+ Transcendence of form

Media burden visual feedback. One must constantly define, qualify, specify, and reaffirm how the definitional parts interlock–the visual feedback loop is a desired form; while material technologies instantiate this form, visual feedback cultivates a unique and technologically agnostic aesthetic. The uncertainty surrounding visual feedback proceeds from the classic definition of a medium (discussed in the previous section)–a means of transmission, thereby insinuating a technology of transmission. Transmission favors the sender, the encoding, and the original information. Media theory, in a way, focuses on the receiver, the decoding, and the received information, only in the guise of transmission and transmitted information. In other words, media theory claims a desired form–the experienced signifier, the expression of a technology, the output–results from a transmitting material form; this combination defines a medium as both enabling raw information flow and expressive communication. Although the material portion certainly enables communication, it is the output form that transforms the material affordances and limitations into expressive functions. However dependent a medium appears to be on its material technology, it is fairly innocuous–television serves as metonymy for Television; film for Cinema. In circumstances where no techno-medial genealogy exists, an orphaned form emerges–the visual feedback loop seems to be sired by the ether, immaculately conceived, a circumstance of and within media.

The entwining of material and immaterial does not discount media theory all together. The ideas, typically addressed in regards to media, account in part for desired forms. The conclusion is that technology does not singularly determine expression. For example, Nam June Paik’s Magnet TV and Woody Valsulka’s C-Trend both illustrate magnet manipulations of video. Paik’s work use magnets to physically and externally manipulate video, rendering it non-recordable.¹ Valsulka’s work uses “electronic deflection modulation”² by way of the Rutt/Etra Scan Processor to internally and procedurally manipulate the raster image.³ For Valsulka, the manipulation relies on the digital signal of video technology. For Paik, the manipulation does not rely on an encoding format unique to video, but the output device (a television). Both works are considered video art because of their aesthetic output rather their encoded input.⁴

Avoiding a techno-medial teleology, this section explores remediation and spatial montage as theories for the desired form. While each of these ideas has been traced to a technology or the conditions of a technology, I will only consider the implications of the outward form.

+ Remediation

The term remediation, as explained by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, is “the representation of one medium in another.”⁵ For example, the website for Museum of Modern Art (http://www.moma.org/) has an extensive digital catalog of the works on display in physical New York City museum. Paintings, photographs, sculptures, and installations are digitally recorded, entered into an online database, and shown in the various sections of the website. “Ideally, there should be no difference between the experience of seeing a painting in person and on the computer screen, but this is never so.”⁶ While there are obvious differences–such as resolution or coloration–the bigger differences germinate in how remediation recombines our expectations, uses, and conceptions of the original work.

Currently, an exhibition of Monet’s Water Lilies, 1914-26 (Sept. 2009-April 2010) is featured the MoMA. When viewing the exhibition in a gallery space, a certain protocol is followed–one must be quiet, not take photographs, and not touch the painting. In the digital exhibition space, the experience is very different. The artwork becomes indistinguishable from any other digital objects–it can be copied to the desktop, clicked on as an icon, or hovered over to reveal details. Alongside the paintings are lengthy curatorial notes, as well as suggested texts, advertisements for upcoming events, and a navigation bar to access other parts of the virtual exhibition. Even more, how and where one experiences that paint is enabled by the accessibility of digital artwork. One can be listening to music, wearing pajamas, talking on the phone, or writing a paper. While the visual components of the painting (may) remain essentially unchanged, the experience of that painting changes drastically. The drastic change comes from how the digital medium remediates a painting.

Structuring remediation are two distinct and opposing goals: immediacy and hypermediacy. These goals form the end points of a singular axis. Immediacy denotes disappearance and transparency of a medium–”perceptual immediacy [is] experience without mediation…one that erases itself, so that the user is no longer aware of confronting a medium, but instead stands in an immediate relationship to the contents of that medium.”⁷ Immediacy provides the audience with a window-like experience of the medium; the medium is seen through and forgotten. Hypermediacy speaks to the other end. “In the logic of hypermediacy, the artist (or multimedia programmer or web designer) strives to make the viewer acknowledge the medium as a medium and to delight in that acknowledgment.”⁸ Hypermediacy breaks the illusion of the immediacy. Hypermediacy and immediacy are always at work in a medium, pulling the attention of the audience back and forth. Water Lilies demonstrate this double logic quite nicely. As much as the paintings represent a depiction (“Those are water lilies!”), they also present a painting style (“The form comes from the juxtaposed colors!”). Likewise, the online image aims to represent the paintings as well as present the mode of representation (demonstrated mouse hover over effects). For digital remediation, hypermediacy and immediacy work in layers. To look at the Water Lilies and see the water lilies themselves is a double transparency (both painting and computer disappear). To see the painting as a painting is to expose the painting’s illusion, but still succumb computer’s.⁹

Underneath remediation is the distinct concept that information is non-unique and so constantly suffering from re-transmission. For example, the MoMA website remediates Monet’s Water Lilies in that the online counterpart corresponds to some original amount of information from the actual paintings. Remediation asserts that “what is new about digital media lies in their particular strategies for remediating…Repurposing as remediation is both what is ‘unique to digital worlds’ and what denies the possibility of that uniqueness.”¹⁰ Counter to this argument is Steven Holtzman, who claims that for digital media to become an “authentic aesthetic … [w]e need to transcend the old [repurposed metaphors] to discover completely new worlds of expression.”¹¹ Bolter and Grusin refute this claim as “comfortable, modernist rhetoric, in which digital media cannot be significant until they make a radical break with the past.”¹² In both views persists the stance that it is informational transmission that defines the digital medium.

To extend the argument at the beginning of Chapter 3, remediation marks a process of re-reception and re-decoding as opposed to re-transmission and re-encoding. In the latter, remediation depends on sender or technology; in the former, remediation depends on decoder and outward form. Even the original definition ascribes to this view of remediation with saying so. When Bolter and Grusin claim digital media absorbs other technologies, they in fact mean digital media recreates the functions of legacy technologies. The recreation of functions relies on the exterior perception of the interior process. In other words, remediation depends on perceived affordances, and so simulation through emulation. Remediation, in a distinctly postmodern manner, borrows these outward metaphors to dispose the audience to thinking in the terms of another desired form. The webcam remediates television by recreating television’s “monitoring function,”¹³ that is, television’s “capacity to record and display images simultaneously with our viewing offers a quality of presentness, of ‘here and now’ as distinct from the cinema’s ‘there and then.’”¹⁴ Webcams exteriorize what defines television in its use of television signs–channels, broadcasts, etc. The remoteness of many webcams makes this unverifiable; it does not discount the audience’s perception of temporal presentness.

Visual feedback embodies many of these amended concepts from remediation. First, visual feedback relies on immediacy and hypermediacy. When the spectator-user becomes aware of self-observation, the output screen in Live Taped Video Corridor switches from opaque–”I see a television monitor”–to transparent–”I see myself.” The double logic does not, however, divide along the two arcs of feedback in a respective fashion. Each arc substantiates the double logic differently and at different times. An awareness of the physical body with respect to the visual self in Lived Taped Video Corridor proceeds in the opposite fashion. Walking into the corridor, save the spatial constraints, does not reinforce an awareness of being a lived-body in-the-world; the physical self is transparent. The appearance of the virtual self forces one outside of the physical self into the augmented and virtual selves. In other words, as the first arc initially moves from opaque to transparent, the second arc move in the opposite direction.

Another example can be found in GPS navigation. When the virtual self approaches a turn, the driving path bends and the unit gives auditory commands. When a person turns smoothly, the prompts cease; the virtual and physical self align in contiguous space on the map and in the world. What one does, sees, and sees being done are all the same. When the person cannot turn–say, there is a recent road closure–the navigation unit becomes obvious as unworldly. The prescribed route extends in virtual space where one cannot go in physical space; the commands to turn are no longer relevant, and move from the realm of subliminal reminder to superliminal nuisance. Fluidity is disrupted as the unit recalculates the course. The disconnect exposes the navigation unit as not having perceptual omniscience.¹⁵ The subliminal commands no longer controls the physical body.

Like all remediations, visual feedback constantly acts in a dialogue with other desired forms. For instance, the audience accepts the “I/eye” condition of the “viewing-view/viewed-view” in film. In visual feedback, the same acceptance–technological augmentation–occurs. Through one’s knowledge of cinematic spectatorship, spectator-user embodies this hermeneutic zeroness when entering the loop’s field. Moreover, the replication of televisual presentness in the various incarnations of visual feedback generates the relationship between the virtual and the physical self, thereby splitting the homogeneous loop into two arcs.

As a simulation of functions, remediation accounts for the persistence of visual feedback loops as a desired forms; that is to say, visual feedback is pure remediation. When a desired form emerges from a technology, remediation states that other media (technologies and desired forms) will try to reproduce the functions of that form. In the case of visual feedback, remediation does not divorce the desired form from an initial technology; visual feedback as a form manifests within technology without resulting from a technology. Even in its first technological incarnation (video, mirror, or water’s surface for Narcissus), the visual feedback loop has been remediated–the functions and components of the experience do not come from the particular expressive medium in which they seems to arise.

Remediation can be formulated in several ways; Bolter and Grusin outline three main restatements of remediation:¹⁶

+ remediation as the mediation of mediation
+ remediation as the inseparability of mediation and reality
+ remediation as reform

The first of these is captured in the re-presentation of Monet’s Water Lilies in a digital form. The mediation of Monet’s reality is again mediated to the audience through a computer screen; the audience views an digital image of a painting, which through its double logic, moves back and forth between direct and indirect modes of perception. Similarly, the visual feedback loop remediates embodied sight through an augmented perspective. The input device adds another mechanism between visible reality; the output device transforms visibility into visuality.

The last restatement can also be found in the digital presentation of Water Lilies. The audience encounters links, expanded explanations, and a dynamic viewing space; the website rehabilitates the notion of a gallery as an information space.¹⁷ The visual feedback loop, likewise, reforms the notion of embodied perception, offering an extension that exposes additional (if not the original) fallacies of observation. Additionally, videogames, such as Portal (Valve, 2007), reform how visual feedback function in situations of navigation. To move from one location to another most quickly in Portal, one must reposition the locations as adjacent by way of a device that distorts space-time. The notion of relational space, viz. Leibnizian space, combines with Euclidean notions of space–perceivable space constitutes both a relation amongst object and relation amongst spaces-as-objects.

+ Remediation of the loop and indistinguishable reality

The second of the formulations of remediation–remediation as the inseparability of mediation and reality–requires an expanded perspective with regards to visual feedback. Essentially, the visual feedback loop remediates the notion of the programmatic loop in physical space. Lev Manovich provides the background support.

Generally, the loop is a cyclic process of repeatedly moving through the same data; the visual loop repeats a sequence of images, thereby engendering an aesthetic of the procedural structure. Lev Manovich cites Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope, one of the earliest film moving images, as a genesis for visual loops; these films were short looped sequences designed for private viewing.¹⁸ The visual loop as a form arose, at least in part, out of necessity due to storage limitations.¹⁹ The limited storage, while pigeonholing the potential expressive capabilities of early film technologies, exposes a procedurality to visual production. A loop purifies action by striping it from its actual duration. As a result, action becomes compartmental and iterative–action shifts from function to object. When action exists as an object, it is subject to manipulation, reproduction, exchange, and uniformity.

For example, hand-drawn animation frequently exploits loops to reduce the number of unique cells needed to portray an action like running.²⁰ Animators design, instead, a series of action sprites. A stride may be composed of three cells; running is just the repetition of those cells. A chase can be described as cycles of action–background cycles and character cycles. Manovich continues:

“Programming involves altering the linear flow of data through control structures, such as ‘if/then’ and ‘repeat/while’; the loop is the most elementary of these control structures. Most computer programs are based on repetitions of a set of number steps; this repetition is controlled by the program’s main loop. So if we strip the computer from its usual interface and follow the execution of a typical computer program, the computer will reveal itself to be [composed of loops]…As the practice of computer programming illustrates, the loop and the sequential progression do not have to be considered mutually exclusive. A computer program progresses from start to finish by executing a series of loops.”²¹

The power of the loop, as Manovich pinpoints, is that it expresses duration in a closed-form; the program as a closed-form collects a series of closed-forms, i.e. loops, to accomplish some goal. Action, interaction, and duration of a program come from a compact representation.

In this final thought, the visual feedback loop remediates lived-space and lived-bodies in a closed-form. This does not imply that the visual loop and the visual feedback loop function similarly For instance, the time of the visual loop, though internally cyclic, is externally linear–a looped stride animation portrays a lengthy chase. Furthermore, the visual loop relies on external spectatorship for comprehension. Visual feedback shares the ability of the loop to express temporal and spatial experience succinctly, that is, in a closed-form.

