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.
Meigh-Andrews, Chris. A History of Video Art: The Development of Form and Function. New York: Berg Publishers, 2006. 121. [↩]
Meigh-Andrews, Chris. A History of Video Art: The Development of Form and Function. New York: Berg Publishers, 2006. 121. [↩]
Meigh-Andrews, Chris. A History of Video Art: The Development of Form and Function. New York: Berg Publishers, 2006. 126. [↩]
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. [↩]
Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999. 44. [↩]
Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999. 45. [↩]
Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999. 22-24. [↩]
Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999. 41-42. [↩]
Arguably, awareness of the computer’s illusion is only a single layer, stopping one’s awareness before any subsequent layering. [↩]
Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999. 50. [↩]
Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999. 49.; original emphasis [↩]
Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999. 49-50. [↩]
Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999. 204.; emphasis mine [↩]
Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999. 187-188. [↩]
There are navigation units that do adjust in these up-to-date circumstances. [↩]
Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999. 55-62. [↩]
Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999. 56. [↩]
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001. 313. [↩]
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001. 316. [↩]
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001. 318. [↩]
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001. 317. [↩]
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.
Lee, Hyun-Jean. “The Screen as Boundary Object in the Realm of Imagination.” Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009. [↩]
Krauss, Rosalind. “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism.” October vol. 1, Spring (1976): 50-64. [↩]
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. [↩]
Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. 56.; original emphasis [↩]
Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. 56. [↩]
Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. 56. [↩]
+ 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 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, visual feedback loops work invisibly within a larger device. For the device to work properly, the loop must be masked by utility; the feedback loop is made indirectly perceptible through its ability to regulate the system to which we devote our attention. 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 and directed uses 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 dual role of subjective observer and objective participant). 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 feedback loop as a desired form–a medium-unspecific information circuit. Where art lays these traits bare, practical devices cloak them.
A prime example is the mirror. For the light mirror, the input device, processor, and output device are one-in-the-same 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 is then consequential, and the mirror image is seemingly pre-technological. The object’s surface is all the object has to offer; there is no apparent depth, no inner-workings, no mechanism. 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 is pushed aside for the virtual self as the 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, and if it appears due to its limited practicality, then it made obsolete. 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. And, 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.”2
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”.3 GPS exclusively deals with placement, and relies on other global information systems to accomplish the combined goal of navigation.
GPS navigation units present an interesting example of visual feedback–partially because of the practicality of the feedback loop itself and partially because of the manner of representation of 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 valid 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 here is not a camera. Instead, the input device is the internal receiver that indicates one’s current location. The receiver, in actuality, retreives 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.4 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 double 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 rotate the car is to rotate the steering wheel. 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 use at the navigation device to find one’s current location is to accept the car as proxy in the physical world and the arrow as proxy 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 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.”5 In this model, space is “conceptualized as a large void”6 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”.7 Location is only determined by the occupying object, and distance comes from the distinction of objects. To speak of space in terms of Leibniz’s model is to refer to a collection of objects. Spatiality is then an adjective that explains the interrelation of objects. Likewise “temporality and causality”8 are applicable for describing relations between objects, but not an object itself. Furthermore, a position in space is determined by relative objects to a fixtures, though these fixtures are not absolute.
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”9 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 objects, they are 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,10 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. From a personal perspective, space begins from the first known object, the self. The absolute model and the relative model are just two sides of the same coin according to Kant.
GPS navigation plays out this difference between absolute and relative space by way of its feedback arcs. The first arc of feedback imbues a sense of relative space; the second, of absolute space. On the screen, the arrow does not appear to move through space as much as appear 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 punctuate the 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 virtual body is decoded into the physical 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 second arc becomes the first again. Approaching a destination means shifting iconography. Yellow lines, white lines, and green patches grow and shrink, and unitized.
Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. 8. [↩]
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. [↩]
Wade, Tasha and Sommer, Shelly, ed. A to Z Gis: An Illustrated Dictionary of Geographic Information Systems. Redlands: ESRI Press, 2006. 91-92. [↩]
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. [↩]
Curry, Michael R. Digital Places: Living with Geographic Information Technologies. New York: Routledge, 1998. 25. [↩]
Curry, Michael R. Digital Places: Living with Geographic Information Technologies. New York: Routledge, 1998. 25. [↩]
Curry, Michael R. Digital Places: Living with Geographic Information Technologies. New York: Routledge, 1998. 27. [↩]
Curry, Michael R. Digital Places: Living with Geographic Information Technologies. New York: Routledge, 1998. 27. [↩]
Curry, Michael R. Digital Places: Living with Geographic Information Technologies. New York: Routledge, 1998. 27. [↩]
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. [↩]
Posted: February 21st, 2010
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To begin, I would be remiss if I did not address the implicit claim that this chapter (or, at least due to the sequencing of chapters) makes. That claim–video art is not interactive art–is intended. The primary issue surrounds the role of the audience; that is, whether participation is in or with an artwork.1 The secondary issue concerns the distinction between video installation art and new media art. These two issues are linked in as much as the technology and the aesthetics are bound together.
While I have asserted that the feedback loop does not depend on its materiality to be a desired form, the materiality impacts how a spectator-user perceives the visual feedback in as much as it (re)arranges components to stage a power dynamic. Specifically, non-interactive visual feedback loops–those found in more traditional video installations–rely on vertical hierarchy, which begets notions of privilege; interactive visual feedback loops tend toward horizontality, which begets equivalences and exchange. Namely, interactive feedback demonstrates a relational aesthetic.
For the sake of the argument, video can be interactive. Nam June Paik’s TV with microphone and Participation TVprovide prime examples. These works differ from traditional video feedback or installations in that they rely on computation, if only in a random or implicit fashion. Using Lev Manovich’s criteria, these works are more akin to new media than video by this simple fact.2 Typically, one thinks of computation as a function of a digital computer, yet analog manipulations (such as Paik’s distortion of video signals by non-linear factors) prove no less computational–the problem becomes explicitly quantifying the change. Of course, not all new media works are interactive (maybe more properly termed responsive). The main distinction is that video employing any computational methods should be called new media. As for how non-responsive feedback loops structure power, it is a matter of outward aesthetics combined with perceived agency.
Non-interactive video feedback often exploits the tensions between 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).3 The corridor structures the spectator-user’s revelation: “to see” implies “to be seen”. This staging requires the spectator-user only to unearth a truth in a purely archeological fashion–the corridor stands as a monument to the power/nature of things.
Underneath this form of feedback is a certain power stratification. A continued analysis of Live Taped Video Corridor provides a window into the problem set. “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.”4 Furthermore, in “Nauman’s work, the viewer has unwittingly become part of a series of experiments.”5 So, the loop assumes a priori spatial fixture–the loop waits in a static, yet existent, form occupying the same space with or without the spectator-user. In mathematical terms, this space follows a Cartesian model, where occupation of space does not effect the space itself (opposed to Leibniz’s view of space which is derived from objects; the following section explains these concepts in more detail).6 Observer-as-(self)observed requires a simultaneous experience of embodiment and disembodiment; 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. The loop strips the physical self of agency as it can neither invert nor shift its position with regards to the virtual self. 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”7 and, more loosely, “a form of art with intersubjectivity as its substratum”.8 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.”9
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, a dialogue can then exist amongst the physical and virtual selves. Alternately, the spectator-user does not enter the the work’s field to complete the system as this implies the system awaits the user in stasis. Instead, the 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 opens up an opportunity to reconsidering the aura in art.10
The relational aesthetic will be explored through the physical mirrors of Daniel Rozin.
