The Museum of Jurassic Technology: fantastical flutterings of real and distant space

March 29th, 2010 researchTags: contingency, experimental circus, machine, play, rhizome, space, time, uncanny, utopia

The obscure Renaissance scholar Athanasius Kircher’s fabulous system of magnetic divination: “The World is Tied with Secret Knots”

Hidden in sun-drenched Culver City, The Museum of Jurassic Technology is a hoax, an art installation of intimate and metaphysical magnitude, a labyrinth for the scholastic  imagination and anything else you can dream of or wish for. Founded by the enigmatic David Hildebrand Wilson in 1989, susbequent recipient of a Mac Arthur “Genius” Grant in 2001 for this puzzling and original endeavour, the Museum is a cabinet of curiosities that tantalizingly frames tidbits of historical minutiae in a fabulous context, very much in the spirit of Mark Z. Danielewski’s legendary House of Leaves, also an ironic mise en abime of scholarly critique folded into an impossible (alhough imaginary) geometric space. Minuscule steroscopic projections visible through copper-articulated glass plates, documentary films with convoluted mystical narratives, whimsically lit diaoramas and glowing orbs: such is that place of perfect delight and incomprehension, the Museum of Jurassic Technology

The micromosaics of Harald Henry Dalton, visible only through a microscope

from the exhibit Lives of Perfect Creatures: Dogs of the Soviet Space Program

from the exhibit Garden of Eden on Wheels: Collections from Los Angeles Areas Mobile Parks

from the exhibit Rotten Luck: The Decaying Dice of Ricky Jay

Inflatacookbook: 1970s alternative media/architecture collective Ant Farm’s instruction manual on how to create weirdly inhabitable inflatable structures

March 23rd, 2010 germinating ideasTags: body, city, espace heureux, experimental circus, immersion, play, space, utopia, visceral

In the late 60′s and 70′s, the San Francisco hippie art and architecture collective known as Ant Farm were creating buildings out of giant inflatable plastic bags. Their 1969 work, 50×50′ Pillow for the Whole Earth Catalog led to the commission to build the medical tent–or as Ant Farmer Chip Lord called it, “the Bad Trip Pavilion”–at Altamont.

Ant Farm also created uncannily prescient work about things like the all-consuming, TV-driven, pop media culture and the American fetishization of cars. [They're the ones who buried that row of Cadillacs nosefirst in the Texas desert.]

from Make Magazine:

“I had the pleasure of meeting and becoming friends with Ant Farm co-founder Doug Michels in the early ’90s. He was as delightfully crazy as ever, drawing up designs for spheres of water floating through space filled with dolphins, a Japanese sex theme park, a giant couch, called the National Sofa, in the park across from the White House, where people could come and interact with the First Family via the National TV set. This was definitely not a guy who liked to paint inside the lines. Sadly, Doug died in a freak climbing accident in 2003.”

Ant Farm’s “Inflatacookbook”

Floating Donuts and Pink Pipe Joints: preliminary models for my project to hybridize the novel and the playground

February 25th, 2010 germinating ideasTags: ambiance, ambient narrative, architexture, body, Deleuze, experimental circus, haptic, haunted space, maze, noise, novel, play, rhizome, space

These sketches are first steps towards a visualization of my concept of “ambient narrative”. In this case, the book being read is inscribed in the walls of a warren of floating inflatable tunnels (suspended like a octopus-shaped air mattress from a ceiling), in the form of pressure sensors that, depending on the visitor’s ensconcement in a particular branch of the structure, trigger audio recordings of a story. Each chapter of the book can be accessed in a recombinant rhizomatic way – literally the visitor travels through the story, using her body, its movements and its rubbing against the plush fabric of the tunnels, as the decoding instrument that allows her to gather fragments of the hidden text. The story itself, called “In the Dark: The Story of a Disapearance” is an existential mystery or detective novel that is pieced together by the non-linear meanderings of the reader.

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 !

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.

Kinesthetic Art: spatial vocabulary and the body ego

January 20th, 2010 researchTags: ambiance, architexture, body, experimental circus, haptic, immersion, inanimata, play, space, time, visceral

Matthew Barney, Cremaster I

text: Margaret Morse, Video installation Art: The Body, the Image, and the Space-in-Between