The closed-form of the visual feedback loop blends (maybe obviously) the physical and virtual spaces. Bolter and Grusin explain that remediation as the inseparability of reality and mediation can be seen in the photographic line-of-sight; people act “as if it were a real obstruction…[Thus, people] acknowledge the reality of the act of mediation”.²² When entering into the visual feedback loop, the conceptual understanding and cultural practice of procedurality is at work. The visual field seen as a virtual world has physical influence. As the first arc enables the procession of the virtual self, the second arc realizes the procession. Being seen through the input device and exposed in the output device changes the spectator-user into a self performer. In this way the visible body is made into an spectacle of control. Panoticism is typically describes how sight controls others; similarly, self-sight garners a Lacanian reunion of controlling the actions of another who is in fact the self. The Self-Other duality collapses–a simulation of power comes from the controlled Other being signified by the controlling Self as controlling the Self.

The doubling of the body transforms bodily actions into objects. Each action is duplicated, distributed, and re-signified. Reality and virtuality morph reflexivity. The visual loop as an aesthetic can be explored internally. The effortlessness of computer manipulation of action-objects (seen from the outside) is imbued with effortfulness. The doubly-signified self must always perform and re-perform; no action can be singularly enacted. The body as looped labors in the closed-form, performing each iteration.

1. Meigh-Andrews, Chris. A History of Video Art: The Development of Form and Function. New York: Berg Publishers, 2006. 121. [↩]
2. Meigh-Andrews, Chris. A History of Video Art: The Development of Form and Function. New York: Berg Publishers, 2006. 121. [↩]
3. Meigh-Andrews, Chris. A History of Video Art: The Development of Form and Function. New York: Berg Publishers, 2006. 126. [↩]
4. Magnet TV is not truly video art at all. While it uses video technology in it, the inclusion is inconsequential. It is the television’s cathode tube that is actually being manipulated. The video components give form to the non-visual manipulation. [↩]
5. Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999. 44. [↩]
6. Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999. 45. [↩]
7. Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999. 22-24. [↩]
8. Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999. 41-42. [↩]
9. Arguably, awareness of the computer’s illusion is only a single layer, stopping one’s awareness before any subsequent layering. [↩]
10. Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999. 50. [↩]
11. Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999. 49.; original emphasis [↩]
12. Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999. 49-50. [↩]
13. Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999. 204.; emphasis mine [↩]
14. Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999. 187-188. [↩]
15. There are navigation units that do adjust in these up-to-date circumstances. [↩]
16. Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999. 55-62. [↩]
17. Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999. 56. [↩]
18. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001. 313. [↩]
19. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001. 316. [↩]
20. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001. 318. [↩]
21. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001. 317. [↩]
22. Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999. 59. [↩]

The impetus behind my exploration is fairly simple: the visual feedback loop, though exploited in various forms and with various technologies, has been under-articulated by media theory as a form itself. Amending this oversight demands things:

(1) Establish an initial criteria for identifying, discussing, and critiquing the visual feedback loop (specify).

(2) Reconcile visual feedback as a theoretical concept with existing media theory (expand).

The first chapter approaches the first of these objectives; this chapter approaches the second. To review, visual feedback loops define two mutually-arising sets: one that is formal and one that is phenomenological. The well-definition arises from a preceding discussion of (moving) images as quintessential relatedness. To be blunt, relatedness does not characterize visual feedback because it is visual. Simply poaching visual relatedness from moving images results in summations, such as the output device is a boundary object¹ or (video) feedback manifests narcissism.² Instead, relatedness characterizes visual feedback because, like the moving images, visual feedback exists as a direct result of a morphism–a transformation that preserves traits. To make sense of visual feedback is to recognize all points as counterpoints (this is what Deleuze and Cubitt assert about how we understand cinema). The physical self and the virtual self depend on each other; the virtual implies physicality, and the physical implies virtuality.

In Deleuze’s definition of cinema (as much as Cubitt’s), relatedness constitutes being, that is, forms an ontology. Abstractly, images act as mathematical elements. A mathematical element, by definition, always relates to other elements (in a set S, arbitrary elements a and b relate, most simply, by a ? b or a = b) and to the whole (a is a part of S). In these terms, moving images correspond–the framed denotes the unframed; a sequence continues an action; a shot disrupts time. Relatedness is both outward (between distinct elements; Cubitt explains how the cut relates shots) and inward (between an element and a whole; Deleuze explains the movement-image is comprised of three parts: the perception-image, the affection-image, and the action-image). Moreover, there is no way to escape relatedness.³ For Deleuze, the ontology is resolutely metaphysical–it is the figurative movement and time that relate images. For Cubitt, the ontology is distinctly concrete–it is the literal movement and time that relate images.

The concept of a desired form champions this duality. The visual feedback loop, for example, is composed of literal mechanisms–input device, processor, output device, and spectator-user. It is also composed of abstract mechanisms (phenomena)–notions of internal and external duration, arcs of information, the construction of space, etc. The literal mechanisms, it may seem, are constantly being materially instantiated; that is, the visual feedback loop remains constant as a desired form and in flux as material form, i.e. a medium. In other words, the visual feedback loop exists across media as a circumstance of technologies. Grounding this relationship between a desired form and a medium is a specific notion of what constitutes a medium.

+ Desired form as reception and decoding

The common definition of a medium comes from the transmission model of information, also know as the Shannon-Wiener model. In this model, the medium is a container of and for information. Made prevalent during the Macy Conferences on cybernetics, the Shannon-Wiener model beat out a more comprehensive model offered by Donald MacKay for the sake of being universally quantifiable. N. Katherine Hayles explains:

“[W]hereas Shannon and Wiener define information in terms of what it is, MacKay defines it in terms of what it does. The [first] formulation emphasizes the reification that information undergoes in the Shannon-Wiener theory. Stripped of context, it becomes a mathematical quantity weightless as sunshine, moving in a rarefied realm of pure probability, not tied down to bodies or material instantiations. The price it pays for this universality is its divorce from representation. When information is made representational [that is, dependent on the context], as in MacKay’s model, it is conceptualized as an action rather than a thing. Verblike [sic], it becomes a process that someone enacts, and thus it necessarily implies context and embodiment. The price it pays for embodiment is difficulty of quantification and loss of universality.”⁴

In terms of visual information, the Shannon-Wiener model defines the image as what it represents–what is seen, what is shown, what is implied, what is occurring, etc. For example, if one says “I see a dog walking” when watching a film of a dog walking, the person is saying that the information-as-mediated (encoded) is no different than the information-as-unmediated (direct). This model reduces the medium so that the same information can conceivable be transmitted by another medium (this is the issue with inward-looking for cinema). The sole offering of the medium is disruption through ambiguity, and such ambiguity can only hinder communication. So, communicative value is purely a consequence of how information can be encoded on the sender’s end and not a consequence of how it is decoded on the receiver’s.

Now consider the opposing model. “MacKay’s model recognized the mutual constitution of form and content, message and receiver.”⁵ To communicate relies on both what is said and in what context it is said. For example, to say “It is snowing.” is obviously more valuable as a statement to someone inside and unaware than it is to someone outside and cold. Conversely, the same statement outside may function differently–say, as a joke–and communicate through its context and not its content. “The problem was how to quantify the model. To achieve quantification, a mathematical model was needed for the changes that a message triggered in the receiver’s mind”, a “staggering” problem.⁶ The rejection of the MacKay model in cybernetics for the simpler (and quantifiable) Shannon-Wiener model seems just. In fields where quantification is not a concern–specifically in media theory–the Shannon-Wiener model is misplaced and misguided.

The MacKay model pinpoints how Deleuze and Cubitt understand a medium (specifically cinema as a desired form). While a medium surely encodes information, it more accurately characterizes a method of decoding information. Content must be processed in situ, making context a contributing factor to how and what information informs. The medium is the content-in-context; this is what Hayles means when she says information is defined “in terms of what it does“. Likewise, a medium is redefined from “a means of transmitting a message”⁷ to a means of receiving a message. That is to say, transmission must serve reception. Roland Barthes echoes a similar sentiment when he says “[T]he birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”⁸ For Barthes, the read text is all that matters; what has been intended by an author is inconsequential. Meaning thereby comes from a process of decoding since the encoded information will never be truly knowable.

The definition of a desired form deliberately avoids any claims of material and technological conditions. To attach such fleeting bodies to the definition returns us to a means of transmission. The desired form is instead a means of reception, a MacKay medium per se.

This is not just a reformulation of Marshall McLuhan’s axiom”the medium is the message”.⁹ McLuhan states that “[t]he effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns or perception steadily without resistance.”((McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: The New American Library, 1964. 33.)) The internet, for McLuhan, produces a new concept of informational access, something that the information being accessed may or may not contain. McLuhan’s medium is defined as holistically effectuating–it does not inform, but reform. A medium assembles senses–cinema assembles sight and sound. The engaged senses are reformed with regards to perception. Sight and sound are privileged in cinema, so cinema stratifies sight and sound with regards to touch, smell, and taste. Moreover, cinema (here McLuhan refers to Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic experiment¹⁰ ) merges the mechanical and the organic, reforming the body as a mechanical thing and extending sight through machine augmentation. It is not important what is captured by Muybridge–a horse in motion–but that the camera allows the audience to see what was previously rendered invisible. Though McLuhan astutely regards the medium as important, he is cavalier in disregarding the content entirely.

On a spectrum of content and context, the Shannon-Wiener model exists on one end and Marshall McLuhan at the other; both deal with transmission. As a means of reception, a desired form never transmits information. Information can only be received, that is, decoded. The transmitted content and transmitting context are only informational; each acts as an information signal, but not as information itself. The signals only relate to the concept of an original form (i.e. encoded information) by way of an end product (i.e. decoded information). Hence, the informational signals relate to received information as a video signals relate to visual form–it is the decoding format that gives shape to what one perceives as the encoded information. Paik understood this when distorting a television broadcast with magnets; Jean Baudrillard echoes the same idea in Simulacra and Simulation. Baudrillard writes:

“It is now impossible to isolate the process of the real, or prove the real. …[Real events] are now in some sense simulation [events] in that they are already inscribed in the decoding and orchestration rituals of the media, anticipated in their presentation and their possible consequences. In short, where they function as a group of signs dedicated exclusively to their recurrence as signs, and no longer at all to their ‘real’ ends.”¹¹

For instance, in the visual feedback loop, the virtual self relates to the physical self through representation and formulation. The spectator-user perceives visual likeness as a deductive fact of the mechanisms (“Since the input device leads to the output device, what I see must be me”) and as an inductive fact of the phenomena (“Since I move and the image moves, the image must be of me”). The information of the feedback loop emerges when the spectator-user synthesizes content and context, that is, decides how to decode the informational signals. Content and context as transmitted information and encoded form arise only after decoding, and so point to an simulacrum rather than the any actual information or any actual medium. “‘Order, signal, impulse, message’: all of these attempt to render the thing intelligible to us, but by analogy, retranscribing in terms of inscription…a dimension of which we know nothing.”¹²

+ A death in media theory

The visual feedback loop illustrates the core of media theory–namely, that media theory defines transmission formats and not reception formats. Even in the most radical of cases (that being Marshall McLuhan of course), media are disposed to top-down logic. A medium is that which encodes, transmits, begets. In one part, this logic comes from legacy of technologies that engender unique decoding. With digital technologies, these get muddled. Huge swaths of desired forms fall under the umbrella terms of new media or digital media (Bolter and Grusin’s concept of remediation comes to mind; it will be discussed in the next section). Can the videogame be grouped with the hypertext story anymore than film can be grouped with video? There are similarities in both cases; it is the differences that matter.

In another part, this logic stems from people holding onto the material entity. People want to point to some expressed form, also denote how it came into being. Baudrillard pinpoints this with regards to news media.

“There is no longer a medium [he is speaking of television] in the literal sense: it is now intangible, diffused, and diffracted in the real…One must think instead of the media as if they were, in outer orbit, a kind of genetic code that directs mutation of the real into the hyperreal, just as the micromolecular code controls the passage from a representative sphere of meaning to the genetic one of the programmed signal. It is the whole traditional world of causality that is in question…one remains dependent the analytical conception of the media, on an external active and effective agent, on ‘perspectival’ information with the horizon of the real and of meaning as the vanishing point.”¹³

Baudrillard understands that what we see on television, while we speak of it as such, is not transmitted information. Television exteriorizes and exploits the material components as lived-bodies in lived-space to conjure a notion of the Real. Television, as all media, performs–realizes–encoded information. A techno-medial myth pervades: the encoding and encoded information exist initially at one end, and the decoding and decoded information exist secondarily at the other end; this is simply untrue. The latter reifies the former. Baudrillard christens this “a fantastic telescoping, a collapse of the two traditional poles into each other: implosion–an absorption of the radiated mode of causality, of the differential mode of determination”.¹⁴ One fabricates an origin in the act of witnessing an outward form (what could be called the origin’s end). Decoding renders into existence both the encoded and the decoded.