+ Physical mirrors and hidden augmentation
All of Daniel Rozin’s physical mirrors rely on similar components. A digital video camera takes visual data and, utilizing a fraction of the resolution and only the greyscale, coarsely digitizes it. 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 by way of the 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, 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.
“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.”11
The necessity of higher orders of remove stem from how subjectivity is typically formulated, where “self-consciousness”12 stands diametrically opposed to subjecthood. To remove forcing self-consciousness, higher order observation, and, finally, invested power in the observation system and virtual self, the subject and object need to restored to their typical balance. Hence, the physical subject in the feedback loop made unselfconscious; this is tricky proposal given the nature of the visual feedback. The physical mirrors provide possible solution.
Sight in the feedback loop, as previously outlined, exists as a pair of arcs. The first arc points toward the virtual self (here, the pixelated reflection) by way of the input device and manifest in the output device. The second arc points to the physical self through the output device and manifest in the input device. The first arc is the visual confirmation or correlation of the physical self–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 visual provides meaning through its imagehood. Deleuze posits that this form of association is divergent as it causes the spectator-user 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; the visual image codifies embodied actions. In other words, a “switch”13 occurs between physical and visual.
The second 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. Causal relationships reside purely outside a subject. Association converges by removing the spectator-user from the process of specification and interpretation; the causal path is denoted by the images. In cinema, the spectator abstractly constructs a cohesive 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 contitutes a real physics. In visual feedback, the spectator-user constructs a singular space that juxtaposes the visible/visual and the embodied. Contiguous regions replace the smoothness of real space. Physical causality issues out from the visual image to influence the physical self. The first arc encodes the physical self and reconstitutes it on the substrate of the output device. The second arc decodes the virtual self and reconstitutes it in the substrate of the physical body–visuality constrains action in this case.14 Colloquially, the first arc corresponds to the statement “I see what I am doing”; the second arc “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. While this provides a new external/internal dynamic (explained subsequently), it positions the result of first arc (the encoded body) as a unique and necessary substrate. Without a person in range, the space before the mirror does not exist alongside a virtual space. The person is a catalyst of duration and spatiality. Secondly, second 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 recursive hermeneutic relationships diagramed 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 horizonal exchange.
+ The external loop, 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 feedback loops reflect nothing endlessly, the notion of feedback here is simply non-existent. This does not mean that external homogeneity is non-existent as well. Instead, the mirrors remain in a pre-temporality (as well as spatiality and causality) when seen from the external vantage point.
The external homogeneity of duration always relies on a conceptual closure. In video art (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 appears not to exist at all. The mirrors occupy themselves and the feedback loop is never implied nor denied by the solitary state. Again, reconsider the previous examples of the external feedback loop. Though physical space remain same with or without a spectator-user, external time is contracted and wrapped upon itself. The external and internal states can be thought of as a conditions in a programmatic loop (in pseudo-code):
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.15 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 image concretizes the abstract (as in showing how perception leads to an action); the legible image abstracts the concrete (as in showing how a perception relates to other perceptions). Similarly, the divergent path here turns perception toward subsequent perception, constantly checking for a person within range. In this way, both space and time are contracted. The reverberated moment stemming from a convergent series vanishes–what is seen by the camera is not outwardly manifest. 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
Once within range, the mirrors recognize the existence of the spectator-user. The contracted space-time unfolds around the spectator-user. 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 his or her bodily shape. The actuation of the motors is an extension of being, a kinetic manifestation of a lived-body being-in-the world.16 The mirrors define a play space17
While TV Buddha clearly does not invite participation (the spectator remains as such, and never becomes spectator and user, i.e. the spectator-user), Live Taped Video Corridor exists on the fundamental inclusion of the audience in the work. The work, however, does not change when in the presence of a spectator-user. [↩]
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001. page. [↩]
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. [↩]
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. [↩]
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. [↩]
Curry, Michael R. Digital Places: Living with Geographic Information Technologies. New York: Routledge, 1998. 24-32. [↩]
Bourriaud, Nicolas. “Relational Aesthetics.” In Participation, edited by Calire Bishop, 160-71. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006. 160.; [original emphasis] [↩]
Bourriaud, Nicolas. “Relational Aesthetics.” In Participation, edited by Claire Bishop, 160-71. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006. 161. [↩]
Bourriaud, Nicolas. “Relational Aesthetics.” In Participation, edited by Claire Bishop, 160-71. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006. 161. [↩]
Bourriaud via Félix Guattariuses 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. [↩]
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. [↩]
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. [↩]
Curry, Michael R. Digital Places: Living with Geographic Information Technologies. New York: Routledge, 1998. 33-38. [↩]
Camille Utterback’s Text Rain provides a perfect example as people change their motion to collect virtual letters; http://www.camilleutterback.com/textrain.html [↩]
Deleuze, Gilles. Negotiations, 1972-1990. Translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. 53. [↩]
In truth, any number of people and non-people could produce the same humanoid outline [↩]
“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. [↩]
Posted: February 18th, 2010
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One of the advantages of the term desired form, as has been pointed out, is that its characteristics arise mutually; the formal structure and experiential phenomena depend on each other. Tangentially, the desired form never assumes a material execution. The material aspects, instead, issue from versioning. Materiality is reduced to its characteristics, such as collect or encode light in photography. 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. The formal framework–for us, the input device, the processor, and output device–can be 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 for a medium is not new by any means. 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 footage of a reel, but capacity of a hard drive (which far exceeds footage). Takes can be longer as a result. 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 transfered 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 is applicable to both media and non-media. The term medium implies a lineage of usage, practice, and aesthetics that treats newer forms with hesitation. The term also predisposes attention to focus on meaning transmission, rendering the medium 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 side-steps this tediousness by only considering an abstraction of the 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 concrete as much as materially exchangeable qualities in exemplifying the characteristics of the visual feedback loop. From these two facets, the visual feedback loop can be understood as 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 a visual feedback loop. Paik created numerous installations (“video sculptures” ((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.)) as Paik called them) involving visual feedback loop, such as TV Rodin (Le penseur)67, TV Chair8, Video Buddha9, and Three Eggs.10TV Buddha from 1974 in Amsterdam, is described in the catalogue listing as “Closed-circuit video installation with bronze sculpture; black-and-white, silent; dimensions vary with installation.”11 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 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 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.))
The piece uses the television to conjure repetition. Where some of Paik’s early work distorts images with magnets to find repetitive visual forms (e.g. curving lines and fluttering interlaced images in works like Demagnetizer12), TV Buddha produces repetition through architecture. The soothingness of repeated sameness replaces the soothingness of repeated distortion. This sameness, however, is more complicated than duplication.
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.”13 Meigh-Andrews also highlights the physical and architectural component in Paik’s work more generally. As for the feedback loop, it requires space to exist (Paik makes this clear). Likewise, the loop must be in space as a space. The closure of information requires a closure of space. Data becomes output-as-input and space becomes binary–interior and exterior.