Morse evokes a piece by Muntadas called haute CULTURE Part I, in which two monitors are placed on each end of a seesaw, thereby making an elegant point, couched in physical terms (physical even as in “physics”, since gravity is employed as an artistic device) about the act of comparing both sets of images. This piece offers an example of what Morse calls “kinesthetic” learning, or the kind of information processing and intuition specific to our perception of the organization of objects in space. Kinesthetic perception is synesthetic and active – it involves visuality, sound, and the haptic in a way that allows each sensorial input to complement, suffuse and correspond to another, and using the entire body, including its own position in space relative to other objects, as a sensory organ. The kinesthetic subject is always hyper-aware of her body/herself as key element in the epistemological puzzle posed by the installation piece: all the meaning that can be gleaned from a space must bounce off of her, her critical interpretation changes and accrues only according to her own changing orientation in space. This unfolding signification is also temporally grounded – in fact kinesthetic appreciation can be defined as a temporalized experience of space, a strange, subliminal experience in which we both critically stand outside ourselves to consider ourselves-within-the-world and have an acute consciousness of inhabiting our bodies, of being materially and psychically connected to the outside world. Morse’s term of “body ego” encapsulates this awareness of oneself as an entity, something that participates in both the object and the subject.

Going back to Muntadas’ seesaw, we can see how the artist’s physical demonstration of a conceptual relationship between the two objects/monitors offers us a uniquely visceral insight into an a priori realm of abstract and critical thought. The kinesthetic argument being made is playful – an analogy more than a declaration. Using the evocative power of objects and their wealth of cultural denotations, an artist can articulate kinesthetic phrases, in which different objects constitute a semantic content and their relative positions (taking into account the multiple trajectories of the visitor) operate as syntax. Objects are further mis-en-abime within the virtual windows of screens and video channels – kinesthetic art erases to a certain degree the ontological difference between what is represented (screen-based) and what is presented (anchored in physical space). The resulting aesthetic and epistemological experience is intuitive and multidimensional, blurring the boundaries between thinking and feeling.

Radiotopia: Imaginative Use of the Ionosphere

November 18th, 2009 researchTags: ambiance, espace heureux, haunted space, immersion, machine, music, play, space, time, utopia

Using Benedict Anderson’s concept of imagined communities as virtual loci that gather individuals into a common cultural space,Susan Douglas (Listening In) reads radio in terms of its capacity, as a social practice, to uniquely constitute (American) subjectivity. Radio’s most obvious affordance is that it allows people separated in space to listen simultaneously, “to experience that very moment of (their) lives in exactly the same way” (p.24). Douglas argues the new medium gave rise to an unprecedented kind of intersubjective intimacy – a linking of inner worlds that occurred not through a meeting of the minds (radio listeners remain anonymous to each other) but by sharing a common (cultural, technological) platform for fantasy.

Radio listeners are bonded by a specific practice of self: as thousands tune in to the same Top 40 song, they cross over together and for a moment into a temporality different from their distracted, fragmented present and experience time as a (musical) signature, as an embodied flow. For the duration of a song, radio holds out the possibility to a fragmented collectivity to perceive themselves as a unique, flavorful being – the kind of communion achieved is not one that can gather a community (radio listeners are experiencing themselves, very closely, rather than experiencing others) but that produces similar and separated subjectivities. Radio-listening Americans live apart but dream together.

Here Douglas’ concept of “dimensional” listening, as radio’s purported affordance that encourages listeners to generate their own powerful imagery to compensate for the absence of a visual world, enters into play. If other media like cinema, where worlds are “given” to the audience for consumption, constitute a vault of imaginary material, then radio trains the subject in the practice of a specific type of imagination, setting up the scaffolding for an inner space that we can freely populate. To “develop an ear for radio” means to gain access to “a repertoire of listening styles and emotional responses”, to be attuned to different inner worlds that we can switch on or off (in this sense, prefiguring the advent of portable music players as mood-regulating devices). In the 20s before regular programming this might mean tuning in to imagine a ionospheric topology projected from the disparate stations the ham could reel in; in the 30s it could mean regularly conjuring the presence of an entire cast of fictional characters from a soap drama. Douglas argues that in exploring the “spaces” of sound – by promenading our consciousness through the rippling folds of rhythm or timbre in music, by stalking the unfolding story of a voice – we are really spelunking in our own depths.

The term “training” characterizes the kind of self-building radio enables in the sense that listeners (according to Douglas) become emotionally attached to broadcast material, especially if they hear it repeatedly: “the more we listen to certain kinds of music, the more we learn to like it.” (p. 32) – in a quite neurological way, Top 40 songs imprint themselves on our mind, giving shape to our subjectivity. This emotional sculpting modifies the listener’s sense of time in significant ways. Radio creates privileged temporal moments for the listener, a more intense experience of the present that accompanies the listener’s exploration of their inner space. Over the course of a life, these privileged moments call to and ricochet off one another – mental states or moods jump across one’s temporality, seeding the self with fragments of past incarnations, reliquary fantasies. Douglas emphasizes that radio almost from the beginning was marked by nostalgia, by the longing for a disappeared moment that a broadcast song could briefly bring back into the present. In this sense dimensional listening is not dissociable from another term Douglas uses, “associational” listening, or the forging of correspondences between the flow of our lives and the soundtrack that accompanies it, meaning that daily routines – e.g. doing laundry while listening to a jazz tune on the radio – are dyed with the color of a sound that can make an initially undifferentiated slice of everydayness remarkable. This quality in radio emerges from its difference from the gramophone as a listening practice – the fact that radio temporally mapped out a listener’s day (starting with regular programming) with scheduled sound. As manufactured sound and especially music became ambient (as consequence of ubiquity) they started exercising an unprecedented level of influence on people’s lives.

