own game and own rules as part of the game?

“…when bang! there you are facing yourself in a mirror jammed at you. Listen. A cough from the alley. You giggle because you’re afraid, suffer claustrophobia, talk to someone nonchalantly, but all the time you’re there, getting into the act…Electric fans start, gently wafting breezes of New-Car smell past your nose as leaves bury piles of a whining, burping, foul, pinky mess”.

“…they appear to go nowhere and do not make any particular literary point”. Because instead they create experience.

“First, there is the context…that is, its “habitat“, gives to it not only a space, a set of relationships to the various things around it, and a range of values, but an overall atmosphere as well, which penetrates it and whoever experiences it.”

Soke Dinkla: “participation is located along a fragile border between emancipatory act and manipulation”. where do I stand on this?

Sartre in Nausea on the construction of human situations

gallery: taste  ::  happening: dirty

“…a flimsily jotted down score of root directions”

“chance then, rather than spontaneity, is a key term, for it implies risk and fear (thus reestablishing the fine nervousness so pleasant when something is about to occur)”

(People having to waddle through a room filled with garbage)

“But it could be like slipping on a banana peel or going to heaven“

“The physical materials used to create the environment of Happenings are the most perishable kind”

“they reveal a spirit that is at once passive in its acceptance of what may be and affirmative in its disregard of security.”

“A STATE OF MIND”

79 Springtimes of Ho Chi Minh: acid rock starts your fight

July 27th, 2009 references, researchTags: kinetic, machine, music, politic, screen, shock, time, visceral

Alvarez's film is rare, but bombing footage is not...

Santiago Alvarez’s 79 Springtimes of Ho Chi Min opens with a flower slowly blooming, followed by a shot taken from a plane overflying Vietnam. Just as slowly as the flower opened, two bombs drop to earth, becoming invisible until – we knew this would happen, but were subconsciously hoping it wouldn’t – the earth erupts into flames. The camera zooms into a photograph of Ho Chi Min as a young man until we see only his eyes. Then, through a series of photographs (Barthes: the poignancy of the photograph is that it is evidence of the certainty of death – a death that already occurred or a death to be), we see those eyes grow older, until we finally zoom out again – Ho Chi Min is an old man, his face and figure freeze into a negative. Here Alvarez brilliantly evokes the passage and passing of a life – a life that (according to the filmmaker) unfolded with beautiful purpose, the process of aging signifying the fulfillment, the blooming of the young man’s promise, rather than a descent or decay. Alvarez simultaneously ties the meaning of this life irrevocably to a place, Vietnam, an event, the Vietnam war and a mission, the struggle against the destruction of Vietnam, a struggle for life (- again, the flower, the earth). Ho Chi Min is embalmed in the negative flash, pharaonically preserved in celluloid to continue to inspire this purpose, ascending to some super-human plane where he is transfigured into ideality – resurrected as a symbol via the film.

Later, more footage of violence in Vietnam is cut with a woman singing in lyrical anguish, ecstatically, until, as she draws out a high note, she disappears, replaced by the explosion of another bomb. The dialectic between vibrant life and sudden anihilation is didactically picked up again, but this is didacticism of a purely emotional, even physiological order. This sequence increases (at least my) heart rate, makes me breathe more heavily, until the world, life, my heart beat is stopped by the arrival of the bomb hitting the singer’s high note.

To cite Jane Gaines’ article Political Mimesis: the spectator “bodies back” to the images on the screen, reacting to the projected world as if she were witnessing reality, something happening right now that calls for an immediate reaction – wherefore the adrenalin. Alvarez’ method is more Eisenstein than Workers’ League newsreel, however – we are not encouraged towards mimesis of the action on screen (no waves of bodies, no protesters arouse this response) but provoked to imbibe the political message being laid out in front of us, namely, that the destruction of life (as it shines forth in the face and voice of the singer, in the liquid harmonics of the synthesizer soundtrack, in the ravaged faces of napalm victims, in the eyes of the old Ho Chi Min) calls absolutely for counter-attack, a commitment of the whole body, a kinetic force of feeling directed against the destroyers. Ho Chi Min is at the center of the footage: he appears as the eye in the storm, the rallying point for everything that stands against the anonymous machinery of death.

more remains of Ho Chi Minh...