Despite pinpoint spatiality, Meigh-Andrews grossly simplifies space and juxtaposition by generalizing Paik’s works as ”playful or deliberately ironic”.14. On the surface, TV Buddha places a statue of Buddha in front of television to expose the tension between the Ancient and the Modern through the active resemblance of meditation and watching. TV Buddha is, more accurately, sincere and reverent; feedback is not an attempt to smear tradition, but, in a pre-Modern fashion, bolster it. The perceived irony of TV Buddha comes from a lack of understanding of the distinct formal and phenomenological features of 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.”15
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.”16
The immediate reflection of video versus the contemplative distance of film shows how TV Buddha is misread as ironic and playful. In a typical viewing situation (that is, one that does not involve feedback such as film), the statue fills the position of the spectator and subject and the television (and camera) fills the role of spectacle and object. The distinction affords distance, and translates into the image being viewed as that of the spectator rather that at from the spectator. The nuance is that the (spectator’s) image is divorced from the spectator’s action–i.e. viewing–in the distanced gaze. Sobchack’s hermeneutic “viewing-view/viewed-view” emphasizes the present encountering the past. The image is a depiction of the spectator–similar but never the same. The perception of the Buddha as watching or meditating on an image of itself negates the truth of how the screened image is being manifest.
In actuality, the image results from the physical situation, and is so bound to the statue being in front of the camera and television. While distance exists between the statue and the statue’s image, the distance is purely physical and not temporal like in film. The “viewing-view/viewed-view” becomes a viewing-view/viewing-view. For the image to arise, the statue must remain in front of the camera. The exterior information flow appears static since the subject is inanimate. Like actual mediation, TV Buddha relies on constant presentness. The unwavering physical situation pairs with the unwavering mental state. TV Buddha proclaims a transcendence through technology toward simultaneous presence. The ability to impose such a reading comes from the first experiential phenomenon–an external homogeneity of time (and space).
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.”17
Bergson states that external understanding is impossible since an observer is fixed only in an embodied perspective. Later, he extrapolates this idea to lived experience, i.e. 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 undo empathy from an embodied fixture. The perception of another’s 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. Likewise, Bergson asserts 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 it is unchanging.
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 us 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). The perceptive constrains information; it does not flow as much as it exists as flowing, or as flow-able. Like a watching a river from the shore, the visual feedback loop is does not transport an experienced moment. The loop continually reflects nothingness. The statue is not looking, but looks–sight is perceived as a state and not an action when the opposite is true. External homogeneity posits that the virtual and physical do not depend on one another; it presupposes that the experience is fixed (also, contrived) since we cannot see the change. The relation of statue to image is null–sameness through absence of 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].”18 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 (processed as closed-circuit video) and the other displays a looped video tape of the empty corridor from the camera. 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.”19
As Nauman points out, Live Taped Video Corridor presents the spectator-user with disjointed information. Nauman focuses on the disconnect of the live feed and live action and fails to comment on the disconnect between the taped feed and the live feed. The disconnect truly begins at the monitors. 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 comes from comparison to the other monitor–the interior perspective.
The homogeneity of the external perspective presents feedback as a directed circle. The spectator-user is simply observer in a single embodied relationship to the loop:
physical_self–>corridor-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. Since the taped feed does not require feedback to be embodied, it can be said to exist outside the loop itself. The immediate juxtaposition of the live feed makes the curled dimensions and surreality of Live Taped Video Corridor prominent. The live feed reveals the external perspective as a hoax. Instead, the taped feed situates the past emptiness of the corridor within its present moment.
The interior perspective of the live feed breaks the circle into two arcs that end where the other begins, and is accomplished by implanting a person within the structure. The distanced gaze transforms into augmented sight. Duration–that is, the loop’s duration–directly perceptible and the structure (more) indirect (at least temporally). The singularly embodied relationship becomes an embodied and hermeneutic one. The corridor-as-object becomes:
(physical_self-camera) –> virtual_self
+
(virtual_self-monitor) –> physical_self
Where the taped feed presents a paradox of time, the live feed presents a paradox of space. Since the camera is behind the spectator-user, the establishment of the eye/I is a snuffing out of sight. Once it is apparent that the spectator-user is being watched it also becomes apparent that he or she is the distant watcher. The newly augmented spectator-user is striped of any ability to see the virtual self. Instead the arcs become confused resulting in:
(physical_self-camera) –> {virtual_self as [(physical_self-camera) --> (virtual_self as (physical_self-camera) --> virtual_self ...)]}
Duration is not reflective or reflexive, but regressive and parenthetical. The physical self and virtual self are locking at a fixed distance, the distance between camera and monitor. Moving closer to the screen does not move the virtual self away as much as keep the virtual self at this fixed distance. Nauman claims that the visible and experiential do not line up. On the contrary, the two experiences align all to well–the virtual self moves along the same vector as the physical self only offset forward. The disconnect comes more from how the camera and monitor construct space.
The spectator-user expects a continuation of space. Upon realizing the corridor’s condition, dimensions expand outward, each of fixed distance from the next. Like a sectioned ray originating at the camera, the world extends forward infinitely with each section is a reduplication of the original corridor. The outside no longer exists–it is a figment of memory as it is a tape from the past–and the inside expands and contracts with the spectator-user’s constrained gaze. Meigh-Andrews describes this as “a simultaneous experience of presence and absence, and of the present and the past.”20 More accurately, the experience lack reconciliation with typically differentiated space. Live Taped Video Corridor transforms space into a discernible and infinite pattern. Repetition of motion links the spaces together in a Deleuzian fashion–action here is action there; so space here is space there. Space is reverberated and while time remains constant.
Bordwell, David and Thompson, Kristen. Film Art: An Introduction. Seventh ed. New York: McGraw Hill, 2004. 6-7. [↩]
Lynch used Sony’s DSR-PD150; http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460829/technical [↩]
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. [↩]
Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: The Princeton University Press, 1992. 169. [↩]
1974, Amsterdam; Hanhardt, John G. The Worlds of Nam June Paik. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2000. 129. [↩]
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. [↩]
1982, New York; Hanhardt, John G. The Worlds of Nam June Paik. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2000. 127. [↩]
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. [↩]
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. [↩]
1981, New York; Hanhardt, John G. The Worlds of Nam June Paik. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2000. 128. [↩]
Hanhardt, John G. The Worlds of Nam June Paik. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2000. 129. [↩]
Hanhardt, John G. The Worlds of Nam June Paik. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2000. 118-119. [↩]
Meigh-Andrews, Chris. A History of Video Art: The Development of Form and Function. New York: Berg Publishers, 2006. 252. [↩]
Meigh-Andrews, Chris. A History of Video Art: The Development of Form and Function. New York: Berg Publishers, 2006. 252. [↩]
Hanhardt, John G. The Worlds of Nam June Paik. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2000. 127. [emphasis mine] [↩]
Rush, Michael. New Media in Late 20th-Century Art. New York: Thames & Hudson Inc., 1999. 83. [↩]
Bergson, Henri. Duration and Simultineity. Translated by Leon Jacobson. New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1965. 39. [↩]
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. [↩]
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. [↩]
Meigh-Andrews, Chris. A History of Video Art: The Development of Form and Function. New York: Berg Publishers, 2006. 229. [↩]
The discussion of Deleuze and Cubitt serves two purposes. On one end, it builds a theoretical background to understand the how the visible screen functions in the visual feedback loop, and how moments of cognition relate to the experience of a medium. On the other end, the discussion provides an example of how to build a theory around a medium. For both Deleuze and Cubitt, theory is birthed from the medium.