The transmission model certainly exists, but not within media theory. It simply does not describe how a technology (a medium) functions as a cultural entity (a desired form). A medium is what a medium does, and what it does is determined in reception.

Now, what if the transmission myth were destroyed? Could we stop pretending the video feedback loop exemplified in TV Buddha and Live Taped Video Corridor has anything in common with video art in general other than the camera and VHS tape?

The performance works of Bruce Nauman rely on a completely different aesthetic and geneology than Live Taped Video Corridor. For example, Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square (1967-68) denies the audience’s inclusion in the performance. It structures a gaze at the screen as a spectacle, and disguises surveillance and augmented sight as observation and direct viewing. The video recording fixes the performance in space and time, allowing it to be replayed, reproduced, and distributed. One encounter with the performance becomes indistinguishable from another; so, spectatorship becomes exchangeable. The camera exploits the tension amongst the mundane content and fixed perspective typical to television news broadcasts of the time, as well as cropping atypical of professional camera work. As a distributed piece of moving image, it denies any its status as commodity since it is conceptual (the name describes the piece’s contents fully; watching it only confirms that fact).

Compare this to Live Taped Video Corridor. The video camera and screen are a portion of the piece. They do not depend of the aesthetics of television, film, or video; instead, Live Taped Video Corridor comes from traditions of installation art and architecture. Themes of surveillance, observation, panoticism, and vertical hierarchy come from the relationships of objects and subjects. The experience depends of participation and physical presence. Documentation may capture the concept, but the concept does not replace the experience.

To consider these two works as exploiting the same medium seems obviously misinformed. Likewise, to consider, the visual feedback loop and video art as distinct mediums qua a means of transmission is equally as difficult. Video feedback and video art are distinguished by their desired forms–the unique sets of formal structures and phenomena. The desired form (that is, a categorical classification such as visual feedback) extends beyond the bounds of technology; it accounts for material expansion, technological reinvention, and digital revision.

Technology may always define what is called a medium; media theory, on the other hand, needs to move beyond this end. As all media become digitized, all technology fall under one classification–the digital medium. Where does this leave hermeneutics that rely on the cinematic apparatus as composed of a projector and celluloid? Does Cinema disappear? Is a movie just a relic? The desired form offers an escape.

1. Lee, Hyun-Jean. “The Screen as Boundary Object in the Realm of Imagination.” Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009. [↩]
2. Krauss, Rosalind. “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism.” October vol. 1, Spring (1976): 50-64. [↩]
3. While Deleuze focuses on the moving image, he means image in far more general way. The movement-image and time-image are the visible projections of movement and time onto film. What we see is only one set–the visible/visual set–and not the pre-image of kinetic embodiment of movement. [↩]
4. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. 56.; original emphasis [↩]
5. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. 56. [↩]
6. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. 56. [↩]
7. http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~murray/6210_medium_notes2.html; emphasis mine [↩]
8. http://books.google.com/books?id=JXT6DQg_WUwC&dq=roland+barthes+image+music+text&source=gbs_navlinks_s [↩]
9. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: The New American Library, 1964. 23. [↩]
10. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: The New American Library, 1964. 249. [↩]
11. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994. 21. [↩]
12. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994. 31. [↩]
13. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994. 30-31. [↩]
14. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994. 31. [↩]

+ A claim for the practicality of visual feedback: global positioning navigation

The previous two sections explicate the capabilities and flexibilities of the visual feedback loop; in all the examples, the artifacts have been artworks. This raises an important question:

Does the visual feedback loop serve any purpose outside the context of art?

Simply, the answer is yes. Visual feedback (as well as non-visual feedback) prominently structures a large portion of current technologies. Recall N. Katherine Hayles’ statement about feedback loops in the practices of engineering. Discussing the governor (a device for controlling revolutions per minute in a steam engine), Hayles makes clear that practical feedback loops are best employed by devices for systemic self-regulation.¹ Systemic self-regulation takes on a different meaning in the case of visual feedback since the loop appeals to the faculties of interpretation. And, just like the governor for the steam engine, practical visual feedback loops work synergistically within a larger device or context. For the system to work properly, the loop must be masked and rendered invisible by utility. When the functioning of the feedback loop is made directly perceptible, its ability to regulate a system is compromised as is the system as useful. Visual feedback as an artistic form highlights the underlying issues disregarded and hidden in everyday uses. To look at these artistic practices, one can clearly conceive of the loop as a form since the practical concerns are removed. In other words, the previous examples illustrate the characteristics and formulations of visual feedback directly. These uses, however, do not preclude the practical uses or imply that no such uses exist.

To review, the visual feedback loop is comprised of four components: input device, processor, output device, and person (whom I call the spectator-user to emphasize the roles of subjective observer, objective participant, and, as we will see in the next chapter, active receiver-decoder). The four-part structure leads to a series of experiences: external homogeneity, internal heterogeneity, visual augmentation, parity arcs of information flow, and contiguous constructed space. The combination of these two sets constructs the visual feedback loop as a desired form–a medium-unspecific information circuit. Where art lays these traits bare, practical devices cloak them.

A prime example (maybe the quintessential example) is the mirror. For the light mirror, the input device, processor, and output device are one-in-the-same, the mirrored surface. Light travels between the mirror and the spectator-user’s eyes, and is processed in the least possible way by being directly reflected. But, just as the simplest video feedback loop, the mirror constitutes a form of mediation, albeit a practical one–subjectivity sprouts from the mirror’s materiality. Perspective, however, is consequential, and the mirror image is seemingly derived from a pre-technological and unmediated condition. The object’s surface is all the object has to offer; there is no apparent depth, no inner-workings, no mechanisms. No matter, the mirror is subjective and does mediate perception.

Unlike Live Taped Video Corridor and Daniel Rozin’s mirrors, a light mirror is not designed to highlight its fundamental flaws. Instead, the mirror as an object of mediation is pushed aside for the virtual self as the (un)mediated object. To look at a mirror is to not see the mirror at all, but to experience the mirror’s conditions; the mirror presents verisimilitude by calling attention to the virtual self as simply verisimilar. In those moments when the limitations of the mirror’s perspective appear, the mirror no longer works. The mirror only serves the aim of seeing that which cannot be seen, and if there are still things that cannot be seen by/with the mirror–say, the back of one’s head–then the mirror serves no purpose. That is, a mirror must disappear to practically exist; if it appears due to its limited practicality, then it made obsolete.² This duality is what haunts the visual feedback loop in practical circumstances.

As a desired form–that is, as a set of circumstances and not a materiality–the visual feedback loop vanishes when looked to for some other purpose than being looked at. Moreover, when the loop is employed for its utility, it is done so to never be looked at at all. Where film or video are materials as much as structural and experiential modes, feedback is only the latter. In film, an idea–inward-looking–arises when the contents of the cinematic image become all that the cinematic image is. The visual feedback loop in more practical realms suffers from this disregard, but does not have the recognizable materiality that film does.

The aim of this chapter is to identify how the visual feedback loop as a desired form provides its practical applications with something more than internal structure. In order to do this, I will explore GPS navigation systems for automotive travel. The goal is to pinpoint what the GPS navigation systems as feedback loops offer other than real-time driving instructions.

+ Background: GIS and GPS

Geographic information systems (singular acronym, GIS) identify a wide variety of technologies and approaches associated with computer-aided geography and cartography. While no singular definition of these systems exists, John Pickles identifies two features shared amongst the various definitions–”the role of digital electronic data and the production of electronic spatial representations of those data: GIS is a product of computers in particular and of electronic information technology more generally.”³

A subset of global information systems are global position systems (singular: GPS). GPS is a “system of radio-emitting and -receiving satellites used for determining positions on the earth [by using] trilateration”.⁴ GPS exclusively deals with placement, and relies on other global information systems to accomplish the combined goal of navigation.

GPS navigation units present an ever-growing example of visual feedback–partially because of the practicality of the feedback loop itself and partially because of the manner of representation of the self and space. Although there exist numerous varieties of GPS navigation units, I will focus on the car dashboard models and specifically the Garmin Nüvi. The selection of the Garmin Nüvi is due to its relative uniformity to other dashboard navigation units (as seen above) as well as it as part of a continued series, indicating longevity of visual form and data structure/system.

+ Technical description

The dashboard GPS navigation unit relies on a complex system of visual feedback. Unlike the previous examples, the input device for a GPS unit is not a camera. Instead, the input device is the internal receiver that indicates one’s current location. The receiver, in actuality, retrieves data based on an array of satellites that calculate the receiver’s current location. As an input device, it acts as a marker. The spectator-user initially selects a destination. A server processes the current location to form a navigable path based on GIS data and mapping algorithms.⁵ The screen presents up-to-date directions and real-time instructions to the spectator-user. The instructions guide the driver and the ever-changing position guides the updated display and directions. Changes from the proposed path by the driver result in a new set of directions and a different path.

+ Dual augmentation

Driving with a navigation unit creates a doubling of hermeneutics. Physically, the world is mediated by the car. Perspective onto the world is that of looking through the near-rectangular windshield. The roadway is felt through the tires, suspension, and chassis. Movement is not direct either. To steer the car is to rotate the steering wheel; to go forward, to push the accelerator. The physical self already exists as machine mediated. Virtually, the world is mediated through the navigation device’s screen. One’s current location is identified by an arrow on the screen.

The physical and virtual self are both represented by proxy. In the real world, the person and car become tautological; on the device’s screen, the self and the arrow are equated. To experience the world in any fashion is to experience the world through a machine’s perception. The augmented self is no simply the embodied I combined with the visible machine eye. Instead, the embodied I is encased in the car which is then represented on the screen. To find one’s current location is to accept the car as surrogate in the physical world and the arrow as surrogate the virtual world. The navigation device precisely relays the overlooked hermeneutics of driving: to move in a car is to move as the car, and it is to assume the machine’s vector in space. The arrow does not belabor the complexity; the virtual self is both an avatar (the arrow as object) and a perspective (the arrow as direction).

+ The absolute and the relative

Space is often described in two general ways. The first is the Cartesian model; this model relies on a concept of absolute space. “[W]e often think of geometrical space as a real space, where the points are characterizable in terms of some metric, and the points are simply locations in that previously existing space.”⁶ In this model, space is “conceptualized as a large void”⁷ that is filled with unrelated objects. This space, therefore, exists a priori and has no connection to the objects that fill it.

The alternate model is Leibniz’s model. “[F]or [Gottfried] Leibniz, space does not exist as a separate entity, a container, but rather exists only in the relationships among objects”.⁸ Location is only determined by the occupying object, and distance comes from the distinction (the trivial co-relation) of objects. To speak of space in terms of Leibniz’s model is to refer to a collection of objects as much as their relationship(s). Spatiality is then a synonym of interrelation (or, in Deleuzian terms, relatedness). Likewise “temporality and causality”⁹ are applicable for describing relations between objects, but not an object itself. Furthermore, a position in space is determined relatively–reference points are objects as well and not absolute fixtures.

The second model–Leibniz’s relative model–implies a particular sense of personhood, which Immanuel Kant highlighted by explaining that “the concept of [a priori] space is built into us”¹⁰ and we impose it on the world because we are prone to attributing it to objects in the world. The revelation is that as much as spatiality, temporality, and causality are attributable to the relationships of objects, they are also attributable to people as objects, and, even more, to the self as a constant (relative) object. While Michael Curry claims that in this Kant debunks the Cartesian model,¹¹ it seems obvious that he provides cohesion between the two models–the self-as-relative and the self-as-absolute is a matter of embodiment and subjectivity. From a personal perspective, space begins from the first known object, the self. The distinction between the absolute model and the relative model is a matter of semantics to Kant.

GPS navigation plays out this difference between absolute and relative space by way of its dual arcs. The forward arc of feedback imbues a sense of relative space; the reverse arc, of absolute space. On the screen, the arrow does not appear to move through space as much as have space form around it. Remaining fixed in the center of the screen, the digital world moves around the virtual self. The visual landscape is constructed by virtual landmarks that use the iconography found in digital maps. Larger roads are shown as yellow lines; smaller roads, as white. Parks are green patches amongst undifferentiated tan planes. Relevant signs (interstates, construction zones, etc.) appear as floating icons. The iconography appears only to disappear; nothing (other than the arrow) remains for long. Spatiality begets temporality. The flux of time–the estimated time of arrival as calculable derivative and as inductive value (due to, say, traffic)–punctuates the fleeting spatial co-relationships of icons. Visual position results from the where and when the icons appear in the frame.