After his funeral, the world falls apart – first in the faces of his supporters, unmade by tears (again, a physical manifestation) and then on the arena of the war itself: the filmmaker mangles footage of gun machine fighting at close quarters so that the soldiers’ violence finds some physically authentic correlate in the violence done to the celluloid, causing epileptic flashes to periodically slice the action unfolding on screen. The lasting impression is one of sensually exprienced chaos, as if the sign – what is represented – had savagely leaped out of its ontological cage to manhandle the spectator, directly triggering the spectator’s self-defense reflexes. As a result, the war footage, the attack on Vietnam starts to feel intimately personal – the bombs dropping on Vietnam seem to be aimed at me.

Like Man with the Movie Camera, I found 79 Springtimes of Ho Chi Min galvanizing, in its etymological sense of muscular stimulation by electric shock. As in Vertov’s film, we are lifted into a universe constructed by the Kino-eye – one where the juxtaposition of actuality coalesces into a higher meaning, a fullness of experience / life. This beautiful vision is then put under attack by the war footage – footage that, although posessing the aesthetic qualities that characterize the entire film, releases all its potential for shock value when considered side by side with the faces and bodies of children, masses, protesters and the compact figure of the deified Ho Chi Min. That the power of cinematic representation can be used so effectively to short-circuit the spectator’s critical capacities to plug in directly to her emotional core and stimulate a physical response (the catalyst for action) is, according to Gaines, the dream of the politically engaged documentarian. But the question of the political content being conveyed cannot be gotten around. The cinematic apparatus remains amoral.

Man on Wire: Hard Evidence of the Impossible

July 23rd, 2009 references, researchTags: city, kinetic, paroxysm, play, time, uncanny, visceral

evolution of in the retelling, the mythologizing, the re-presentation of the inefable: news report from 1974 to the documentary “Man on Wire”

Perhaps the documentary force of this film derives from the fact that it is about such a singular, unique moment – Petit’s 40 minute funambulism between the towers of the World Trade Center. Man on Wire gives us that which should be irretrievable, magicking us into the heart of an act meant to be ephemeral, carried through in order to vanish. We relive the feeling of astonishment we see reflected in the faces of the crowd staring out of the archival footage, their eyes fixed on something they will never see again. Are we touched by our sudden intimacy with a historical event? Only Petit’s act does not seem to participate in history but to stand out, timeless, as a flight into another order of poetic existence that supersedes both the mundane and the collective. The excitement of watching the footage (admirably build up by the filmmaker’s use of the narrative structure of the heist) stems from our witnessing this heart-stopping cessation of time, a more privileged mode of viewing/experience than the opportunity to resurrect the past.

Would Man on Wire be as effective if it were a film rather than a documentary? Apart from the irreplaceable presence of Petit himself, whose voice provides an almost kinetic impulse to the sequentiality of the entire film, a fictional reconstruction of the crucial moment (the wire walking), rather than what we are given, a lingering montage of stills and (frustratingly but concomitantly authentic) distant footage from the ground, would most certainly have broken the spell. After all, the premise of Man on Wire is that it gives us proof of the impossible and therefore accomplishes something of a metaphysical acrobatics itself. What we lose in proximity to the event itself is retrieved in the extensive archival footage of Petit’s rehearsals in the field, surrounded by his accomplices. The time of preparation unlocks the “real thing”, just as the reconstruction of the heist sets us up for the “real thing”, the archival footage, the indexical link to the miraculous.