As much as Gilles Deleuze explores film, he questions the foundations of contemporary visual rhetoric. These foundations treat the image as subservient to its reading; Deleuze inverts this. Part of his inversion is formal, such as exploring cinema as moving instead of showing; other parts are conceptual, such as the image as visual cognition rather than stirring cognition. A presupposition underlies this approach: film is a sought-after medium not because of what it represents, but how it represents it.
Likewise, Sean Cubitt’s analysis of the formal functioning of cinema breaks from the representational models of cinematic analysis. Though the bulk of his example analysis (as well as all of mine) rely on traditional narrative, the same formal palette exists in non-narrative and non-traditional film (including at the far end of the spectrum the works of Stan Brakhage). The formal functions for Cubitt do not claim narrative is fundamental to cinema (he actually states the opposite). Instead, these practices of filmmaking inform the particular and peculiar film experience–the way time is understood, the nature of causal association, the understanding of space, etc. Even in the absence of narrative, these formal elements exist and work in at least a critical, if not functional, fashion. Shot-reverse-shot is more than line of sight for understanding character motivations; it is causal sequencing to form spatiotemporal continuity. Again, Cubitt claims not that film can do what other media do, but film can do things that other media cannot.
This approach is often grouped into the idea of medium specificity. The term medium specificity is not quite accurate. It gathers the unique characteristics of a medium on a surface level. The underlying structure is tainted with the epistemological issues with remediation, such as well-definition. Instead, I characterize the theories of Deleuze and Cubitt as claims for a desired form.
Using this model, I take aim at the visual feedback loop. If the visual feedback loop is a desired form (which I claim it is), then there needs to be a theory that is derived from the sum of its unique structure. Deleuze and Cubitt provide a scaffold for building such a theory.
(1) A set of material conditions “relating to or involving the outward form, structure, relationships, or arrangement of elements”2 as opposed to the content of those elements.
(2) A set of sensible phenomena manifest directly through an encounter with the material conditions.
(3) The material conditions of the form lead to one set of sensible phenomena; the set of sensible phenomena that identify the form stem from only one set of material conditions.
The desired form defines to a both the material and immaterial portions of a medium. The necessity of this term comes from frequent essentialization of a medium. The material and phenomenological set tend to be culled into a generative subset of elements. Such a set, mathematically speaking, contains the elements that under the operation or operations of the larger set can recreate the entire set. This means the larger set can be pared down into that which is the bare minimum–elements can be discarded if they are just operative combinations of other elements. The notion of a desired form asserts that the whole set of elements is the only subset of those elements, that is, the trivial subset. To find a generative subset of elements within a form means either (1) the form is not a desired form or (2) the subset is, by definition, non-equivalent to the desired form.
Hence, in media theory, essentializing a medium into a single experiential or formal aspect can only be seen as an affront to the form itself. For example, in cinema, if the moving image is simplified into merely (mechanical) representation, it denies a distinction between the profilmic and the photographic. Both could essentially represent the same thing, i.e. visual verisimilitude. A true desired form must be well-defined in the mathematical sense–the final product implies a single and unambiguous means of production. The well-definition of the desired form can be represented as (3): (1) if and only if (2).
While the term desired form allows us to speak of the visual feedback loop as set of conditions that are not tied to a particular technology, the term gains worth when considering modes of remediation and once technologically exclusive media, such as cinema’s original material apparatus. As media become more and more distant from their technological constraints, the necessity to speak of the technologically-absent medium–that is, the desired form–as opposed to the pure materiality the medium will become more necessary.
+The materiality of the feedback loop
Feedback can be generally defined by the circumstance where the output of a system is used (at least in part) as input for that same system. Feedback refers to output-as-input and loop refers to the systemic closure that exists when output is used as input. In a more general sense, the feedback loop constitutes a causal structure, where the system functions based on previous functioning. The result is structure that is reflexive and recursive–the current state is inductively derived from lifespan of the system as well as indicates the (potential) outcome of the system. “Feedback loops [have] long been exploited to increase the stability of mechanical systems”3 as an inborn method of self-regulation. Since the invention of video, feedback loops have included visual output-as-input. The visual feedback loop also allows for self-regulation, albeit a different type.
We will consider the visual feedback loop as a desired form; it will be to broken down only for taxonomic purposes. The separated components cannot represent or reproduce the function of the whole loop (as the Hyun-Jean Lee claims about the loop’s interface). Furthermore, the aim is to develop specific terminology that avoids invocations of inadequate or antiquated media theories. The base that the thoughts of Deleuze and Cubitt provide is a structural analogue for the purposes of introducing and grounding the importance of this theory in media traditions.
As Hyun-Jean Lee’s thesis outlined, the feedback loop is comprised of a series of components.4 Lee identifies four varieties of the feedback loop5–the physical loop, the electronic loop, the code-level loop, and the psychological loop. These varieties of the loop can be generalized into a set of three components.
(1) The input device
(2) The processing device
(3) The output device
(1) The input device receives information. Data enters the loop from the outside. In this act of reception, the feedback loop generates an inward vector, or, more precisely, continues a one-way cyclic process. A video camera is a prototypical input device in the visual feedback loop. It acts as an eye by receiving in light through its digital aperture. While the properties of light do not change, the input device ostensibly transforms the usually omnidirectional light into a focused beam toward the camera. Hence, the sense-able world before the input device is always directed at the input device (from the point-of-view of the system).
(2) The processing device takes the real-world information and translates it into a new digital format. The light perceived by the video camera becomes encoded into a video signal or information array. The light is digitized through the processes of sampling and quantification6. First, the image is broken down into discrete parts. Next, each part is assigned a set of values to represent the original information. Despite the process of digitization7 , the actual methods of sampling and quantizing vary based on the encoding format.
(3) The output device takes the quantized data and re-presents. For the visual loop, the now-digital image is displayed. The processing device digests the input so that it may be in an acceptable format for the output device. The output device assembles the data, such as arranging pixels on a screen.
These three components exist in the four different types of loops Lee categorizes. Since the focus is on the visual feedback loop, the input and output devices are almost universally a digital moving-image camera (e.g. video or webcam) and a screen (e.g. television or projector & screen), respectively. The processing device can vary tremendously, from a simple video graphics array (VGA) to a computer processor.
While Lee’s categories are helpful in speaking of the parts of the feedback loop, they illustrate a essentialized approach. Her explanation of the psychological loop, for instance, illustrates a misunderstanding of Rosalind Krauss’ claim that feedback is a “‘bracketed’ situation”.8 By this, Krauss means to place a person both physically and psychologically within the physical loop. The spectator/user acts as an intermediary by participating in the loop process. Hence, the psychological loop is always a subset of the physical loop as the physical loop provides the condition for the psychological loop. Lee, on the other hand, claims “most importantly, all the loops described…fall under a more intensified psychological loop because of the real-time interactivity between the interactor and the system…The directly mirrored feedback and the exact mirroring effects keep the system closed and the viewer self-absorbed. In this situation under real-time feedback, there is little room for subjective reflection on the interaction.” ((Lee, Hyun-Jean. “The Screen as Boundary Object in the Realm of Imagination.” Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009. 7.)) The psychological loop, according to Lee, exists as the outside the physical loop either in parallel and concurrent or enclosing the physical conditions.