Douglas also investigates the fascinating history of the beginnings of radio and the social significance accorded the new technology at its inception, particularly around the relationship between radio and a collective desire for the existence of a tangible spiritual dimension, a longing for the unchartered and unknown that characterized both radio’s marketing as a mechanical “medium” (a notion that interestingly recontextualizes media in terms of spiritism) and the practice of DXing. Radio uncannily symbolized, more than the phonograph which was an inscription device, the utopian possibilities of technology as interface between different ontological realms, as a transducer that could allow for communication between what was previously considered incommensurable: the living and the dead, humanity and the extraterrestrial, invisible world of the airwaves, two individuals separated by vast distances. Douglas points out that in endowing radio with this mystique Americans were engaging in a search for meaningful connection, a sense of existential and communal belonging that, at least in the collective Western imaginary, had been lost in the turn to mechanized, serialized, fragmented modern life. DXers, poetically dubbed “distance fiends”, developed a form of radio practice that engaged the technology not only as a commodity fetish but also as, literally, a medium, a means of accessing different possibilities of signification through the exploratory use of the technology’s affordances. Before the more commoditized modes of dimensional and associational listening, tuning in to the radio was also a game played across the virtual landscape of the airwaves as DXers would fish for the disembodied voices that stood in for real-world localities.

Douglas’ discussion of DXing as a poetic practice weaves into her general investigation of radio not only as a locus for a cultural imaginary but as a technology that crucially enables imagination – which raises questions as to how other sound technologies have been and might be imaginatively used. If the commodity-use of the record, the tape, the MP3 player have trained us to meaningfully experience sound in certain ways that have constituted our subjectivities according to certain common cultural (capitalist) patterns, then what other cultures (and other subjectivities) with potential to challenge or re-organize capitalism emerge as a result of exploratory, imaginative use? Radio leads us into a consideration of contemporary countercultural (but also massively embraced!) practices around sound technology, namely DJ and remix culture…

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.

Weird Information: Touch as interactive immersive technology!

September 10th, 2009 referencesTags: architexture, body, haptic, immersion, inanimata, play, space, visceral

“Why can’t we have an aesthetic language of composition for the sense of touch using vibration?”

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”

PHOTOPIA : a happy, haunted space: where we would be: punctum

July 31st, 2009 referencesTags: ambiance, derive, espace heureux, haunted space, indexicality, photopia, punctum, space, utopia

The art or process of producing images by the action of radiant energy and especially light on a sensitive surface. an imaginary and indefinitely remote place. a convention or motif, esp. in a literary work; a rhetorical convention. Greek (koinós) tópos (common) place. Gk, comb. form of phôs (gen. phōtós), light.

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?

Topo-analyse and happy space

June 24th, 2009 researchTags: ambiance, derive, espace heureux, space, time

Matisse, "red studio" : home as a hall of images

commentary and excerpts from: Gaston Bachelard, “The Poetics of Space”

On the possible phenomenological interchangeability of lived space and lived time – “living” as temporal endurance in space/of space, equally meaning the spatialization, actualization of temporality. The present is always a spatial configuration:

We sometimes believe we know ourselves in time, when all we know is a sequence of fixations in those spaces that offer our being stability _ a being who refuses to pass, to flow away, to run out and who, even when looking for lost time in the past, wishes to “suspend” time’s flight. In those thousands honeycomb cavities, space lends itself out as compressed time. That is the purpose of space.

How imagination uses space as a template for the building of being, in order to create a home out of one’s own mental processes:

We will see our imagination build “walls” with impalpable shadows, confort itself with illusions of protection – or, vice versa, tremble behind thick walls and doubt the solidity of a fortress.

On TOPOPHILIA / TOPO-ANALYSIS:

“we want to examine very simple images, the images of the spaces of happiness/fortunate spaces”, éspaces heureux. Fortunate/happy: the joy emerging from happenstance, from the present. In french, fortunate and happy are one concept: heureux.

On IMAGES and their resistance to psychoanalytic explanation, origination:

“The life of the image is all in its lightning brillance, in the fact that an image is the superseding of all sensible data.” _ “It is inversely not in causality but in the concept of resonance or impact that we think we find the true measure of a poetic image”

Victor Hugo's "haunted house" on the island of Guernsey...