Interactive Recombinant Editing: SPECTER OF SENSE

July 13th, 2009 germinating ideasTags: ambiance, archive, contingency, database, derive, detournement, haunted space, kinetic, mapping, maze, noise, photopia, play, punctum, screen, uncanny

still in the room. player squeezes a knob when he hears a prompted word (s) a voice speechifies on possibilities

determines which set of footage from the database will be edited into another set of footage (not completely haphazard) or running simultaneously on different screens??

editing algorithm, blackout, obeys a subterranean rhythm, cuts words in midstence, faces in mid-expression

cutting between this, this, and this ? CLOUD OR SHAPE, SPECTER OF SENSE – sampling of the cultural whirl – not quite arbitrary drops (it’s all water)

Peter Greenaway – Prospero’s Books ; David Bowie ; Jem Cohen: sea change, becoming, wishing, wish fulfillment, riffling through, collecting books, collecting memories, collecting personalities. databases all.

Workers’ Film and Photo League Newsreel: political kinetics

July 11th, 2009 references, researchTags: archive, kinetic, shock, visceral

rough and ready: a recent iteration

The ennervating, mobilizing effect of shot after shot of masses on the march – sometimes we are given an idea of the scale involved through overhead shots, sometimes we are plunged into the tide of participants with a hand-held camera, pushed up against the urgency and turmoil of political action made manifest. The filmmakers hammer us with the evidence not only of the presence but of the force of the labor movement during the Depression – the unemployed form a kinetic force, a projectile aimed at the social-structural status quo, something more ineluctable than a mere group of individuals. Consequently – faces seen only in passing, as the camera sweeps over the crowd, faces merging with others to create an anonymous and therefore more powerful entity. The newsreel offers an image of themselves to those members of the political movement that is larger than life, that documents the viscerally-felt impact of collective will on the actual/the real. I get the sense of history being forged as the newsreel unfolds, created as a result of the collision of human matter.

This discourse of anger and action stands against the Griersonian call to sympathy _ the actants, the agents of the movement would not be served by self-pity. The call to sympathy as a documentary trope marks the boundary between subjects and audience, wherein the subject is an Other to be reached out to. The gathering sense of the Workers’ Film and Photo League newsreals is a “we”. The document is proprietary – carried by the viewers like a tool or a weapon or an identity card. It is not “a work”, there is no artist or pedagogue asserting his voice or vision behind the documentary artifact.

Man with a Movie Camera: utopia arrives!

July 9th, 2009 references, researchTags: archive, body, city, contingency, Dziga Vertov, experimental circus, immersion, kinetic, machine, modernity, music, play, punctum, space, time, utopia, visceral

This film opens up a world, another level of “reality” that is more than the sum of its parts. Emerging out of a vision of other time – time mechanized, measured, dislocated, arrested, superimposed – is the vision of a other way of life, a life energized by the fullness of the juxtaposed moment, a society aligned with Vertov’s and the communist project’s ideal of a union of the activity of communal / industrial daily life and the vital élan, the joyful exercise of each individual’s humanity. The world invented / discovered by Vertov’s camera erases the division between labor and “one’s own time”, between citizens and the city, between the producers and the technological means of production, between products and their consumers. Every element that is captured by the apparatus meshes with a multiplicity of analogous moments or rather analogous vectors, snippets of temporal trajectories in which the world and all its inhabitants seem to freely throw themselves into each others’ paths.

Brecht-like, Vertov pulls down the wall between the screen and the audience, allowing the subjects-spectators possession of their photographed selves, assigning the camera (and the filmmaker) to be as much a participant in the buzz as its privileged observer. This move is incredibly satisfying and startling at the same time: I do not feel I am presented with an object, a result, a work out of or beyond actuality for me to consume but that the windows of actuality have been blasted open all around me and that I find myself almost on the same ontological plane as the (human, technological) population of the film. Rather than bringing the world to me, it brings me into the world – as a spectator I feel simultaneously transformed into an actor, an agent, part and parcel of the aliveness of the kino-eye. It’s the first time I’ve seen “Man with a Movie Camera” . I cannot remember having ever been so engaged (as opposed to engulfed, enchanted, immersed) by a work of art.