This inversion of material and immaterial conditions allows Lee to claim the screen interface of the feedback loop provides the definite characteristic of the loop itself. ((Lee contextually defines interface as the medium in or on which the real and virtual (Lee’s “imaginary”) collide. In the case of the psychological loop, the person forms the boundary object, while for physical loop the screen does.)) Instead of the loop being the final product, it provides a circumstantial context for real and virtual worlds to fluidly interact. The reflexive, durable, and directional situation of the loop is discounted for the transformative and immersive qualities of the interface (which is, for all intensive purposes, achievable without feedback at all).
In response to these issues, I offer few amendments. The first of these is that the loop’s bracketed situation–i.e. requires and includes a person–is only consistent when discussing the loop as an experience and not as a physical condition. The standard three-part loop can have an optional fourth component, a person, to close the loop and begin a durable experience. The three-part loop results in a static form that is cut-off from duration for the sake of external meditation (this explored in Chapter 2 Section 1 through Nam June Paik’s TV Buddha). The loop exists either unto itself as a three-part system or with a person as a four-part system. (We will see the former begs for the latter. The three-part loop is a conceptual entity since it requires duration, and so a fourth part, to be validated as exhibiting the phenomena of visual feedback.)
+The characteristics of the desired form
The four-component feedback loop establishes a complex set of cognitive and physical circumstances. These circumstances are outlined as follows:
>>External homogeneity:
The visual feedback loop has four-components. As a lived-body being-in-the-world, the fourth component–the person– is able to bear witness to the three-component loop without yet being included; the person can elect to enter and exit the loop. While on the outside, the feedback loop is not fully realized. From an external vantage point, the loop exhibits a particular set of characteristics.
Externally, the loop denotes the static material notion of feedback. The three-components are visible, and so comprehensible in their conceptual worth. One can inspect these elements, their functions, and their relative positions. Thus, the loop is treated as a living body through our ability to objectify and dissect it. It does not need to act as a feedback loop (taking in output-as-input) as much as appear to act as a feedback loop. The external loop is then a conceptual object.
The three-part loop processes nothingness infinitely. A single moment, as much the singular physical space, is comprised of a series of moments that are trivially identical and reflexive. Borrowing from Bergson, the loop expresses temporal homogeneity because of a lack of distinction amongst moments9. Again, the loop is externally conceptual; that is, it exists in full without relying on a material (that is, informational) execution. The production of output-as-input is irrelevant since distinguishing input from output is impossible. The loop is closed and can symbolized as a directed circle moving through the input device and processor, and out of the output device. This external homogeneity forms how we identify with our augmented experience once inside.
>>Extended perception and the augmented self:
Once the spectator-user enters the loop, the dialectic of viewing subject and viewed object begins. Sobchack explains the similar experience in film an act of negotiated viewing–the spectator views the screen which is, in fact, the result of what the camera has viewed. Cinematic sight is represented in Sobchack’s notion of the I/eye. The acceptance of this schizophrenic persona formulates a precognitive association, a precondition to being able to experience cinema.
The feedback loop relies on a similar moment akin to the previous discussion on zeroness (though not technically a precognitive moment). In film, the viewer initiates viewing by accepting the viewing-view/viewed-view. This moment fixes a relationship of position and perspective. The output allows a person see his or her own representation. Once a person enters, that person immediately becomes aware of the extension of his or her perception. The input device establishes a pair of shifting embodied and hermeneutic relationships:
(physical_self-input_device)–>virtual_self
(virtual_self-output_device)–>physical_self
Where the negotiation in film is that of the camera and the viewer as distinct perspectives, the negotiation in feedback is placing of one’s self physically and virtually. The directed circle is divided in half: one half pointing in to the virtual-self (the first arc) and one half pointing out to the physical-self (the second arc). The total self, as a result, is constantly in flux–on the screen and off the screen, staring in and staring out. Once a person begins negotiating placement, the homogeneous moment is erased.
Deleuze described a similar dynamic with the perception-image and actual-image. In the former, perception leads toward action; in the latter, perception leads toward recollection. The feedback loop enacts both of these concepts in its own fashion. In seeing the self, the screen presents the viewer with both a perception-image and an actual-image. The difference is that in film perception is always precognitive; in-loop perception is to a point. Since the act of (accepting) augmentation couples with the act of self recognition, the precognition enters after these acts have moved from the fore. The perceptive act translates sensory-motor schema into instantaneous recollection. The moment of firstness seems hurdled–signification instantly requires a referent. The lived-body motion is physically embodied as well as visually re-presented. The visible action is split: sensory-motor schema must be visually recalled from non-visual physicality.
Perception leads the visible self to be a visual self. The image on the screen is always a process of identifying physical- and virtual-self, thereby linking the selfs in what Deleuze describes as a crystal10. Identity as much as time is refracted, yet united in a single point of origin. To understand the image as the one of the self, the spectator-user must correlate the visual world to the physical world. Each identification of the visual self is through embodied physical movement. Hence, recollection is bound to the sensory-motor.
This rise of a referent takes on two cases, each similar to Cubitt’s cut. While external moment is trivially comparable (as it is itself), internal moment is comparable through regression. To know that performed physical motion is the same as the visual motion is to know that one begets the other. In the first case, the virtual-self validates the physical-self by way of the first directed arc. The spectator-user sees to correlate what has been done. The converse case of the physical-self validating the virtual-self comes forms from the second directed arc. The spectator-user acts to correlate what has been seen to what is being done. In both cases, the origins of the arcs are validated through their terminus.
>>Internal heterogeneity:
Once the person elects to enter the loop, it assumes its full form. What was seen as stagnant from the outside leaps into motion. The reverberated visual moment (i.e. output-as-input) always seeks passage through the situated person. Where change cannot be seen from the outside, change is instantly understandable from the inside; space-time becomes heterogeneous. The fullness of loop is not without consequence. The externally visible whole is hidden from the inside. The visible screen allows the spectator-user to ground the internal experience of fragmentation.
The acceptance of technological augmentation leads to the understanding of this pure change. For Deleuze and Cubitt, this witnessing of change signifies a moment of firstness. Although such distinctions do not apply to the loop dynamics, pure change (i.e. duration) denotes a primacy of experience. Augmented sight begets internal heterogeneity, and vice versa. Reflection is never experienced without understanding what is reflected.
(3) Contiguous space:
The correlations of the virtual world and physical world lead to a mapping of the spaces together. The continuousness of natural space is twisted upon itself by way of the direction of the feedback loop. Continuousness is replaced by contiguousness. The physical-self and virtual-self juxtapose space as much as identity. Cubitt speaks of reframing as a manner of establishing causality and in turn generating a coherent space in film.11 Reframing becomes inframing for the feedback loop.
The visible space on the screen becomes implanted in the physical world. While the frame never shifts its position, the visual world moves enough to allow the frame to appear mobile. This is readily apparent in the dashboard GPS navigation device. As the world moves outside the frame, the world inside continues to be situated next to the external reality. The world passes in and out the frame. Inframing makes the viewed reality (whether the space before the screen, or the world around the screen, and the screen itself) a hybrid of virtual and actual spaces. The construction of contiguousness never mimics natural and continuous space. Instead it transforms space into a windowed reality.
—
{
Concluding remarks.