Conversely, the physical confirmation of the visual space turns flexible icons in to fixtures. As the GPS device directs the driver to turn, it uses distance measures (“Turn right in 300 feet”). Poaching form Henri Bergson’s reading of time, a measurement of time formulates homogeneity–each moment of equivalent measure is equivalent. Bergson attests this denies that time is experienced, and so equal measurements of time vary in experienced duration. Likewise, distance measurements un-differentiate space: between here and there are only a number of units. Hence, the device converts Leibniz’s relative space into Cartesian absolute space when the physical body rasterizes the virtual body. To reach a destination is a matter of covering unitized space rather than moving from one landmark to another. The second arc disregards the localized iconography; the relationships of objects are abstracted as measurements and then dissolved as programmatic physical motion.

Of course, the absolute becomes the relative when the reverse arc moves into the forward again. Approaching a destination means shifting and switching iconography. Yellow lines, white lines, and green patches grow and shrink, and are unitized.

In the case when the physical and virtual worlds do not align–say, in the circumstance of recent road closure–the feedback loop is exposed. That is to say, the spectator-user becomes aware of the mediated-ness of the experience. The onscreen directions (“Continue on Main Street.”) are incongruous to the directly perceivable reality. The contiguity of the constructed viewpoints breaks down; instead of convergent subjectivities (the loop as a whole being a bidirectional exchange), the arcs diverge. Each reality points to its own solution. Of course, the physical outstrips the virtual. When finally the physical solution is played out (say, taking a detour) does the arcs re-converge.

—

Now that we have seen how it functions in a practical setting, we move on to explore the impact of the visual feedback loop on notions of information and mediation. To foreground this next section, we need to recall the core assumption of this desired form, namely, that the visual feedback loop does not require a materiality to exist.

Consider the medium of a book. Though it can be defined as the physically printing of text, it can equally be defined as a recognizable text format for collecting. The latter definition exceeds materiality, grouping physical and digital texts together. While we can point to an originary format of a book, digitized texts question our notion of what constitutes a medium. Is a digital book a different medium than a physical book? One may claim, digitization make a text reconfigurable, transferable, and procedural. The combinatorial literature of the Oulipo certainly counters this. Even more simply, a physical text can be changed insofar as one can scribble, tear, and distort the pages. If the claim is that the digital book and the physical book are instances of the same medium–a book–then what defines a medium?

Moving back to the visual feedback loop, which has no technological genesis, what constitutes the coherent grouping of Live Taped Video Corridor with the GPS navigation unit? The answer is certainly not a materiality. Then, one must wonder, what characterizes the origin of a form if not its stable encoding?

1. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. 8. [↩]
2. Live Taped Video Corridor exploits precisely such a tension. [↩]
3. Pickles, John. “Representation in an Electronic Age: Geography, GIS, and Democracy.” In Ground Truth: The Social Implications of Geographic Informations Systems, edited by John Pickles. New York: The Guilford Press, 1995. 3. [↩]
4. Wade, Tasha and Sommer, Shelly, ed. A to Z Gis: An Illustrated Dictionary of Geographic Information Systems. Redlands: ESRI Press, 2006. 91-92. [↩]
5. For example, a greedy algorithm progressively selects the largest-valued node to form a connected path to the destination. Values are determined by a set of criteria, such as speed limit, distance, or traffic. [↩]
6. Curry, Michael R. Digital Places: Living with Geographic Information Technologies. New York: Routledge, 1998. 25. [↩]
7. Curry, Michael R. Digital Places: Living with Geographic Information Technologies. New York: Routledge, 1998. 25. [↩]
8. Curry, Michael R. Digital Places: Living with Geographic Information Technologies. New York: Routledge, 1998. 27. [↩]
9. Curry, Michael R. Digital Places: Living with Geographic Information Technologies. New York: Routledge, 1998. 27. [↩]
10. Curry, Michael R. Digital Places: Living with Geographic Information Technologies. New York: Routledge, 1998. 27. [↩]
11. Ending a discussion of the Cartesian model in the methods of designer Christopher Alexander (on 32), Curry explains that “[t]he world emerges from this pattern of interrelationships” and that the Cartesian model emerges as an artifact of the knowable world of modernism; Curry, Michael R. Digital Places: Living with Geographic Information Technologies. New York: Routledge, 1998. 27. [↩]

The spectator-user of visual feedback assumes numerous roles: subject, object, agent, observer, etc. These roles determine and predetermine a great deal about various characteristics of our defintion, viz. the relative weights of the individual features result, in part, from the scripting of the spectator-user. While I have asserted that the visual feedback loop does not depend on its materiality to be a desired form, materiality certainly impacts perceptions, thereby staging different power dynamics. Specifically, visual feedback loops with little agency (such as Live Taped Video Corridor and TV Buddha) rely on a vertical hierarchy; the spectator-user observes and is observed, but has no ability to change observation. Thus, verticality engenders technological or a priori privilege. Inversely, visual feedback loops with more agency (such as Daniel Rozin’s physical mirrors) tend toward horizontality; the physical self exists in an exchange with the virtual self. Thus, horizontality demonstrates a relational aesthetic between the spectator-user and the work.

Generally, visual feedback explores the tension amongst a series of binaries: observation and surveillance, object and subject, audience and voyeur. In Live Taped Video Corridor, for instance, the graininess of early video cameras and black-and-white televisions sire visual claustrophobia (exacerbated by the confines of the corridor itself) and menacing panopticism (foregrounded by the intervention-less power structure).¹ The loop structures the spectator-user’s revelation: to see implies to be seen. In this revelation, the spectator-user unearths a truth in an archeological fashion: the corridor stands as a monument to the power/nature of things. Live Taped Video Corridor suggests an inverse form of experience which is inductive.

A continued analysis of Live Taped Video Corridor sheds light on the mechanisms that create its deductive and vertical logic. Dörte Zbikowski writes, “Nauman repeatedly creates new situations that focus on engendering uncertainty. Though the camera assumes the role of the observer, what we see are only sections, so the person observed becomes their [sic] own observer. What comes into play here is the tension between what the observer knows and the manner in which it is experienced.”² Furthermore, in “Nauman’s work, the viewer has unwittingly become part of a series of experiments.”³

Zbikowski suggests that Nauman’s works rely on a priori hypotheses. In the case of Live Taped Video Corridor, the spectator-user unknowingly enters into a situation with a single outcome. Embedded in the fact the loop is an entered situation is a Cartesian (a priori) model of space⁴ The loop awaits, occupying the same space with or without the spectator-user. Observer-as-(self)observed requires a simultaneous experience of embodiment and disembodiment; and each body–physical and virtual–inhabit distinct locations in space. The disembodied and augmented self, in turn, gains privilege as it provides literal and figurative oversight of the physical perspective and body, as well as being united with the pre-existing structure. In this, the loop strips the spectator-user of agency; one can neither invert nor rearrange power because the loop as a space is fixed. As much as the spectator-user becomes a component in the feedback loop, the physical body is positioned below the virtual body. This is what is meant by a vertical arrangement.

Nicholas Bourriaud defines an alternate arrangement of elements along a horizontal axis; he calls this a relational aesthetic. It is defined as “an art [aesthetic] that takes as its theoretical horizon the sphere of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an autonomous and private symbolic space”⁵ and, more loosely, “a form of art with intersubjectivity as its substratum”.⁶ Bourriaud continues to explain,

“Art (practices derived from painting and sculpture and displayed in the form of an exhibition) proves to be an especially appropriate expression of [the] civilization of proximity. It compresses relational space, whereas television and books send us to spaces where we consume in private; and whereas the theater or the cinema bring small groups together to look at univocal images, there is in fact no live commentary on what the theatre or cinema audience is seeing (the time of discussion comes after the show). [Relational aesthetics] create free spaces and periods of time whose rhythms are not the same as those that organize everyday life, and they encourage an inter-human intercourse which is different to the ‘zones of communication’ that are forced upon us.”⁷

Relational aesthetics, then, are enablers of communication; Bourriaud limits this dialogue to the spectators of the art in a flexible region before the art (something that Nauman’s work denies through architecture as much as technology). Hence, relational artwork acts as a locutory by constructing a space for interpersonal conversation.

To amend this idea, I propose that Bourriaud’s inter-human intercourse be called an interlocutory intercourse to allow dialogue amongst the spectator and the work. In this fashion, the artwork and the spectator are horizontally arranged. For the visual feedback loop, space becomes dialogical as the space of the loop is generated between to the physical self and virtual self. Where one enters into Cartesian space, relational space only exists because of the spectator-user. So, the visual feedback loop grows organically from the spectator-user’s presence (i.e. does not exist a priori). Beforehand–that is, from the external vantage point–the homogeneity of duration can be attributed to the conditional nature of the loop’s existence (recall that the static external reflection engenders a homogeneity of duration in TV Buddha and Live Taped Video Corridor).

The relational aesthetic reconsiders the aura with regards to art.⁸ Daniel Rozin’s physical mirrors demonstrate how this shift in power allows for a seemingly unique experience.

+The physical mirrors of Daniel Rozin

/Hidden augmentation

All of Daniel Rozin’s physical mirrors rely on similar components. A digital video camera takes visual data and coarsely digitizes it by utilizing a fraction of the possible resolution and only greyscale values. The greyscale values of each pixel correspond to the actuation of Servo motors controlled in real-time by a computer processor. The processor additionally detects proximity and only allows actuation when something is within range. The motors reside behind the mosaic-like output surface and are attached to one of the physical pixels. For example, a motor in Peg Mirror rotates a single peg to produce a differentiation in lighting on the angled face. When a person stands within range of the mirror, the computer processes the digital video images and adjusts the motors. The relative changes in the tone or color of each pixel through actuation produces a recognizable virtual counterpart. Important to this recognition is that the mirror’s movement occurs quickly to allow visual confirmation of a physical action (“When I move to the left, my ‘reflection’ does too.”) and physical confirmation of a visible action (“What I see in front of me is my motion”).

Circles Mirror (2005); Weave Mirror (2007)

Peg Mirror (2007); Mirrors Mirror (2009)

The mirrors stand in stark contrast to many new media works by disguising the technology that is actually on display. Rozin explains about his piece Wooden Mirror (not shown):

“In many ways, this is the essence what we try to do here: taking the power of digital computation and concealing it to see how it influences something more in touch with the human condition. Wood doesn’t want to be very digital, each tile is slightly different. But computation can take all this randomness and messiness and put it into an order. [...] The piece is on the line between analog and physical vs. digital and computational.” ((http://labspace.open.ac.uk/file.php/4287/Wooden.pdf))

As new media artifacts, the physical mirrors present a case for how digital processes relate to non-digital things. The mirrors lay bear how digitization reconstitutes the physical body. The body is broken down, transformed into data, sequentially reorganized, and made computational and computable. The body-as-data is taken a step further and playfully reconstituted in data as visual-and-visible body. Here, the virtual self is a physical object that occupies real space as much as the physical self is a conceptual object that occupies virtual space. The realms of real and virtual are dually populated–existing in tandem and in parity across the divide.

/Equally weighted arcs

As previously mentioned, certain interactive feedback tends toward horizontality. This is both a phenomenological and structural characteristic. In order for the feedback loop to allow for a dialogue between, say, physical actions and virtual (and visual) actions, the augmented perspective must not be encapsulate a higher order of observation. This concept is explained as follows:

“In order for something to be made observable at all, other things [...] drop out of the same observation [...] Formulated in terms of logical concepts: the [first-order] observer is the excluded third of his observation; he [sic] is not the ‘subject’, he is the ‘parasite’ [...] of his observing…When a second observer sees what the first does not see–thus, when he observes an observer observing–this is called second-order observation…[A] second-order observation is also a first-order observation, which results in a paradox, since it is simultaneously something and something else [...] Every second-order observation shares the fate of the observation that it is observing–as long as it is observing it is not transparent to itself. For that, a higher order of observation is required, and so on.”⁹

The necessity of higher orders of remove stem from how subjectivity is typically formulated, where “self-consciousness”¹⁰ stands diametrically opposed to subjecthood. To remove self-consciousness, higher-order observation and the invested power of the observation system must also be removed. When the subject and object are balanced, the physical subject acts unselfconsciously since the subject-as-object is also the object-as-subject.