“l’inconscient séjourne.”  The unconscious remains in places.

Space: the site of “imaginary” action (rèverie). “On oriente l’onirisme, on ne l’accomplit pas” / We can orient oniric states, not accomplish them.

Derive and Detournement: call back to situationism

June 4th, 2009 referencesTags: ambiance, city, cyborg, derive, detournement, experimental circus, flaneur, haptic, modernity, nomad, play, situationism, space, utopia

These texts and clips had me thinking about the relationship between the modernist concern with contingency (starting with the ubiquitous presence of photographic arts from the early 20th century onwards) and the movement of situationism as it flourished in the late 50s and 60s – I see another line or relationship between the flaneur, the nomad, the cyborg and the situationist as precursors of immersive arts/installations practitioners…immersion is basically the design of playful space.

Debord advised drifters to allow themselves to be guided by those features of the street neglected by most pedestrians, like “the sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters” and the “path of least resistance which is automatically followed in aimless strolls (and which has no relation to the contour of the ground)”. the determinants of drift, apparently, were alternations in emotional and ambient intensity; “the appealing or repelling characters of certain places”; and the drifter’s tendency to “drain” along relatively unresistant paths, “the fissures in the urban network”. The Lettrist International even “envisaged a pinball machine arranged in such a way that the play of the lights and the more or less predictable trajectories of the balls” would represent the “thermal sensations and desires of people passing by the gates of the Cluny Museum around an hour after sunset in November,” as though drifters were like ball bearings, propelled through the city’s channels by the energized “pins” of the unities of ambiance.

Simon Sadler, The Situationist City

Nomads Revisited – postmodern flaneurs?

March 23rd, 2009 researchTags: Aleph, Benjamin, city, De Certeau, derive, flaneur, nomad, pedestrian, space

Texts:

Walter Benjamin, The Poet of Modern Life

Tim Cresswell, Imagining the Nomad: Mobility and the Postmodern Primitive (from Space and Social Theory, Interpreting Modernity and Postmodernity, edited by George Benko and Ulf Strohmayer)

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

Tim Cresswell traces many postmodern theorists’ (De Certeau, Deleuze and Guattari, Ian Chambers) enthusiasm for the trope of the nomad to Benjamin’s articulation of flanerie, i.e. the activity of wandering through the crowded city, exercising one’s gaze on the varied, ephemeral spectacle of urban life and being gazed at in return, as a preeminently modern experience of social space.

What differentiates the ‘modern’ flaneur from the postmodern nomad (where, for argument’s sake, we understand nomad as a theoretical construct rather than as a ‘real’, historical subject) ? Despite the mobility and anonymity of the flaneur as a subject/object of desire (consumption) steering a course in the flow of urban lived space (or representational space in Lefevrian terms), he remains a contextualized entity, culturally and metaphorically ensconced in a proper place, namely 1860s Paris and its geography of flaneur-friendly arcades. Baudelaire’s poetry, which Benjamin mines for clues of the flaneur condition, is evocative because it refers so concretely to the representational/lived space of Paris, a space that can be characterized as having a multiple, ambiguous (Baudelaire depicts nameless streets vs. landmarks) but nevertheless very tangible identity.

The flaneur is at home in the shifting, fluid unwinding of urban spatiality. This space, which he traverses according to personal habit, endows him with a certain flavor, attitude, a point of view that constitutes a form of identity – an identity that Benjamin argues is that of a commodity. There is nothing reified, however, about Baudelaire’s precise, concrete, rich description of the flaneur’s experience, which emphatically contradicts the notion that mobility is necessarily tied to the experience of space as abstract, empty, or isotropic (Deleuze and Guattari). The flaneur embodies that very modern idea of at-homeness within the fractures of society, of working with the destabilizing forces of space-time compression that shake up fixed places.

De Certeau adds miltary metophors to the poetic aura of the flaneur – Tim Cresswell dubs this new figure “pedestrian hero”, the tactician of everyday life, the lone consumer who is engaged in recapturing the representations of a space daily traversed from the “strategists” or masters of abstract space (the producers of capitalist space/power structures) through an infinite series of tiny narrative gestures or metaphorical inscriptions of one’s footsteps/traces in the city. This figure, more so than the flaneur, takes part in a spatial politics as a sort of everyman guerillero, producing infinite spatial possibilities – Borges’ aleph, what Edward Soja would call Thirdspace – from reified spatial product.

The term nomad more properly applies to De Certeau’s pedestrian than to the flaneur insofar as the pedestrian is not embedded in a place (19th century Paris) but produces ephemeral, personally specific places wherever he or she goes. The identity of such a pedestrian is mysterious – the making of “spatial stories”, as De Certeau puts it, is a means to produce a richly significant experience of the everyday, but what imprint does this plethora of microscopic narratives leave within the pedestrian’s sense of self? Does this pedestrian have any allegiance other than to himself?