}
In choosing the term “form” rather than the term “medium”, I want to draw the attention away from the definition of a medium as “a mode of artistic expression or communication” (Merriam-Websters). While this definition is accurate, it pigeonholes a medium into being understood as a transmission substance; that is, a substrate on which communication takes place. Form emphasizes the composite whole that is divisible only for the purpose of taxonomy. [↩]
Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. 8. [↩]
Lee, Hyun-Jean. “The Screen as Boundary Object in the Realm of Imagination.” Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009. 6-10. [↩]
Lee, Hyun-Jean. “The Screen as Boundary Object in the Realm of Imagination.” Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009. 7. [↩]
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001. 28. [↩]
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001. 28. [↩]
Lee, Hyun-Jean. “The Screen as Boundary Object in the Realm of Imagination.” Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009. 7. [↩]
Bergson, Henri. Duration and Simultineity. Translated by Leon Jacobson. New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1965. page. [↩]
Introduction: Image-ontology is not without its caveats.
+ limited to sight, not cinematic practice (except for montage)
+ grounded in limitations of cinema, not
>>Cubitt’s criteria for constructing cinematic space-time (as extension of Deleuzian concepts)
>>use Cubitt to ground Deleuze in the visual codes of the medium; useful for visual codes enacting loop
>>pixel, cut, vector demonstrates three-part construction, plus the user
}
+I/eye
Sean Cubitt’s presentation of the cinema effect (what cinema does by how it does it) begins at a moment of firstness. His primacy of signification (the topic of the next section) is called the pixel. While the pixel forms the beginning of the closed system on/of the cinematic screen, it hedges upon the acceptance of the cinematic screen as “dynamic”1 ; that is, the pixel succeeds a complementary concept only comparable to the perception-image–a precognitive translation of moving image as moving image. For Cubitt’s purposes, it is not essential to discuss the foundational moment of motion, but, for the purposes here, it is vital for two reasons: (1) parity and (2) completeness. In imagehood, the moving image initializes its passage into cognition by uniting visual objects with thought objects; the perceptive act is material by way of its visibility in the visual. In the same sense, the construction of the cinematic experience through its technical and practical mechanisms must be enacted through a similar structure, preparing the viewer for cognition. The demand for such a parity formulation comes from the fact that the perception-image even exists. Given the ability of perception-image to initiate causality, the moving image itself must give rise to the embodied (viewer’s) act of cognition through a moment of genesis to establish a connection between viewer and screen space. Secondly, in order to designate the world from the cinematic, the viewer must be able to know when one is present instead of the other. Since we are ostensibly aware of our worldliness, then cinema must inform us that what we are seeing is other-worldliness, a cinema-ness.
The pixel, we will see, is assumed to be already perceived, exemplified by Cubitt’s invocation of Deleuze to explain the pixel’s dynamism as essentially effectuating. “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.”2 The implication of the equilibrium–what Cubitt refers to this as “the cinematic present”3–results from a constant frame of reference. The cinematic present only manifests the duration of cinematic time (the primary characteristic of the pixel) by way of an unmoving “orgin”4. 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.5 Where the photograph or painting allows for timeless revelry and contemplation, the cinema never reveals its full material form, the filmstrip. Instead we only see the frame (the pixel) as a testament to what has changed and what will change. The dynamic equilibrium of the cinematic present–the visible image always sandwiched between what it was and what it will be–already assumes the conditions of spectatorship in understanding an absolute reference point. Therefore, an initial moment–that is, the establishment of the origin (Cubitt refers to this as “zero”)–prepares person to be entered into spectatorship toward the moving image. The origin, then, engenders the succession of the cinema effect.
Let us revisit the perception-image. The perception-image, unlike the other subdivisions of the movement-image (and time-image as the actual-image), does not describe a cognitive process. Instead, the perception-image is precognitive–it unites optical sight and pure sensation (a sensation that, in the time-image, overwhelms and leads to the virtual-image). The perception-image initializes the disruption the signalectic material–that which constitutes the image-object–by amassing potential cognitive energy for transference through the oscillation of the effectuation interval. Its trapped energy can only be spoken of in terms of what it can do when it is set in motion. The perception-image, in a sense, acts non-directionally as much as omni-directionally. In other words, the perception-image foregrounds cognition by establishing an initial point from which a multitude of possible effectuation intervals, and the one true interval, begin. The perception-image, therefore, is just an origin, a moment to and in which we see the foundations of a causality (similar to a stone cast into water). In the act of perceiving, there is a lack any understanding where perception leads which allows Deleuze to attribute the perception-image with a precognitive/pure optical moment. Deleuze explains the perception-image as a precondition:
“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).”6
The cognitive processes of affection, action, and relation materialize their respective image-objects in as much as the image-object is sense-able within the screen space; that is, the visual register begins to concretize perception by digesting the raw image-object into a comprehensible vernacular. For example, the affection-image implies information (data) processing. The interval, begun by the perceptive act and ended by the decisive act, maps the purely optical onto the understandable; perception is effectuated into action. 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, the next step is not apparent. The information has simply been transmitted to Thorn, who is not quite aware of its impact on him or his world. Once Thorn begins following Sol’s body (initially out of grief, and then to discover the truth about Soylent) the perceptive moment is left behind. Once the affection-image is made known (Thorn’s grief and new-found determination due to Sol’s death), the ambiguity of the perceptive moment vanishes. The affection-image, then, can be said to be backwards looking–signifying the perceptive act only after the perception-image has vanished.
Since the perception-image is precognitive–a degree zero of the sign–the viewer cannot be aware of the perception-image’s existence until entering the interval of effectuation. This is due to the fact that the primary function of the perception-image is establishing non-reflexive visuality. The affection-image then must signify both its own existence, as well as the existence of the perception-image (and the existence of a terminus, the action-image). The perception-image is thus only knowable indirectly.
The indirect knowledge of perception-image implies a great deal about the act of perception. Sobchack explains:
“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.” ((Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: The Princeton University Press, 1992. 40-41.))
Sobchack highlights two main points: (1) perception signifies a perceptive agent and (2) perception implies a perceivable world. For the perception-image, these implications come ex post facto. Only in Thorn’s revelation do we know that and what Thorn perceived. As a viewer, we only see what the camera sees through the affection- (and subsequent) images; that is, the visible can only be understood by how the camera expresses visual digestion in cognition, and any precognitive act becomes apparent only after the act moves into a cognitive interval. Significance requires difference, and difference requires differing. Hence, recognizing the what camera registers comes through the immediate absence of perceptive registration. Conversely, registering perception happens in the perceptive act. So, the camera as a hermeneutic lived-body (camera and filmmaker perceiving the world)–just as the perception-image as a visible lived-body perceiving–must be established prior to effectuation, and so cognition, since understanding already assumes the camera’s register is seen as such and prepared to be understood. That is, the viewer’s perceptive moment of non-reflexive visuality also establishes the condition of seeing through the camera as a lived-body. Where perception-image correlates perception and visual register on the screen to denote internal intentionality, the viewer’s perceptive moment denotes the camera’s intentionality. Hence, the cinematic “eye” meets the personal “I”.