Sight in the feedback loop, as previously outlined, exists as a pair of arcs. The forward arc points toward the virtual self (here, the pixelated reflection); the reverse arc points to the physical self. The former visual confirms and correlates physicality, viz. the virtual self visualizes what the physical self does. Deleuze explains this concept in cinema as the time-image. Spaces (i.e. the real and the virtual) become correlated through perceptive connections; causality relies on imagistic association. The physical self is knowable as it is visible and visual, and the output becomes the signifier of the physical action. Hence, the virtual self as visualized physical self provides meaning through its imagehood. Deleuze posits that this form of association is divergent as it causes the spectator to bridge the gaps between discrete parts. In cinema, the spectator connects sequential perceptions as metaphors. In visual feedback, the spectator-user connects the virtual self to how the physical self is seen. In other words, the virtual self visually codifies one’s embodied perception of disembodiment.

The reverse arc is the physical confirmation of the visual. Again recalling Deleuze, this concept in cinema is known as the movement-image. Spaces become correlated through a sensory-motor schema; causality relies on imagistic physics (visual perceptions have visible actions). Causal relationships reside purely outside the body of the subject (recall that in the reverse arc the subject is the virtual self). Hence, images converge by constructing relating discrete parts. In cinema, the spectator abstractly constructs lived space (contiguity becomes continuity) by following relationships. For instance, a shot of a hand pressing doorbell followed by a shot of another person looking through the curtains relates actions and reactions within a single space. In visual feedback, the spectator-user constructs a singular space that juxtaposes the visible/visual and the embodied/physical. Contiguous regions replace the smoothness of real space. Physical causality issues out from the visual image to the physical self. The forward arc rasterizes the physical self and reconstitutes it on the substrate of the output device. The reverse arc remodels the virtual self to substantiate it as a physical body.¹¹ Colloquially, the former corresponds to the statement “I see what I am doing”; the latter “I do what I am seeing”.

The physical mirrors allow the two arcs to exist with equal weight. This is due to two factors. First, the feedback loop extends forward to include the spectator. The forward arc formulates the rasterizes body as a unique, necessary, and a posteriori substrate. Without a person in range, the space before the mirror does not exist alongside a virtual space. The spectator-user is a catalyst of duration and spatiality. Secondly, the reverse arc is fully decoded as physical. In Live Taped Video Corridor, the virtual self never fully assumes a physical form in the spectator-user (as demonstrated by the disassociated regression diagrammed in the previous section). A physical mirror, on the contrary, acts as a counterpart or mime. The output device offers another first-order observation. What is seen in the mirror is not simply the virtual self, but a response to the physical self, thereby avoiding self-consciousness. Although both physical and virtual selves are both subject and object vis-à-vis one arc, the subject-as-object never emerges as the result of the full loop. The feedback loop here exhibits a fundamental horizontal exchange.

/External and internal, revisited

Externally, the feedback loop appears not to exist. When no one is within range, the mirrors throb and ripple as if playing alone. There is no outward indication that proximity will change that behavior. The mirrors seem anthropomorphically content. While externally-static loops await entry, dynamic feedback loops await existence. This does not mean that external homogeneity is non-existent as well. Instead, the mirrors remain in a pre-temporality (as well as pre-spatiality and pre-causality) when seen from the external vantage point.

The external homogeneity of duration always relies on a conceptual closure. In video feedback loop (such as the absent screen in Live Taped Video Corridor or the eternal present of TV Buddha), the external duration lacks distinction because it lacks change. The moments reverberate as a single moment; time is frozen. In Rozin’s work, the conceptual loop exists invisibly. As the physical space extends outward upon entry, it contracts upon exit; likewise, time contracts. The external and internal states function conditionally:

loop()

{

if(someone is close){//mimic}

else {//play alone}

}

The null condition (i.e. no one is near) creates a divergent series akin to the eponymous Deleuzian idea–(machine) perception leads toward an internal, rather than spatial/causal, state.¹² Deleuze defines the divergent series as coming from the legibility of time-images as opposed to the visibility (and so convergence) of movement-images. Legibility, just as in written text, refers to an act of deciphering. The visible movement-image concretizes the abstract (as in showing how perception leads to an action); the legible time-image abstracts the concrete (as in showing how a perception relates to other perceptions). Similarly, the divergent conditions of the mirrots turn perception toward subsequent perceptions, constantly checking circumstances. In this way, both space and time are cyclic. The reverberated moment stemming from a convergent series vanishes–what is seen by the camera is not outwardly manifested. The mirror appears self-contained; it requires neither the presence of another for defining a space nor the being of another for defining a time. In other words, causality is absent; in its void arises external homogeneity.

Once within range, the mirrors register the spectator-user and the contracted space-time unfolds. The self-contained work transforms into a social work. The feedback loop emerges fluidly; this is what is termed the deceptive aura. A shared and differentiable time, i.e. heterogeneous duration, begins. The mirror makes a clear connection to the unique and present being. The form seen by the spectator-user is not simply a bodily shape, but her bodily shape. The actuation of the motors is an extension of being–a kinetic manifestation of a living-body being-in-the world.¹³

—

The previous two sections have outlined the a variety of visual feedback loops within the art. The following section explores how visual feedback loops work in a practical context.

1. Zbikowski, Dörte. “Bruce Nauman.” In Ctrl [Space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, edited by Thomas Y.; Frohne Levin, Ursula; Weibel, Peter, 64-67. Karlsruhe: ZKM Center for Art and Media, 2002. 66. [↩]
2. Zbikowski, Dörte. “Bruce Nauman.” In Ctrl [Space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, edited by Thomas Y.; Frohne Levin, Ursula; Weibel, Peter, 64-67. Karlsruhe: ZKM Center for Art and Media, 2002. 67. [↩]
3. Zbikowski, Dörte. “Bruce Nauman.” In Ctrl [Space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, edited by Thomas Y.; Frohne Levin, Ursula; Weibel, Peter, 64-67. Karlsruhe: ZKM Center for Art and Media, 2002. 67. [↩]
4. This is opposed to Gottfried Leibniz’s view of space. He defines space as that which is derived between the relation objects. The following section explains these concepts in more detail. For our purposes here, it matters that the Cartesian model denotes the pre-existence of space.; Curry, Michael R. Digital Places: Living with Geographic Information Technologies. New York: Routledge, 1998. 24-32. [↩]
5. Bourriaud, Nicolas. “Relational Aesthetics.” In Participation, edited by Calire Bishop, 160-71. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006. 160.; [original emphasis] [↩]
6. Bourriaud, Nicolas. “Relational Aesthetics.” In Participation, edited by Claire Bishop, 160-71. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006. 161. [↩]
7. Bourriaud, Nicolas. “Relational Aesthetics.” In Participation, edited by Claire Bishop, 160-71. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006. 161. [↩]
8. Bourriaud via Félix Guattari uses the term deceptive aura to define a unique experience with(in) a work; Bourriaud, Nicolas. “Relational Aesthetics.” In Participation, edited by Claire Bishop, 160-71. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006. 170. [↩]
9. Katti, Christian. “”Systematically” Observing Surveillance: Paradoxes of Observation According to Niklas Luhmann’s Systems Theory.” In Ctrl [Space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, edited by Thomas Y.; Frohne Levin, Ursula; Weibel, Peter, 50-63. Karlsruhe: ZKM Center for Art and Media, 2002. 52-57. [↩]
10. Katti, Christian. “”Systematically” Observing Surveillance: Paradoxes of Observation According to Niklas Luhmann’s Systems Theory.” In Ctrl [Space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, edited by Thomas Y.; Frohne Levin, Ursula; Weibel, Peter, 50-63. Karlsruhe: ZKM Center for Art and Media, 2002. 57. [↩]
11. Camille Utterback’s Text Rain provides a perfect example as people change their motion to collect virtual letters; http://www.camilleutterback.com/textrain.html [↩]
12. Deleuze, Gilles. Negotiations, 1972-1990. Translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. 53. [↩]
13. In truth, any number of people and non-people could produce the same humanoid outline. But, in a way the mirrors define a play space where individuality matters. Johan Huizinga explains: “Here, then, we have the first main characteristic of play: that is it free, is in fact freedom. A second characteristic is closely connected with this, namely that play is not ‘ordinary’ or ‘real’ life. It is rather a stepping out of ‘real’ life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own.”; Huizinga, Johan. “Nature and Significance of Play as a Cultural Phenomenon.” In The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology, edited by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, 96-120. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006. 103. [↩]

The main advantage of the term desired form, as previously mentioned, is that formal and phenomenological sets are well-defined. So, no matter the underlying technology, one general definition applies; this does not, however, presuppose that the affects of a particular technology are inconsequential. Instead, a specific materiality adjusts the relative weight of each feature to privilege some and dampen others. Though it may seem that this is a concession for essentializing one portion of a medium to preserve another, there are two reasons why this makes sense in the age of digital media.

First, technology tends to change; often times, it does so quickly. A computer, for instance, (seemingly) enters obsolescence almost as soon as it enters the market–its processor grows slow and its memory becomes insufficient when compared to the newest product. The desired form hurdles the obstacle that a medium–that is, a means of transmission–looses its relevance and is replaced. The desired form turns a medium, which is bound to material execution, into a conceptual object, namely, a weighing schema. The formal framework–for us, the input device, the processor, output device, and spectator-user–is stripped of its concrete and inflexible matter. In a new alchemy, matter is transmutable and resists change. Hence, the final product is never an factor of whether a specific device, material, or process is part of the production. The desired form treats a medium as conceptually concrete.

The exchangeability of technologies within a medium is, in fact, a condition we already implicitly accept; cinema provides a prime example. The various film gauges (e.g. 16mm, 35mm, 70mm, 70mm IMAX) all produce what we call cinema.¹ They are selected for various reasons, including low light conditions, resolution quality, and color spectrum, and produce very different effects. Even more, recent filmmaker, such as David Lynch for Inland Empire (2006), have begun to use high-definition digital cameras². Unlike traditional film cameras, digital cameras encode light as data rather than viewable image.³ The limiting factor is not the size of a reel, but the capacity of a hard drive. Inland Empire, despite the huge difference in material execution and technological detail, is considered a work of cinema (even, a work of film since it was later transferred onto film for projection in theaters). Cinema, as Cubitt and Deleuze expound upon, is a combination of formal and experiential qualities, and not a technology. Cinema resists obsolescence by continually embracing technological change that fulfills its formal and experiential criteria.

Second, a desired form side-steps the distinction between media and non-media. The term medium implies a lineage of usage, practice, and aesthetics where newer forms are met with hesitation. Furthermore, medium privileges information transmission, thereby rendering the form transparent at the cost of its illusion. Alternately, the term makes a strong claim for a how technological processes manifest an experience. For instance, the cinematic experience that Sobchack describes (i.e. dependent on the cinematic apparatus⁴ ) does not translate to home viewing. The DVD player attached to a television is not a new medium, but it is also not the traditional means of viewing cinema. The desired form avoids this tediousness by only considering the abstraction of technology. A technology is only one means of generation, and so the desired form is materially exchangeable.

These two implications make the desired form (and specifically the visual feedback loop) technologically transcendent. This chapter will focus on the various incarnations of the visual feedback loop. It is always important to keep in mind that the artifacts rely on the conceptually concreteness and materially exchangeability to exemplify the characteristics of the visual feedback loop. From these two facets, the visual feedback loop can be understood as more than a circumstance of technology and situation from technology.

+Homogeneity and TV Buddha (1974)

TV Buddha⁵ by Nam June Paik is a clear, and often referenced, example of the visual feedback loop. Paik created numerous video installations (“video sculptures”⁶ as Paik called them) involving visual feedback loop, such as TV Rodin (Le penseur)⁷⁸, TV Chair⁹, Video Buddha¹⁰, and Three Eggs.¹¹ TV Buddha from 1974 in Amsterdam, is described in the catalog listing as a “[c]losed-circuit video installation with bronze sculpture; black-and-white, silent; dimensions vary with installation.”¹² It is composed of a video camera situated above a small television monitor. The camera is aimed toward the bronze statue of Buddha. The statue faces the monitor and camera as if watching the television image of itself. The processing device, housed within the camera, converts light into video signal for direct interlaced display. Despite the relative stillness of the artwork, the video feed is live.

When asked about TV Buddha, Paik explains:

“Most likely the quick success of my TV Buddha was because it was what the young generation was looking for, a protranscendent [sic.] aesthetic. When you see the so-called dancing pattern device of my early video circuit (a self-invented electronic device), it was all slowly repeating patterns–all nongravity motion [...] It was soothing and sweet. In a way, TV was a logical progression, because it’s sweet due to the repetitive visual thing.” ((Ross, David. “A Conversation with Nam June Paik.” In Nam June Paik: Video Time–Video Space, edited by Toni Stooss and Thomas Kellein, 56-65. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1993. 57-58.))