N0-PLACE / U-TOPIA : second articulation of an animation project

March 13th, 2009 project updatesTags: Amy Kravitz, architecture, city, contingency, haunted space, immersion, infrastructure, mapping, maze, music, noise, photopia, space, trap, uncanny, utopia

The city we walk through everyday is not necessarily the city we experience. The urban landscape we experience is colored by our goals and projects, subordinated to the destination we are moving towards. We tend to blank out or forget the real space of the city, a often inexplicable space created by the various forms of infrastructure that are the bare bones of our urban lives. This short film recreates our sensation/perception of these “forgotten” spaces when we chose to focus on them, to really feel the contours of their existence. Although these different urban landscapes have different moods or atmospheric connotations, they all share the same capacity to both suck in and repulse our attention. Both omnipresent and indefinable/unnamable, this infrastructure-landscape creates a sensation much like falling down a well or becoming lost in a maze, as the mind loses all points of reference and is engulfed by/trapped in undiluted space.

Photographic stills of urban spaces representing freeway underpasses, unidentifiable buildings, passages, unplanned-for vegetation, pipes with no immediately visible purpose, walls, fences, or placing in the same space elements that are physically contiguous but semantically unrelated, such as a row of windows in a building and the tree growing in a parking lot next to it, or the sidewalk corner that randomly unites two structures are woven into each other in an editing style strongly reminiscent of Amy Kravitz’ piece “Trap” in which patterns of light and shadow alternate and flow into each other in order to create (for me, at least) an abstract, mysterious, elusive space that hypnotizes the viewer and thwarts/encourages her attempt to find a form of fragmented meaning in the seamless changeability of the images. The infrastructure space I aim to create is not as abstract as that, since the shape of the elements that are represented will be visible, although, in the spirit of “Trap”, cut up and disjointed, thrown out of physical/topological context. However, the nature of the spaces represented i.e. the fact that no clear “object” of representation but only shape, line and texture will be truly identifiable in the frame should contribute to the viewer’s same sensation of being lost, even dizzy, that she gets from watching Amy Kravitz’s piece. In addition to using Kravitz’s technique of blending/ fading in and out frames to create this effect, I anticipate using lighting effects in After Effects, for example, having stripes of light or spotlights flow over the images, much like in Pistachios’ “Curare Bulgari” piece.

To add dramatic buildup to the piece (which Amy Kravitz’s piece perhaps lacks) I will interrupt the flow of photographed infrastructure with short segments of live action (5-10 seconds), in which a mime, using a combination of gestures (mostly upper body) and facial expressions will introduce to more jarring and explicit effect the sensation of mental distress/discomfort that one feels when confronted with the emptiness and “semantic insufficiency” of these spaces.  As the piece progresses, these interludes will become more frequent, more brief and the gestures and lighting will become more intense. In terms of the gestures, more intense does not necessarily mean more contorted or frightening, but less controlled, perhaps even more passive, as if one had finally surrendered to the space represented. In terms of lighting, this will mean a gradual stepping up from flat to very contrasty (the mime mostly in shadow, along with the background, except for part of her face brightly illuminated). The progression of the “mime” sequences should culminate in a cathartic release from tension, as if the mind, after putting up resistance against the flow of incomprehensible space, after having tried to imbue it with meaning / decipher it, had decided to flow with it, to follow it where it lead, even into an unknown territory where the city, where lived space, ceases to make any conventional sense. Ideally, the viewer will be brought to the point where this release will be a desired thing, something that needs to happen in order to reconcile the insupportable tension between the space and the viewer’s mind. The final mime sequence would be, in sharp contrast to the visual/editing buildup of the previous sequences, longer (10-15 seconds) and would involve completely flat, very bright lighting and a passive posture on the part of the mime.

The mime will be shot against green screen. Ideally, I would like to create a background that resembles the “luminous cube”. The walls of the cube will be a different color in each sequence to match the color palette of the previous photographic sequence. As we progress in the piece, we will be able to see less and less of the cube, however (until the final sequence), as the lighting recedes from the background to focus more on the mime, and becomes more contrasty – as if the person were “losing space” and losing their footing in a black emptiness. The mime will be dressed in textureless, close-fitting black, their body gradually losing visibility with the change in lighting, until only their face can be used as the expressive element.

The soundtrack will be atonal and electronic, incorporating sound effects and feedback, in the style of noise artists or industrial electronic music artists such as John Cage, Throbbing Gristle and Venetian Snares. The music for the sequences involving the photography of infrastructure will progress to become more and more monotonous, to include less and less variation. The music for the sequences involving the mime will progress to become more varied, faster, and will start to incorporate harder and harder beats (perhaps even morphing into a drum n’ bass sort of sound). The final pairing of a photography / mime sequence will have both soundtracks merge again in a common soundtrack, a more melodious, more “beautiful” sound (something like the way the soundtrack I used in my exercise piece earlier this semester climaxes/dissolves into a more ecstatic, slow movement) to express the release or relief, the sense of liberation at the end of the short.