How is “Man with a Movie Camera” a documentary? Grierson’s “the creative treatment of actuality” seems too indeterminate a definition to characterize Vertov’s utopian project. Actuality here is certainly treated, openly, visibly mediated by a community of agents : by the apparatus (which eerily and comically becomes an animate character of its own)_ by the camera operator, the camera’s appendage or transport device whose main task seems to be to enable the camera’s heroic phenomenological agency_by the editor, who, in a sequence showing shots of frames on a film strip followed by shots of the same frames projected at their proper speed, finalizes the machine’s God-like powers to set time in motion. This candid mediation takes the sting out of “creative treatment of actuality”: we are informed as to the “how” and encouraged to jump into the project ourselves.

The filmmaker does cease to be a conjuror and becomes an epistemologist – rather than doling out a spectacle (even a spectacle structured by an argumentative, informative or ideological purpose, on the non-fiction side like Grierson or on the fiction side like Eisenstein) the kino-glaz (a gaze that is simultaneously the filmmaker’s, the spectator’s and the camera’s) inscribes a map of actuality, in fact writing by the exercise of looking / scoping /projecting.

Argumentation becomes problematic at such a level of investigation into the actual, not least because we are placed in a realm beyond language or discourse into something that is purely cinematic – if we are mobilized politically it is on a poetic level, where social issues cannot be divorced from their embededness in an entirety of human meaning.

Another epistemologist – phenomenological camera in Chris Marker’s “Sans Soleil”. “Sans Soleil” also takes actuality as its material, but is it a documentary? When does not the poetic treatment of actuality but the poetic purposes of the filmmaker diverge from a “documentarian” purpose. “Sans Soleil” is about actuality, although a highly subjective one. Does it count? Or must a documentary necessarily address some form of consensus reality – must it necessarily inform in addition to express?

Yvonne Rainer: body and machine frame the play-space

July 1st, 2009 researchTags: body, kinetic, machine, play, structuralism, time

To what extent is Rainer performing for a camera rather than for an audience ? – here the structures of play at work in the dance interact with an automated gaze, one that marks time and maps space at a distance from notions of drama and affect. Recalling Bazin’s take on the ontology of the photographic image, we are denied the metaphorical, “falsifying” pleasures of montage in favor of the almost metaphysical satisfaction of reliving embalmed time. What is the relationship between time and play in this film? Choreographed movement appears at the bisection of these planes, tracing patterns that populate the metronymic (and quietly zooming) temporality of the camera. Time flows and organizes itself in the magic circle designed by the body’s machine momentum and the machine’s asubjective gaze. Filled space _ matter at play, matter spontaneously obeying rules for freedom, defeating contingency.

A polarity emerges with Muybridge’s Zoopraxographer, whose display of photographic contingency (mundane movement) is window-dressed by associative montage/metaphor.

from Wikipedia:

A turning point in Rainer’s choreography came in 1964, when, in an effort to strip movements of their expressive qualities, she turned to game structures to create works. All movement aimed to be direct, functional, and to avoid stylization. In so doing, she aimed to remove the drama from the dance movement, and to question the role of entertainment in dance. Throughout this stage of her choreography she worked towards movement becoming something of an object, to be examined without any psychological, social or formal motives. She opted for neutrality in her dances, presenting the objective presence of the human body and its movements, and refused to project a persona or create a narrative within her dances. In 1965, as a reaction to many of the previously stated feelings, Rainer created her “No Manifesto,” which was a strategy formulated to demystify dance.

This exploration in reducing dance to the essentials climaxed with one of Rainer’s most famous pieces, Trio A (1966), initially part of a larger work entitled The Mind Is a Muscle. Something of a paradigmatic statement that questioned the aesthetic goals of postmodern dance, Trio A was a short dance that consisted of one long phrase. In Trio A, Rainer intended to remove objects from the dance while simultaneously retaining a workmanlike approach of task performance.