Where some of Paik’s works expose repetition within the image, TV Buddha reveals repetition in a different sense. Demagnetizer,¹³ for instance, employs magnets to distort the cathode ray. Repetition is visible in the image–lines curve, shapes twist, and interlacing flutters. Alternately, Global Groove makes repetition systematic and syntactic; video feeds are blended, overlaid, and left and rejoined. Sequences act like visual leitmotifs. TV Buddha, however, represents repetition non-visually, or, at least, non-perceptively. TV Buddha manifests architectural and conceptual repetition. The spectator sees no change, despite witnessing a live video feed. Repetition is reflexive as opposed to reflective; visual, spatial, and temporal forms are not duplicated or reproduced, but equated.

Chris Meigh-Andrews sums up Paik’s video work as “partly relying on the juxtaposition of the familiar domestic television into an incongruous physical situation [...] The images on the screen are often simple, repetitive and graphical, even perhaps of secondary importance, simply reinforcing or complementing the physical structure.”¹⁴ Meigh-Andrews highlights the importance of physical architecture to Paik’s work. The loop is as much in space as it is a space. TV Buddha demonstrates the essential physicality of visual feedback. Paik quarantines the loop by raising it above the ground, thus reinforcing “the act of mediation [...] as a hybrid [to be] treated much like a physical object.”¹⁵ Space becomes partitioned–TV Buddha divides the gallery space into exterior and interior with regards to the loop. The raised podium sterilizes the interior space by eradicating the possibility of anyone truly entering the loop.

Despite pinpointing how space complements visual forms, Meigh-Andrews grossly simplifies Paik by generalizing his works as “playful or deliberately ironic”.¹⁶. On the surface, TV Buddha places a statue of Buddha in front of television to expose the tension between the mindfulness mediation and the mindlessness of watching television. Even more, the gaze of the Buddha is juxtaposed with gaze of the camera to deflate modern meditation as simply mediation. More appropriately, TV Buddha is sincere and reverent; visual feedback does not attempt to smear tradition, but bolster it. The perceived irony of TV Buddha comes from a lack of understanding of the distinct formal and phenomenological features of visual feedback. John G. Hanhart hints at the underlying complexity by saying “The buddha silently observes himself on the screen in an infinite temporal loop as the monitor/camera links the contemplative figure with the process of its production and reception.”¹⁷

Speaking more generally of video artists (Paik included), Michael Rush begins to explain why irony fades after first blush:

“[T]he spontaneity and instantaneity of video were crucial. Video recorded and revealed instant time, whereas film had to be treated and processed. According to [Dan] Graham [a contemporary video artist of Paik], ‘Video feeds back indigenous data in the immediate, present-time environment. Film is contemplative and “distanced”; it detaches the viewer from present reality and makes him a spectator.’”¹⁸

The immediate reflection of video compared to the contemplative distance of film is at the center of the misreading of TV Buddha. In a typical viewing situation (that is, one that does not involve visual feedback, such as film), the statue occupies (in space) the position of the spectator and subject; the television and camera occupy the position of the spectacle and object. The distinction of roles relies on a distance in space, which TV Buddha enacts, but denies. The television image is an image of the spectator–the virtual Buddha and physical Buddha exist simultaneously in time–rather an image from the spectator. In this latter case, the mode of production of the image is inconsequential to the image as representation. The nuance is that the latter situation divorces the spectator’s action–i.e. viewing–from the system’s action–i.e. crystallizing time and space. Where the viewing-view/viewing-view exists in the former (and actual situation), the viewing-view/viewed-view exists in the latter. To qualify the TV Buddha as simply assembling Buddha before its image negates the active function of that assemblage.

In actuality, the image results from the physical situation, and is so bound to the statue being before the camera and television. While distance exists between the statue and the statue’s image, the distance is purely physical; both statue and image are co-temporal (again viewing-view/viewing-view). For the image to arise, the statue must remain in front of the camera. From the exterior, statue and image are resolutely static as the subject/object is inanimate. Like actual mediation, TV Buddha relies on constant presentness–being is never expanded to future or past beings. The unwavering physical situation pairs with concept of an unwavering mental state. TV Buddha proclaims technological transcendence. Externally homogeneous time equates each moment to the same moment–now.

The external homogeneity of the loop acts as a null relation. Henri Bergson explains,

“There is only one motion, we said, which is perceived from within, and of which we are aware as an event itself: the motion that our effort brings attention. Elsewhere, when we see a motion occur, all we are sure of is that some change is taking place in the universe. The nature and even the exact location of this change escape us; we can only note certain changes of position that are its visual and surface aspect, and these changes are necessarily reciprocal. All motion–even ours as perceived from without and made visual–is therefore relative.”¹⁹

Bergson states that external understanding of absolute motion is impossible since an observer can only be singularly embodied, and therefore unable to be non-relative. Later, he extrapolates this idea to lived experience, namely duration (durée). He suggests that any claim of understanding of experience (just as the true nature of motion) is a function of surface projection and empathy. The perception of experience is either an external (and so impersonal) measurement of time or a projection of internal (and so relativistic) duration. The perception of experience is then nothing more than a function of one’s own duration, and so inaccurate and imprecise. Bergson implies an inverse postulate: if we cannot note change, then even our perception of duration shifts to a measurement of time. TV Buddha functions under this complex discourse–stasis is non-change as much as imperceptible change.

The interior time of the loop is closed from external viewing. The spectator remains a spectator, and is never allowed to be a user with regards to the loop in TV Buddha. Hence, the sculpture forces the audience to consider a physical situation (the loop as a structure) as a embodied duration (feedback as an action); Bergson asserts the impossibility of this. The internal reality (heterogeneity) of TV Buddha is reduced to an external perception (homogeneity). Perpetual exteriority obfuscates the directed arcs and rendering them indecipherable; the physical self and virtual self exist, but only as objects to the audience. One can watch watching and observe observing, yet never be watched and be observed. The loop is fixed, and therefore contrived, as an experience. The relation of statue to image is null–sameness through absence of embodied comparison.

+Heterogeneity and Live Taped Video Corridor (1970)

Live Taped Video Corridor by Bruce Nauman technically consists of “wallboard, video camera, two video monitors, videotape player, [and] videotape [with variable dimensions].”²⁰ The video camera is placed over the entrance of the narrow corridor. At the opposite end of the corridor are the two television monitors. One television displays the live feed (closed-circuit video) and the other displays a looped video tape of the empty corridor from the camera’s perspective. Nauman explains:

“I used a wide-angle lens and it was above and behind you as you walked into the corridors, so you were removed by yourself, sort of doubly removed–your image of yourself was above and behind, and as you walked, because the wide-angle lens changes the rate that you’re going away from the camera, so as you took a step, you took a double step with your image. It’s a strange feeling. [...] [W]hat you have very obviously in that situation is two kinds of information. You have the information that you’ve given yourself walking down this space, and then the other information through the camera visually. You have a piece of visual information and a piece of kinetic, or kinesthetic, information and they don’t line up [...] That’s what the piece is, is that stuff that’s not coming together.”²¹

As Nauman points out, Live Taped Video Corridor presents the spectator-user with disjointed information. Nauman focuses on the disconnect between the live feed and live action, while neglecting to comment on the disconnect between the taped feed and the live feed. The disconnect Nauman describes truly begins at the monitors, and particularly when the feeds are compared. Until a spectator-user reaches the monitors, the installation exists as a whole; the two monitors split that world into outside and inside. The taped feed displays, what can only be called, the external perspective–time is frozen and space is isolated. The disconnect emerges from the other monitor–the interior perspective.

The homogeneity of the external perspective presents feedback as a directed circle. The spectator-user is simply a spectator in a single embodied relationship to the loop:

physical self (as subject) –> feedback loop (as object)

The feedback loop is directly perceptible as a structure (sensory-motor schema), yet indirectly perceptible as a duration (sensory-perceptive schema). The taped feed paradoxically allows such a removed perspective only from within the corridor. Since the taped feed does not require inclusion, it can be considered the external perspective. The juxtaposition of the live feed emphasizes curled dimensions and surreality of the tape. The external point-of-view is neither true nor false; instead, the taped feed is unverifiable. Situating the past emptiness within the present fullness of the corridor generates a dual simulacrum. The simulated past space and the simulated absent space become more than real the actual past and true absence since the latter can not witnessed directly; the tape codifies the past and the absent by way signifying it as non-present. The homogeneity of external duration emanates from this distinction–the current state of the corridor reveals the non-current state.

The interior perspective of the live feed breaks the loop into two arcs. First, gazes are distinguished; this is the augmentation of sight. The spectator-user, in being made a visual object, differentiates the embodied gaze from the hermeneutic gaze. As a result, the structure of the feedback loop falls into indirect perception so that the duration of the loop can be directly perceivable. The single embodied relationship to the loop transforms into a dual relationship within the loop, namely:

feedback loop:

physical self (as subject) –> virtual self (as object)

+

virtual self (as subject) –> physical self (as object)

As the taped feed presents a simulacrum, the live feed presents a paradox. The arcs reveal an uneven distribution of power. While the forward arc positions the virtual self as object, the reverse arc reveals the virtual as its own visual subject and object. Primarily, the paradox arises from Nauman’s use of a curved lens; the physical self as object vanishes at the moment of objectification. Secondarily, the paradox arises from the position of the camera. While the spectator-user comprehends her own objectification, it cannot be verified–turning toward the camera; that is, assuming the role of object; annihilates subjecthood. So, the physical self disassociates with the virtual self (selves). Experientially, the arcs appear distorted:

physical self (as subject) –> {virtual self (as object/subject) –> virtual self (as object/subject) –> … }

The result is not reflective or reflexive, but regressive and parenthetical. The physical self and virtual selves maintain a fixed distance (the distance between camera and monitor). Moving closer to the screen does not move the virtual self away as much as the virtual self moves away. Nauman claims that the visible and experiential components do not line up; on the contrary, the two experiences align all to well. The virtual selves vectorize physical motion by translating remove. A similar vectorization occurs to the space itself.

Typically, visual feedback divides space equally–half physical, half virtual. Live Taped Video Corridor, however, infinitely and equally partitions space. The contiguous world–the fabricated space of the visual feedback loop–reduplicates the same fixed-width corridor. As the contiguous space is made visible, it is also made non-traversable; just as the physical space, it is restricted and bounded by the width and breath of the corridor. Live Taped Video Corridor transforms space into a discernible, yet infinite pattern.

—

TV Budda and Live Taped Video Corridor present the aesthetics of looped duration. Despite their differences, these two works reveal a similar truth about visual feedback loops. Time is fundamental to how the loop functions. Paik manipulates time to spatialize mediation; Nauman manipulates time(s) to disorient our notion of the present (and being present). This leads to an important question: does the visual feedback loop use a timeline? Alternately, does the visual feedback loop time out? The answer deals more with user experience than phenomenology (which I will no go into here).

Simply, the answer is yes. The visual feedback loop eventually looses its audience. Depending on the interaction, the timeline changes. The changes come, at least in part, from the power structure of the loop (discussed at length in the next section). When a spectator-user is given minimal agency, the experience seems to shrink. In the case of TV Buddha, the complete lack of agency with(in) the artwork reduces the timeline down to nothing, allowing one to claim the piece is a work of conceptual art. The following section, in exploring the interactive mirrors of Daniel Rozin, implicitly offers that more comprehensive forms of agency change the length of the timeline. However, the goal of this work is to illustrate rather than prescribe. Therefore, it is out of place to offer solutions for extending the timeline outside of those implicitly suggested by the artifacts.