Sobchack invokes this correlation of eye and I to discuss for embodiment in the cinematic experience. Sobchack’s “viewing-view/viewed-view”7 expresses a complex interplay amongst embodied and hermeneutic relationships, past and present. Sobchack relies on a material apparatus to generate the “viewing-view/viewed-view”, and so the I/eye. This is important to extend Cubitt. The hermeneutic/embodied relationship of the filmmaker, camera, and world formulates the cinematic eye–a view that has been viewed. The embodied/hermeneutic relationship of the viewer, screen, and display method formulates the personal I–a view that is viewing. When viewing a moving image, the constant 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 realizs 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.’”8
The personal I becomes indistinguishable from the cinematic eye, creating a personal I/eye. That is, 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 so of the (spectator’s) lived-body. First, the spectator comprehends the visual surrogate and then extends natural perception into that prosthesis. The paired views now functions a cohesive unit–I/eye.
Sobchack rebuts the argument that these two viewing subjects ever merge to make the film into a “viewed object.”9 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 screened image directly. And, for Sobchack’ purposes of explaining the phenomenology of the film experience through the structure of thematerial 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.”10 Since this argumentation deals with the perceived viewing experience (the cinema effect), it makes sense to allow this unit to exist as indivisible as the viewer perceives it.
+present:here
Cubitt’s cinema effect begins with the pixel. Once the distinction of the viewer and the camera/screen is abolished in the precognitive moment of accepting the condition of spectatorship through the camera’s eye, a single unit is formed. The camera becomes an appendage of the viewer’s lived-body. The result is a viewer immobilized vis-à-vis the screen–the appendage is fixed with respective to the lived-body despite the motion of either. The immobilized and augmented viewer serves as a fixed point in expressing difference. Cubitt utilizes the concept of zero to capture how the cinematic present manifests motion. 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”.11
Zero denotes a cardinality (the number of elements in a set) as opposed to a position. The I/eye orders cinema by creating two axes–space and time. Their intersection at the origin–that is, in the viewer–results in an “instability [that] is the perpetual source of movement.”12 The cinematic present “is symbolized by its distance from zero, its difference from the nonidentical, the fullness of that apparently empty address (0,0).”13 Each pixel event can be conceived of as a point in the space-time coordinate system. A mathematical point gains its identity through its difference from the origin, such as the ordered pair (4,3) refers implicitly to (0,0) in its well-defined mathematical name. The point itself is dimensionless, and therefore containing nothing measurable. The nomenclature of a mathematical point requires a fixture, and, as a autonomous entity, a point can only be named labeled denoting a “here.” The cinematic pixel similarly necessitates a fixture in space-time to be understood; it is always “different (than)” or, equivalently, “a difference (of)” when named. Also similar to the mathematical point, the pixel is dimensionless–it is pure change, a difference (of), and so contains no spatial or temporal elements unto itself. Moreover, as a point, the pixel itself escapes measurement since measurement requires at least one dimension.
The pixel is then representative of a few simple facets of cinema. The pixel event (the pure motion of the image) expresses a difference (of) externally and the qualities of hereness and nowness internally. The pixel regards only the current image and the current time. It does not, “as a process of perpetual change, … depend on a prior external world.”14 It allows the I/eye to be fully one, where the viewer senses duration directly and perceives the viewed as sense-able. The immobility of the I/eye lets the change happen by being present in the hereness/nowness of the image. The pixel promotes “presentness”, further solidifying the prosthetic lived-body being-in-the-world.
Presentness is the essential product of the pixel. It manifests the moment of firstness by collapsing the temporal and spatial qualities of the cinematic image into a fluid duration (“I/eye am here/now.”). Where Deleuze denotes firstness through the affection-image/virtual-image (the visual/sensory moment of being able to cognize perception), Cubitt’s moment of firstness is being aware of being in situ.15
As a process, the pixel and presentness is a fully organic. It is unbroken by cuts or transitions and is allowed to issue from the most basic material/technological aspects of moving images. The pixel can be compared to perceptual duration not yet fractured by the unconsciousness.
“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 conciousness of unified objects.”16
By unified objects, Cubitt is referring to the full construction of (cinematic) duration through contiguous continuities. Sleep, for instance, discritizes experience, providing a perceptual/visual transition. The cut, the cinema effect’s secondness, breaks the pixel’s naturalistic experience in a similar fashion.
+past:there
The rupture of pure motion results from the cut. The organic flow of time and space is broken by a perspectival shift, where the camera assumes a new position in space-time instantaneously. The cut makes apparent the constructedness and the construction of cinematic duration by compositing of contiguous pixels as a continuous film. Cubitt explains:
“[T]he ideology of attentiveness and the pointlessness of reverie 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.”17
As the pixel is a comparable to the point, the cut is comparable to the line. While the origin still grounds the presentness of the pixel itself, the cut founds a co-relation amongst pixels without the origin being required. One can now speak of a pixel’s “distance (from)” with regards to another pixel. The pixels are connected, respectively, as relative origin and terminus of a vector. While the naming of a point implies (a distance from) the origin, a vector requires a pair of relative points to be explicit in defining a trajectory. The cut, in turn, refers not only to the presentness of the seen pixel, but the pastness of the recently absent pixel. The former defines the end of the disruption in space-time, while the latter defines its beginning.
“In cinema, we are aware first of movement [I/eye] and only secondarily of what moves [the pixel] and [thirdly] 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.”18
The cut establishes a moment of secondness–that is, an understanding of meaning through relative components. In Die Hard (1988), when Officer John McClane pulls the trigger and camera cuts to Hans Grubber being shot, we understand the relationship between the two shots by understanding their continuity in space-time. Deleuze’s action-image (his secondness for the movement-image) is not simply the continuity of space-time, but the linking perception-image and affection-image into a concrete decision. 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 killing him as he holds his wife).
The cut also forces a reconstitution of all preceding moments of signification. “The presubjective subject of the pixel is one with the apparatus”,19 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.”20 The need for “[o]rientation takes the place of immersion”.21 The immobilized I/eye is broken and repositioned, and the pixel is allowed to be present; the difference is now the viewer is aware of a referential meaning of the present through re-identification (“I/eye am here/now, and I/eye was there/then.”)
+future:elsewhere
To expand on the mathematical metaphor, where points beget lines, lines beget planes. By connecting lines, the number of dimensions (degrees of freedom) is increased one. To explain, the point allows no motion; to be at a point is a state without freedom. The line allows one degree of motion, i.e. forward/backward, left/right, or up/down. Planes allows two degrees of motion, selecting the degree of freedom from one line (say, forward/backward) and combining it with the degree of freedom of another line (say, left/right). The result a surface.
Cubitt refers to the moment of thirdness as the vector. To employ our metaphor, the cut has defined an awareness of past, allowing freedom of motion from the present backwards. The viewer can now connect the sensations of presentness to previous sensations of presentness. The vector extends the freedom of motion forward by giving the viewer 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.”22 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].”23
The vector describes an inductive process of reasoning, or thirdness. After the pixel has been disrupted enough by the cut, the viewer becomes aware that the disruptions are a trend; the moving image becomes a sequence of cuts. 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.”24 The viewer understands how something might become, and how space might be navigated.
Futureness connotes an asymptotic mentality. The foreseen becoming acts as a goal25 that cannot be achieved. The viewer instead maps out a potential space existing beyond the space-time of the pixel based on the cut (“I/eye am here/now and I was there/then, so I will go elsewhere/later.”) The current position is not sensed as an end (or a beginning, as Cubitt claims); the pixel is a point on a line reaching backward and forward indefinitely.