I’ve decided to use only one screen – although I am playing with the idea to have the final climactic sequences “explode” across multiple screens.

Nomadology: “they arrive like destiny, without cause, without reason, without pretext.”

March 10th, 2009 researchTags: De Certeau, Deleuze, derive, geography, Guattari, narrative, nomad, postmodernism, space, theory, time, utopia

Commenting on:

Tim Cresswell, Imagining the Nomad: Mobility and the Postmodern Primitive (from Space and Social Theory, Interpreting Modernity and Postmodernity, edited by George Benko and Ulf Strohmayer, Blackwell Publishers, 1997)

Edward Said, The World, the Text and the Critic (Harvard University Press, 1983)

Diana Fuss, Inside/Out (from Inside/Out, Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, edited by Diana Fuss)

Deleuze and Guattari imagining postmodern space as a desert, isotropic and boundless where mobility finds a home.

Tim Creswell, Edward Said and Dianna Fuss all seem to hone in on a key issue in the discussion of postmodern notions of spatiality (centering around the nomad, the tactician, the embodied self) and which Said specifically places at the heart of the theorist’s identity. To what extent do theorists, in making sense of their world, inevitably “reify” it, turn lived experience, and in this case, the experience of space/place into an abstraction, either by institutionalizing the theory and cutting it off from its social and historical context or by practicing theory “for theory’s sake”, as itself a form of literature?

Cresswell rightly points out that under the horizon of theorists’ successive attempts to either exalt or demonize the figure of the nomad, the nomad herself, as an embodied subject, remains unknown. Deleuze’s and Guattari’s nomadology subtracts the historical and economic substance of the nomad to extract an elegant and poetic ontology of postmodern society as a utopia structured by no-structure or freedom of movement. Lines of flight or trajectories through space replace a now intolerable fixity of points, of subjects rooted in place. In a revealing parallel with Lukacs, according to whom contemporary society has catastrophically abolished the historicity of subjects to better control them as empty objects circulating through empty space, Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphysics imply that the postmodern subject/nomad only acquires total mobility in space by becoming immobile in time, unmarked by the passage of time. “Unmarked by the traces of class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and geography” – Cresswell argues that it is precisely those markers that give reality and substance to a subject, a reality that theoretical obsessions with the nomad clearly lack.

Contra theorists of Deleuze and Guattari’s ilk, Said asserts the following: “the work of the humanist critic is to materialize rather than spiritualize the culture in which we live”. This notion travels closely with Lukacs idea that the practice of theory engages on a fundamental level our awareness with the material conditions of the world and therefore serves as a basis for social action. But does “materializing” versus “spiritualizing” culture necessarily go hand in hand, like Lukacs, with reestablishing the theoretical primacy of place i.e. a lieu, or proper place to quote De Certeau and all the historical, economic, political specificity that attach themselves to place, over the attention also due to space, which in its own way, also carries with it definite political and economic implications.

After all, the ideal of spatial mobility, of transience, of boundary transgression is one that carries, not only for Deleuze and Guattari, but for De Certeau (who is concerned with the condition of the consumer) and for Fuss (who is concerned with the theoretical context of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender – and by extension, ‘heterosexual’ – experience of sexuality) the promise of a social space that is no longer delimited and limited by hierarchy, by top-down design, by notions of inclusion and exclusion. We are invited to consider the theoretical transfer from a (modernist) society in which everyone has a place or stays in their place to a (postmodernist) society in which no one is chained to/oppressed by a “proper noun” (De Certeau), but instead is a “poet of their own affairs”, slipping in and out of places according to a logic of the opportune moment. In this sense De Certeau, contra Deleuze and Guattari, does not abolish the “place” of time in the human experience, but argues for a different notion of time, one that is not structured by narratives about past and future but that seizes the story (of life) in the present, in the moment of experiencing the world.

Dissertation Project_ITERATION#3

March 8th, 2009 germinating ideas, researchTags: augmented reality, body, database, immersion, material, play, screen, space, virtual

REDEFINING IMMERSION:

abstract vs. physical metaphors for virtual space?

Most discussions of “immersion” or the extent to which a media experience can sensorially and psychologically engulf the viewer, presumably bringing them closer to a ‘real life’ experience, revolve around kidnapping the viewer/player more decisively into the realm of the virtual – wherefore larger screens and stereoscopy, even VR.

Another route towards immersion involves the notion of “augmented reality” or embedding the virtual in physical space in order to create the experience of a (ideally) seamlessly merged virtuality/reality.