1. Bordwell, David and Thompson, Kristen. Film Art: An Introduction. Seventh ed. New York: McGraw Hill, 2004. 6-7. [↩]
2. Lynch used Sony’s DSR-PD150; http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460829/technical [↩]
3. One can not look directly at the recorded information to see the image for it must be digitally recombined. Arguably, the same can be said about for film, as the film stock must be developed in order for the images to be viewable. The main difference is that the information being recording in digital cameras is never intended to be seen directly. Just as the video signal does not represent that which it is encoding, the information of the digital image corresponds to the viewable image as much as the shape of a letter or sequence of letters corresponds to the idea being communicated. That is, there is always a decoding process that relies on a system which is not about the visual product but about the information itself. [↩]
4. Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: The Princeton University Press, 1992. 169. [↩]
5. 1974, Amsterdam; Hanhardt, John G. The Worlds of Nam June Paik. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2000. 129. [↩]
6. Ross, David. “A Conversation with Nam June Paik.” In Nam June Paik: Video Time–Video Space, edited by Toni Stooss and Thomas Kellein, 56-65. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1993. 58. [↩]
7. 1974/1976, Stuttgart; Ross, David. “A Conversation with Nam June Paik.” In Nam June Paik: Video Time–Video Space, edited by Toni Stooss and Thomas Kellein, 56-65. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1993. 56. [↩]
8. 1982, New York; Hanhardt, John G. The Worlds of Nam June Paik. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2000. 127. [↩]
9. 1976, Cologne; Ross, David. “A Conversation with Nam June Paik.” In Nam June Paik: Video Time–Video Space, edited by Toni Stooss and Thomas Kellein, 56-65. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1993. 61. [↩]
10. 1989, Stuttgart; Ross, David. “A Conversation with Nam June Paik.” In Nam June Paik: Video Time–Video Space, edited by Toni Stooss and Thomas Kellein, 56-65. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1993. 63. [↩]
11. 1981, New York; Hanhardt, John G. The Worlds of Nam June Paik. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2000. 128. [↩]
12. Hanhardt, John G. The Worlds of Nam June Paik. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2000. 129. [↩]
13. Hanhardt, John G. The Worlds of Nam June Paik. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2000. 118-119. [↩]
14. Meigh-Andrews, Chris. A History of Video Art: The Development of Form and Function. New York: Berg Publishers, 2006. 252. [↩]
15. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999. 59. [↩]
16. Meigh-Andrews, Chris. A History of Video Art: The Development of Form and Function. New York: Berg Publishers, 2006. 252. [↩]
17. Hanhardt, John G. The Worlds of Nam June Paik. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2000. 127.; emphasis mine [↩]
18. Rush, Michael. New Media in Late 20th-Century Art. New York: Thames & Hudson Inc., 1999. 83. [↩]
19. Bergson, Henri. Duration and Simultineity. Translated by Leon Jacobson. New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1965. 39. [↩]
20. 1970, New York; De Angelus, Michele. “Interview with Bruce Nauman.” In Please Pay Attention: Bruce Nauman’s Words, edited by Bruce Nauman and Jane Kraynak, 197-295. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003. 263. [↩]
21. De Angelus, Michele. “Interview with Bruce Nauman.” In Please Pay Attention: Bruce Nauman’s Words, edited by Bruce Nauman and Jane Kraynak, 197-295. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003. 264. [↩]

Deleuzian imagehood is not without its caveats. For instance, Deleuze presents the time-image as if it organically arises within modern cinema. Even when Deleuze highlights directorial practices, the time-image results from the social subconscious. In a specific example, Deleuze credits Jean-Luc Godard with developing his own cinematic criteria and then invokes Mikhail Bakhtin “to identify [Godard] with modern cinema.”¹ The time-image arises in Godard’s films–the symptom of modern cinema–insofar as Godard’s films borrow visual language as the novel borrows written language through “its ‘plurilingualism’”.²

The main issue is that Deleuze disregards formal considerations for phenomenological ones; this chapter aims to reconcile this. The overall goal is to reconnect the visual feedback loop with media theory. Deleuze provides a structure for discussing how information is generated rather than transmitted in the expression of a medium. Similar to the relatedness of images, the components of visual feedback related and so engender certain phenomena. Relying completely on Deleuze leaves a gap between the immaterial relationships and the formal relationships (the apparatus). Sean Cubitt’s theory of the cinema effect focuses on the formal aspects of cinema, and how they construct relational complexes. Similar to Deleuze, Cubitt claims the formal relations of cinema result in comprehension–formal relations generate information as do phenomenological ones. Cubitt bridges the gap by identifying what the formal components contribute, and how that contribution colors the internal relationships.

+I/eye: Establishing the inside and outside

The cinema effect begins at a moment of firstness. The primacy of formal signification (and the topic of the next section) is called the pixel. While the pixel is the first component (i.e. cinematic image as moving) for Cubitt, it depends on the spectator accepting the “dynamic screen.”³ Cognition of motion requires, as Deleuze points out with the perception-image, precognition. Hence, a precognitive moment–a zeroness of signification–exists to position the spectator within the cinematic apparatus and set motion in motion. Borrowing from Vivian Sobchack, this zeroness will be called the I/eye.⁴

First, we need to revisit the perception-image. The perception-image, unlike the other subdivisions of the movement-image and time-image,⁵ does not describe a cognitive process. Instead, the perception-image is precognitive–it unites optical sight and pure sensation.⁶ Deleuze explains that the perception-image originates disruption to the signalectic material of cinema. In a way, it amasses potential energy; the affection-image releases that energy in a kinetic oscillation of the signal by relating various image-objects. The perception-image is both non-directional and omni-directional. In other words, the perception-image foregrounds causality by establishing an initial point from which a multitude of possible effectuation intervals could proceed. As the affection-image establishes relations amongst image-objects, the possibilities narrow in on a single interval. The perception-image, therefore, is an origin–a moment to and in which we see the foundations of a causality (similar to a stone cast into water). Deleuze attributes the ambiguity of the origin to precognition and pure optics. Therefore, the perception-image foregrounds cognition and optics as it simply gathers the material for cognition and optics. Deleuze explains:

“We saw […] that firstness, secondness and thirdness correspond to the affection-image, the action-image, and the relation-image. But all three are deduced from the movement-image as material, as soon as it is related to the interval of movement. Now this deduction is possible only if we first have a perception image. […] The perception-image will therefore be like a degree zero in the deduction which is carried out as a function of the movement-image: there will be a ‘zeroness’ before Peirce’s firstness. […] [T]he perception-image received movement on one side, but the affection-image is what occupies the interval (firstness), the action-image what executes the movement on the other side (secondness), and the relation-image what reconstitutes the whole of the movement with all aspects of the interval (thirdness functioning as closure of the deduction).”⁷

The affection-, action-, and relation-image manipulate the perception-image; they give emotion, meaning, and context to what is initially perceived. Specifically, the affection-image concretizes perception by transforming the sensed into sensation. The effectuation interval takes in raw information and outputs a response. In Soylent Green, as Robert Thorn (Charlton Heston) listens to Sol Roth (Edward G. Robinson) reveal the secret of the Soylent Corporation on his deathbed, his expression is blank expression at first. Thorn is unable to process what he has been told (perception-image 2) as much as Sol’s circumstance (perception-image 1); the information remains raw and undetermined. Then, Thorn begins to follow Sol’s body as it is transported away. Initially he acts out of grief (affection-image 1 to action-image), only to realize Sol’s sacrifice for Thorn’s cause (affection-image 2 –> action-image). In this latter realization–Sol death as an impetus for Thorn’s discover–combines simultaneous emotion, and dually determine Thorn’s action. The raw information is recombined multiple times, defining and redefining the scene. The image-objects generate different relationships: is Thorn simply upset with Sol’s death and is trying to recover his body?; or, is Thorn just using Sol’s death as an excuse to enter the bowels of the Soylent factory? Important to take away is that the conflicting and complementary relationships amongst image-objects are fluid yet determinate. No single image-object determines the outcome; the resultant action is a combination of causalities as much as an erasure of potential outcomes. In the perception-image, however, all outcomes are potential as the precognition expresses a complete lack of determination. The interval of effectuation begins determining causality by separating useful from useless information.

Now, the pixel parallels Deleuze’s notion of effectuation. “Every object, every thing, must see its own identity swallowed up in difference, each being no more than a difference between differences. Differences must be seen differing.”⁸ As much as the affection-image, “the cinematic present”⁹ requires a predecessor for one main reason: intervals of change require a reference point. In other words, the pixel determines motion by determining what is in motion as well as what is not. To enter the interval of effectuation, the beginning of the interval (the perception-image) must be established; otherwise, image-objects lack causal relationships and the spectator is unable to link the act of differing to the signalectic oscillation. In the example from Soylent Green, reading Thorn’s actions as unrelated to Sol’s death a difference divorced from differing. Likewise, to experience in the cinematic present, an unmoving “origin”¹⁰ must be established; otherwise, motion becomes indistinguishable from stasis.

Cubitt explains that “[i]n cinema, the dark transport of the filmstrip undermines the subject as timeless being, specifying in its place a constant process of coming into being. Cinematic zero inscribes the dynamic equilibrium of spectatorship as unfinished process.”¹¹ Where the photograph allows for timeless revelry and contemplation, cinema never reveals its full material form. Instead, the spectator constantly spectates anew in the presence of the moving image. Each frame is distinct; the similarities amongst frames (e.g. an unmoving tree) orients the audience to the differences amongst frames (e.g. birds scattering as a man approaches the tree). In truth, the tree is no more static than the birds (it is re-captured by the film in each frame), but the audience necessitates stasis to understand dynamism. The pixel, as a membrane between what the image was and what it will be, assumes the spectator is subconsciously aware of the static and the dynamic elements. In this, the cinematic spectator assumes the cinematic image acts like direct perception. Motion is the product of the image as a lived-body being-in-the/a-world¹² and spectator’s ability to vicariously relate to that body’s perception. Vivian Sobchack explains further:

“Perception [...] is more than a mere mosaic of sensations on the body-object, more than a mere psychological phenomenon. [...] Perception is the bodily access or agency for being-in-the-world, for having both a world and being. Perception is the bodily perspective or situation from which the world is present to us and constituted in an always particular and biased meaning. [...] [T]he lived-body constitutes an intrasubjective and intersubjective system in which being is both understood and signified as significant–that is, as intentional. [...] And because intentionality … is articulated in existence through agency and activity of the lived-body being-in-the-world, every conscious lived-body is semiotically and hermeneutically competent in its ability to commute perception to expression and back again. Thus, the primacy of perception as the primacy of expression [...] is synopsized in lived-body experience as the primacy of communication.”¹³

Sobchack highlights two main points: (1) perception signifies a perceptive agent and (2) perception implies a perceivable world. The pixel is congingent on the spectator being aware of both of these. The moving image functions hermeneutically for the audience and an artifact of embodiment for the camera. The former is that the image is a mediation of some perception; the later is a direct perception. The coalesced hermeneutic lived-body–seeing through the eyes of the camera–is precisely the I/eye; the cinematic “eye” meets the personal “I”.

Sobchack invokes this correlation of eye and I to discuss for embodiment in the cinematic experience. Sobchack explains that spectatorship is the negotiation of seeing, the “viewing-view/viewed-view”.¹⁴ The viewing-view corresponds to the spectator positioned before the screen; the viewed-view corresponds to the perception of the camera. Moreover, the hermeneutic/embodied relationship of the filmmaker, camera, and world formulates the cinematic eye–a viewer who has been viewed. The embodied/hermeneutic relationship of the viewer, screen, and display method formulates the personal I–a viewer who is viewing. When viewing a moving image, the personal I (a forward vector of perception) is augmented by the camera’s register (i.e. perception, also a forward vector) of the cinematic world. In the moment of motion–the pixel–these two vectors form a resultant vector that allows us to perceive the cinematic world through a translucent frame.

Hence, the zeroness of the cinema effect is this meeting. The viewer’s vector to the screen (“I am watching.”) and the camera’s vector to the world (“The eye is seeing.”) meet at the image itself. Sobchack states this meeting of views enacts possession on the part of the spectator.

“[T]he camera that mediates and realizes the filmmaker’s original perception is only indirectly present [as is the filmmaker] in the spectator’s perception of the world as it visibly appears to his or her vision. Thus, the spectator perceives the world in a complex ‘invisible’ and introceptive mode,that is, within is or her own perception lived bodily as ‘mine,’ and with the camera’s and filmmaker’s perceptions, both also lived bodily as ‘mine.’”¹⁵

The personal I becomes indistinguishable from the cinematic eye, creating the I/eye. The act of perceiving the moving image is established through the viewer’s acceptance of perpetual and transparent augmentation. The viewer knows the camera is an other, but, for the sake of seeing what it sees in its position in and toward a world, it is assimilated as the Self. The zeroness of cinematic cognition is then an act of extension–an extension of the senses, and of the spectator’s lived-body. First, the spectator comprehends the visual surrogate and then extends natural perception with this prosthesis. The paired views now functions a cohesive unit to allow cinema its effect.

Sobchack rebuts the argument that these two viewing subjects ever merge to make the film into a “viewed object.”¹⁶ Her claim is that the act of viewing a film is a continual negotiation of the spectator and camera/filmmaker/screen. To an extent, Sobchack is right–when watching a film, the viewer never replaces the camera’s perspective to perceive the world directly. And, for Sobchack’ purposes of explaining the phenomenology of the film experience through the structure of the material apparatus, this holds. The spectator, however, is rarely aware of the material apparatus, let alone the structure to distinguish perceived singularity from actual singularity of perspective. Sobchack even recognizes that when watching a film, it appears “directly felt [and] sensuously available to the viewer.”¹⁷ Since this argumentation deals with the perceived viewing experience (the cinema effect), it makes sense to allow this unit to exist as an indivisible unit.

The I/eye has one main implication for Cubitt’s theory (as well as for the visual feedback loop). Despite perception feeling direct, spectator is always removed. That is to say, within the cinematic apparatus, the spectator fulfills a different role than outside of the cinematic apparatus. Hence, the I/eye implies that the cinematic apparatus has an exterior and interior. On the exterior, the spectator does not relate to the hermeneutic lived-body; on the interior, the spectator does. Once within the interior space of the apparatus (e.g. in the theater), the subsequent moments of firstness, secondness, and thirdness proceed. Even more, to view moving images automatically places one within the apparatus. While this seems trivial with moving images, it is less so with visual feedback loops.

+ The Pixel: A body in the present

At its most basic level, the cinematic image expresses “a process of perpetual change”.¹⁸ This undisturbed change–i.e. the moving image without further qualification or manipulation–is the pixel. The pixel produces, what can be called, the presentness of cinema–the sensation of spectating here and now. Like firstness, presentness subsists unitarily.¹⁹ While the condition of I/eye certainly and directly enables the pixel, the pixel relates internally; the pixel combines being in situ with being aware.

The living-body of the viewer, as augmented by the lived-body of the camera/filmmaker, becomes unhinged in time and space within the cinematic apparatus. The condition of I/eye makes the spectator and the camera co-dependent. In turn, the spectator experiences a spatio-temporal past as a spatio-temporal present; the moving images unfold in (a) real-time to the spectator. Hence, the moving images gain a living-body–that of the spectator–to use as a substrate. As a living-body in-the-cinematic-world, the spectator perceives (motion) as one does as a living-body in-the-world; that is, the spectator is always experiencing and is unable to avoid change. Cubitt explains “[t]hat the cinematic present [...] can be given a number: zero”:

“Zero is not a quantity so much as a relation. [...] [A]s a noun, zero itself ‘fails to be exemplified’: ‘Since nothing falls under the concept “not identical with itself”, I [Cubitt quoting Frege] define nought as follows: 0 is the number which belongs to the concept “not identical with itself”‘. The concept of nonidentity reveals zero’s quality of internal difference. Zero is a relation rather than a (no)thing because it is always already a relation of nonidentity with itself. Zero acts, rather than is”.²⁰

Like Deleuzian image-objects, the cinematic present fundamentally relates. For the pixel, the relation is always visible, internal, and present. The pixel is less a demonstration of change than a change itself–the pixel is visible flux. Deleuze relegates this “instability [that] is the perpetual source of movement”²¹ behind the screen; the relationships amongst image-objects create the profilmic. The pixel, on the other hand, “is symbolized by its distance from zero”,²² and is characterized by its reflexive dissimilarity. This dissimilarity is absolute; the pixel always relates by being further from its static origin.

First and foremost, the spectator, who is situated within the cinematic apparatus, becomes aware that the moving image modulates (as Deleuze would say); it is at once the same and different. For example, the spectator of Thomas Edison’s Serpentine Dance watches a woman twirl and spin before the camera. Her motion testifies to cinematic “spectatorship as unfinished process.”²³ Unlike a looking at a photograph, watching a film is a temporal act. The dancer requires the spectator’s full and continual attention insofar as the spectator’s recognizes cinematic expression comes from the fundamental motion of the image. Inversely, to cease spectating separates motion from the image, in turn negating expression and dividing the prosthetic lived-body from the living-body. In the case where spectatorship lacks the motion, cinema becomes symbolic and conceptual (recall inward-looking). Playfully, Andy Warhol’s Empire seemingly completes the process of spectating by filming the Empire State building from a fixed position for eight hours. The cinematic present is not accelerated as one would expect; instead, Empire constructs a one-to-one presentness by reconstructing (and privileging) the camera’s duration.

Serpentine Dance (above);((Edison, Thomas Alva. “Serpentine Dance.” 0:00:21. USA, 1895.)) Empire (below)²⁴

As a feature of cinema, the pixel is a fully organic. Cubitt explains:

“The non-identity of the pixel, the formless, initiating instant of sensation, in the moment of firstness [...] For cinema, [firstness] is the interpenetration of the physics of light and the physiology of seeing, the world worlding freely over the senses. Duration without beginning, end, or direction, firstness is the simplest possible awareness of sensation, and it antedates, logically, chronologically, and phenomenologically, all consciousness of unified objects.”²⁵

This final point–the pixel precedes unified objects–refers to the full construction of cinematic duration as contiguous continuities. In the cinematic present, the spectator is concerned solely with seeing; the current element is all that is.

+ The Cut: The echo of the past

The cut ruptures the cinematic present by relativizing the pixel. As the camera assumes a new perspective instantaneously, the spectator is presented with a juxtaposition of pixels. In this sequencing, the current pixel relates outwardly as distinct from the previous pixel. In other words, the ordering of pixels generates a relation of secondness. Cubitt explains:

“[T]he ideology of attentiveness and the pointlessness of reverie [of the pixel] demanded a more substantial organization of film’s temporal flux. Framing and compositing distinguish in time as they determine in space. Composing the image in layers not only distinguishes movement into objects: it demands a temporal relation between layers, here in the construction of causality (the boy steps on the hose; the water stops flowing). … The cut that establishes foreground and background, onscreen and offscreen space allies with the construction of a temporal horizon to convert the random jostling of pixels into unified and discrete cinematic objects.”²⁶

The solitary pixel produces a first-degree relation; the internal and absolute change implies only one object, that is, itself. The cut produces second-degree relation; the current pixel is externally different from its predecessor. The shift of perspectives connects the visible pixel to the absent pixel. By itself, the pixel appears to be all that constitutes cinema. The cut objectifies the pixel; it can be acted upon, manipulated, and reformed. The cut interrupts the present. “In cinema, we are aware first of movement and only secondarily of what moves and that its movement constitutes a coherent action. [...] The cut turns sensation into perception in a retrospective ordering of raw, undifferentiated (and mechanical) flux into identified objects. [...] [T]he elementary practices of the cut convert the play of pixels into objects, worlds, identities.”²⁷ In this, the cut produces a reverse trajectory–a pastness–within cinema.

The cut establishes a moment of secondness–that is, an understanding of meaning through relative components. In Die Hard (1988), when John McClane (Bruce Willis) pulls the trigger and camera cuts to Hans Grubber (Alan Rickman) being shot, the spectator understands the relationship between the two moments by understanding their continuity in space-time. The cut disrupts the one pixel to beget another.²⁸ The comprehension of McClane successfully shooting Grubber comes in the second moment. Thus, the cut preserves a causal path by relating the current moment to the preceeding one. Unlike Deleuze’s profilmic action-image (the second-order relation for the movement-image), the cut is simply a filmic relation.²⁹

The cut also forces a reconstitution of all preceding moments of signification. “The presubjective subject of the pixel is one with the apparatus”,³⁰ allowing for a direct sensation of the world through a unified I/eye. “The cut splits apart the elements of the apparatus” as to vivisect the self and its appendage, only to reunite them as an “object.”³¹ The need for “[o]rientation takes the place of immersion”.³² The cut breaks and reconfigures the I/eye. Afterwards, the spectator must form a new augmented body.

+ The Vector: The continual disruption of elsewhere/elsewhen

Following the sequence, a third-order relation arises by relating cuts to one another. Cubitt refers to the moment of thirdness as the vector. The cut has defined an awareness of past, allowing freedom of motion from the present backwards. The spectator can now connect the sensations of presentness to previous sensations of presentness. The vector extends the freedom of motion forward by giving the spectator a sense of the future, i.e. futureness. “The vector,” as Cubitt explains it, “takes us one step further: from being to becoming, from the inertial division of subject, object, and world to the mobile relationship between them.”³³ Futhermore, “[w]here the cut instigates endings, the vector enacts beginnings [...] [by giving] the moving image a future, the possibility of becoming otherwise than it is [or has been].”³⁴

The vector relies on inductive reasoning. After the pixel has been disrupted enough by the cut, the spectator becomes aware that the disruptions are systemic. Cinema, on the whole, is a sequence pixels; each present moment gives way to the next. Hence, the cuts align spatial causalities and generate temporal orders; they exemplify how things become. It is only natural that the viewer begins seeing the structure as a whole. “The pixel grounds us in the film as a present experience, the cut in the preexistence of the filmstrip to consciousness of it, the vector in the film as the becoming of something as yet unseen.”³⁵

Where the pixel and the cut deal exclusively with the visible (or once visible), the vector communicates the invisible–how something might become and how space might be navigated. The spectator must willingly split from the camera’s eye to imbue personal intentionality upon the visible world. The vector, then, connotes an asymptote. The predicted future can only be approached, yet can never be reached.³⁶ Sobchack refers to this asymptotic behavior as a negotiation of viewing subjects.³⁷ However, the negotiation is always one-sided. The spectator, while continually projecting outcomes, continually reunites with the camera. The potential space-time folds upon itself and evaporates as the spectator passes into future actualities while forgetting projections.

+Concluding remarks

Although the cinema effect and image-ontology formulate similar arguments–cinema is a medium of relations–the two theories rely on vastly different modes of relation. Deleuze posits that the relations of cinema result from perceiving causality. As spectators, we comprehend moving images through the construction of a network amongst visible and non-visible points. Narrative, for instance, comes from the relations themselves. Cubitt posits that the relations of cinema result from seeing the formal play of motion and disruption. The continual disruption of motion is all we perceive in cinema; the higher-order notions of narrative and metaphor come from how the spectator imbues the relations with meaning. That is to say, Deleuze constructs a theory that denotes interpretation and Cubitt constructs a theory that implies interpretation.

For the visual feedback, Deleuze and Cubitt offer valuable meta-commentary on a core issue with defining the form. In one sense, the visual feedback loop is sensed; the spectator-user perceives how actions relate on an interpretive level. Alternately, the visual feedback loop is formal; the spectator-user perceives how actions relate on a logistical level. In Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv’s Text Rain (below), people understand their gestures as being in service of falling text poetically and physically. The spectator-user does not simply rely on the image of the body, but also the body of the image. Hence, the definition of visual feedback requires a variety of parts to account for this simultaneity.

Before entering into new theory, a summary of the main points from Deleuze and Cubitt is in order.

1. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 184. [↩]
2. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 187. [↩]
3. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001. 96. [↩]
4. Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: The Princeton University Press, 1992. [↩]
5. Recall that in the time-image, the perception-image is called the actual-image to delineate amongst the external perception and the internal recollection. [↩]
6. A sensation that, in the time-image, overwhelms and leads to the recalled virtual-image. [↩]
7. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 31-32. [↩]
8. Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 31.; orginal emphasis [↩]
9. Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 33. [↩]
10. Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 33. [↩]
11. Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 40. [↩]
12. Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: The Princeton University Press, 1992. 40 [↩]
13. Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: The Princeton University Press, 1992. 40-41. [↩]
14. Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: The Princeton University Press, 1992. 200-201. [↩]
15. Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: The Princeton University Press, 1992. 197. [↩]
16. Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: The Princeton University Press, 1992. 20. [↩]
17. Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: The Princeton University Press, 1992. 8. [↩]
18. Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 39. [↩]
19. “[T]he cinematic event [...] does not depend on a prior external world [...] The filmstrip neither has nor lacks a transcendent origin, whether external reality or narration, that lies anterior to it. Film and world are of the same matter. Demanding that the one represent the other not only creates the distinction between the two; the thesis of cinematic realism ensures that either the world or the cinema is condemned to unreality.”; Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 39. [↩]
20. Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 33. [↩]
21. Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 33. [↩]
22. Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 33.; emphasis added [↩]
23. Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 33. [↩]
24. Warhol, Andy. “Empire.” 8:00:00. USA, 1964. [↩]
25. Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 48-49. [↩]
26. Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 45. [↩]
27. Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 49. [↩]
28. Cubitt calls this “reframing”; Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 45. [↩]
29. In Die Hard, the action-image also represented by John McClane shooting Hans Gruber. The relation, however, is not the causality of direct space-time. Instead, it is the relation of perception-image; McClane perceiving the necessity to shoot Gruber; and the affection-image; McClane weighting the danger of shooting Grubber as he holds McClane’s wife. [↩]
30. Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 67. [↩]
31. Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 67. [↩]
32. Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 67. [↩]
33. Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 71. [↩]
34. Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 71. [↩]
35. Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 71-72 [↩]
36. Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 73. [↩]
37. Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: The Princeton University Press, 1992. 8. [↩]