Is there a way to rehabilitate the screen, historically a hallmark of the 1rst type of immersion, for purposes of augmenting reality? Typically the screen is the well-known boundary between the physical and virtual, the thing that extrudes from normal, material space to shed simulacra down on us.

Returning to the idea of creating a “burrow” or an immersion “box”, the idea of physical space or geography serving as the interactive device for a database narrative – cannot the screens or “displays” themselves become part and parcel of real space, so that rather than running into a simulacra-projector, one is thrown in/sucked into the hidden, temporary space of a media-fragment?

Even more urgently – to complete the dream of seamlessness between material and virtual, can we be satisfied with an analogy between architecture i.e. the space of a gallery/rooms/hallways, and database structure? The textures of narrative and information, relayed across different media technologies are too viscerally pervasive and “real”, urgently present to us, to find adequate expression in the cool, ascetic, representational spaces offered to the typical art installation.

Must we not go deeper, more intimately into our project to map the virtual onto the physical? Perhaps it is important to start considering the sensorial/sensual rather than abstract properties of real space. To think of the body rather than architecture as a proper metaphor for our collective apprehension of virtuality.

David Cronenberg’s Videodrome as the faithfully visceral rendering of our felt relationship with media technology…

“Fears of Utopia”: styleframes_2

March 5th, 2009 project updatesTags: city, noise, photopia, space

photographic sources (in order): Hans-Christian Schink, Cassio Vasconcelos, Osama Kaneimura

soundtrack source: Venetian Snares

Treatment: “FEARS OF UTOPIA”

February 20th, 2009 project updatesTags: city, noise, space, utopia

Style frames feature the work of photographer Cassio Vasconcelos  (depicting the uninhabited, alien feel of marginal urban landscapes, but also exploring the aesthetic pleasure of pure space), Rutt Blees Luxemberg, and breakcore/IDM music artist “Venetian Snares”.

This animated short explores the question of the ‘liveability’ and humanity of contemporary planned urban landscapes. The title is a play on the two meanings of utopia, as a place of designed perfection and function and as a ‘no-place’, a transient and indefinable place recalcitrant to human occupation.

The short presents segments of animated photography featuring spaces in the city whose ambiguous purpose or lack of identity evoke a sense of ‘psychological vertigo’, what I think of as a hypnotizing mixture of fascination and alienation. These spaces are tunnels, passageways, roadsides, bridges above freeways, abandoned buildings, unkempt infrastructure, closed strip-malls at night, streetlights, subway tracks (above ground), empty parking lots, apartment façades with closed/dark windows.

These spaces will alternate with live-action segments in which a person in a room ‘enacts’ the atmosphere, mood or “being” of the different places put on show, through the play of expression on their face or through gesture and bodily movement/posture. The actor will be as textureless and smooth as possible, preferably androgynous: thin, medium height, dressed in black pants and a long sleeve black T-shirt, bald, with large (‘frightened’) eyes. I want to keep my options open in terms of ‘the room’ that provides the environment for the actor. I want to shoot the actor with a green screen background that allows me to place the actor in a different room depending on the space he/she is enacting – this series of rooms will actually be one room that I get footage of and whose visual characteristics (brightness, hue, saturation, texture, patterns) I have modified to correspond to/evoke the visual characteristics of the urban space that the actor is enacting, hopefully strengthening for the viewer the bond between the urban landscapes/the actor. The framing/shot of the room will be the one invariant – three walls (the back wall a frontal surface, the left and right wall slightly longitudinal surfaces), all of equal or close to equal surface dimensions. However, in case the green screen option does not work out (technical difficulties, mistakes…) I also want to shoot the actor in a real room. The connection with the urban landscapes in this case will be emphasized by changes in the actor’s makeup/ facial paint (color, patterns). For example, if the space I have shown involves striking patterns of light and shadow, these patterns will be reproduced (in a stylized way) on the actor’s face, or if the space is drenched with a red light, the actor’s face will be painted red.

I would like to film the actor in two different kinds of light. The first scheme would involve a flat style of lighting, in which a bright, warm/orangish light evenly lights both the actor and the room. The second scheme would involve lighting the actor much more fully than the room, so that while the front of the actor is brightly lit, the back wall of the room, the far sides of the other walls and the corners are steeped in shadow. The actor’s choreography would then involve playing with this brightness gradient (stepping into the light, moving back into the shadows). I am unsure how to carry on the second lighting scheme in the green screen context i.e whether I need to shoot the screen as evenly and fully as the actor and then change the lighting with After Effects.

In terms of the actor’s choreography, I envision simple, ‘one-liner’ movements rather than complex ones. I want the actor’s physical movement to mirror the movement of feeling that occurs when one goes to/contemplates these different spaces – at this point I feel that dance-like movements would distract from the space imagery and introduce unnecessary signifiers. For example, if I show an empty office space with white walls and gray carpet, a corresponding choreography might involve the actor’s face distorting into a silent scream while he/she crouches down on the floor as if reacting to a bombing/air raid. An interesting option would be to modify all or some of the movements in post (speed up, slow down, reverse) to make them seem more inhuman, in order to emphasize the ‘unliveability’ and artificiality of the spaces shown. A lot can also be done to choreograph movements that express discomfort or un-naturaleness (arms bending the wrong way, a 3-part sequence of a-rhythmic movements)

celebrated mime Marcel Marceau using his body as a site of inarticulable tension

In terms of editing the urban space sequences, I want the spaces to come off as static (creating a ‘face to face with a blank wall’ sort of feeling), cryptic, even unapproachable. The experience I want to convey would ideally be similar to the experience described by Sartre in Nausea when he describes objects in the world, especially the nondescript, random elements one finds in urban landscapes as having “a type of small/petty meaning that taunts you with its indecipherability”. So far I’ve experimented with some options using scanned photographs: simple zooms and pans into/across the picture, in the mode of exploring the geometry and texture of the space (following the lines of structures with the camera), focusing on the ambiguous/incomprehensible space created by zooms and interspersing these extreme close-ups with flashes of the entire photograph to imitate the way one ‘takes in’ a scene and how one’s point of attention jumps from detail to detail and only occasionally embraces the whole picture. Other options that I would like to explore but haven’t really figured out include the question of whether to include some form of object movement in the animation of these spaces. The Dsrukt/Ronin piece was very useful in terms of thinking how movement can be more or less organically integrated into a still image – I can see the same sort of thing working in the case of a photograph of the band of grass and scruffy vegetation next to a highway, where everything would be still except for the leaves of a bush or grass moving in the wind. I can also imagine a form of animation that would imitate the staggering/non-fluid quality of (“bad”) stop-motion, where new elements keep appearing/disappearing in the photograph – for example, changing the color/brightness of the windows in a photograph of the façade of a building in order to create a surreal version of accelerated time. I’ve also thought of creating the illusion of moving objects simply through sound: for example, to create an atmosphere of damp coolness in a tunnel by slowly zooming into the tunnel while the sound of running, cavernous water grows louder and louder.

In terms of the soundtrack, I wish to establish a clear separation between the space sequences and the actor sequences. I see the actor sequences accompanied by nothing more than a droning sound, which simply varies in pitch depending on the sequence. Variety and complexity in the sound-scape is a property of the urban landscape. Theoretically, I am mostly interested in using atonal, dissonant sound mixed with sound effects, in the spirit of ‘noise music’ artists like John Cage and Throbbing Gristle, to create the atmosphere of discomfort I am looking for. I find that noise music creates a strange dual feeling both of detachment/alienation and of almost unwilling immersion or hypnotic engrossment in the viewer. However, I have experimented with editing certain sequences to still atonal and aggressive/distorted, but faster and less monotonous electronic music with some promising results. I find this kind of music introduces an element of the sublime/aesthetic pleasure that provides an interesting counterpoint to the dissonance/distress that it also embraces. The degree of abstraction in the music I end up using will depend on whether I ultimately feel that a sustained feeling of discomfort/alienation in the viewer becomes too monotonous, and whether I need to vary the range of emotional experiences for greater effect (touches of sublimity).

The question of whether to use a single screen or two screens is something I still have not settled upon. This depends I think on whether the correlation between the actor in the room and the urban landscape animation will be most clear and effective through single-screen editing (alternating one with the other, whether simply having a ‘space’ sequence followed by its ‘actor in room’ companion sequence or interweaving both in tighter, shorter edits) or by having one screen play the space sequences while another plays the ‘actor in room’ sequences. The effect of forcing the viewer to shift their attention erratically from one to the other could have either the effect of reinforcing the destabilizing effect I am after, or it could damagingly distract the viewer and inhibit the sense of hypnotic immersion I am also after. Perhaps a two-screen setup that could counteract this last effect would be to have the two screens placed at eye-level and leaning towards each other at a right angle, so that when the viewer steps into the triangular space created by the screens they find themselves ensconced in a sort of immersive head-space (where they don’t really need to move to shift their attention; their eyes just flicker from one screen to the other). According to this scenario the most effective sound set-up would perhaps involve headphones – the complex soundtrack for the ‘space’ sequences and the droning soundtrack for the ‘actor in room’ sequences would be separated in the right and left ear – such an installation could certainly be a step forward in terms of ‘kidnapping’ the viewer’s attention and putting them in a tight psychological spot, but it might also create a sense of aesthetic confusion or being too overwhelmed that would go against the goal of delivering a focused and precise/coherent experience.