+Concluding remarks
{
Connect Deleuze and Cubitt
Diagram/chart of parallel ideas
Gateway into feedback loops
}
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001. 96. [↩]
Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 31. [orginal emphasis] [↩]
Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 33. [↩]
Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 33. [↩]
Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 40. [↩]
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh and Galeta Tomlinson, Robert. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 31-32. [↩]
Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: The Princeton University Press, 1992. 200-201. [↩]
Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: The Princeton University Press, 1992. 197. [↩]
Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: The Princeton University Press, 1992. 20. [↩]
Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: The Princeton University Press, 1992. 8. [↩]
Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 33. [↩]
Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 33. [↩]
Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 33.; emphasis mine [↩]
Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 39. [↩]
The I/eye is the precognitive establishment of being, an assumption needed here to allow for awareness of being in situ [↩]
Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 48-49. [↩]
Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 45. [↩]
Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 49. [↩]
Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 67. [↩]
Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 67. [↩]
Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 67. [↩]
Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 71. [↩]
Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 71. [↩]
Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 71-72 [↩]
Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. 73. [↩]
To understand why and how Gilles Deleuze provides such an important touchstone for understanding the feedback loop, a background discussion about the presuppositions of Deleuzian and non-Deleuzian cinematic is necessary. In brief, the Deleuzian model for cinema allows for images (truly image-objects) to be formative in situated causality rather than symbolic of such relations. The relatedness of image-objects to sensory schema gives the visual medium a material consequence without solely relying on the material apparatus or hermeneutic relationships of cinema. The result is not a phenomenology, but a physics. The image(-object) induces relationships through its inherent qualities rather than simply through the things it captures or represents.
As mentioned before, a great deal of film theory has been devoted to semiotic and representational models. These theories differ quite a lot, yet abide the same founding assumptions. These models derive meaning from cinema in the same fashion that they derive meaning from any system. Instead of the cinematic image being a unique (non-linguistic) phenomenon, it is a collection of iconic elements serving as a synecdoche for a deeper meaning. This implies three things:
(1) Images contain meaning, and so engenders inward looking.
(2) The image frame is an arbitrary, rather than semantic, boundary.
(3) The meaning of an image is predetermined in as much as the meaning stems from definition.
The first of these has been previously discussed as denying the specificity of the medium. Inward looking trains the eye on the interior space of an image (again, any image, as these modes of thought do not distinguish looking at a still image from looking at a moving image). In a way, the image is transparent and the illusion of the image is opaque. What is seen is not the image as a whole, but what the image contains, represents, or re-presents. This implies that the screen acts as a window into which the viewer ascribes the same logic as her own world–exterior logics are projected over the interior ones. This leads to the second implication.
The arbitrary frame presents a paradox for cinema. The typical metaphor of the image (or screen, in the case of cinema) is that of a window. Although the image-as-window forms how we understand the world beyond the frame, it asserts that the contents are only a slice, albeit a selective slice, of the world on the other side. Our view of that world is then always perspectival; that is, subjective in its full meaning. In painting and photography, the frame limits the world beyond by seizing life from time, limiting perspective to an instant. The conflation of time and space allows for the autonomy of the image–the world outside the frame is unknowable, and so is inconsequential. What the frame contains is the sole manifestation of any and all meaning. In cinema, the frame (truly the camera’s eye) does not appear to arrest time and space, but present it. The verisimilitude of the cinematic space to actual space denotes continuity–not only does a world exist beyond the frame, but it exists concurrently with the framed space-time. The world does not stop at the boundary of the screen; instead the “true” world begins at that boundary (again, Andre Bazin called this concept “the myth of total cinema”1 ). The cinematic screen is a manifestation of subjectivity, and implies a totality of existence beyond the strictures of cinematic sight. Theories of iconic interpretation restrict the analysis to the image space–that is, the visible region–and so deny an exteriority to the frame in their analysis (except when convenient). Even more, as the frame constitutes the limits of the visible world (but, often times, not the limits of the audible world) of semiotics, it also constitutes the limits of how cinematic experience can be explained by semiotics. That is to say, the understanding of cinema must be embedded in the image rather than due to the image.
Underneath these two assertions exists the third concept: the contents of the images–those aspects that lead to its meaning or interpretation–are predetermined. While the spectator constructs the meaning of by a process of anchorage and slippage (Roland Barthes uses this process to rid the concept of the Author of a text), the viewer must rely on the inflexible framework of definition. Hence, the potential meanings form a finite set.
The finiteness of the definition set is less troubling than how that finite set is generated. For a definition to be invoked by way of the reader, a paradigm-syntagm structure must exist. The paradigmatic objects are the existent set of elements (e.g all possible definitions of a word). The sytagmatic objects are the explicit selections from that set (e.g. the definition by placement). “Elements in the syntagmatic dimension are related in presentia, while elements in the paradigmatic dimension are related in absentia.”2 The former is what a person sees; the latter is what a person does not, but implicitly refers to for understanding. For words, this provides an adequate model, allowing the word to connote as well as denote; for cinema, this is inadequate. Meaning derived from the abstract connection to a set of (pre)defined meanings denies a visual, symbolic, or relational whole. The image is then defined within the framework of what it is, rather than what it does. Cinema–that is, Deleuzian cinema–comes from the latter, where (causal) relationships are privileged.
For my purposes here, I will focus on two concepts from Deleuze:
(1) The fundamental of relational structure of cinema (or imagehood).
(2) Relational vectors of the movement-image and time-image.
These will later be utilized to explain the visual feedback loop as a homogeneous structure with heterogeneous duration, as well as a construction of synthesized spatial continuousness through visual contiguousness.
+Imagehood
Gilles Deleuze understands cinema as a unique physics, exhibiting its own relationships, interactions, and experiences. “[Deleuzian image-ontology] is not an ontology of semiosis or signification, but a general ontology of the universe–the universe of images. Being–being itself, without further qualification–is conceived as imagehood; all being is ‘image-being’ and/or ‘being-image.’ … The most general imagistic trait is to be a dynamic kind of relation or relatedness”. 3 Where the image acts as a vessel in semiotics, the image in the Deleuzian universe acts as an atomic particle. The former promotes a search for the visual and material composition; the latter, a search for the visual and material interaction. So, inward-looking modes subdivide the cinematic image, searching the interior space while sterilizing the image from its most obvious characteristic–that it is, in fact, an image rather than a window. Deleuzian sight recognizes the image-as-such, where the dynamism of the cinematic image connects perceptive acts.
The image derives its being from its relatedness (through space or time) to other images. Hence, imagehood characterizes a bidirectional exchange.
“To be an image is thus to be a form of exchange or interaction–action and reaction–between something and its environment, and to have or to constitute being and determinacy as such a form. Exchange operates in both directions, from the environment toward the image, from the image toward its environment. Images are (by) being in exchange with the milieu–a milieu that is, of course, imagistic. Effectuating exchanges take place both across and beyond the boundaries of a particular image, for exchanges always take place in more comprehensive webs relating a plurality of images. Indeed, all movement-images interact all the time with all the other images, and there are no nonimages.”4
To look at an image now is to relate through a two-part process of differentiation and specification. The image is not so much looked at, as it is looked to, in this dual process. The syntagm-paradigm duality forces the re-cognition of icons, which are digested and rid of motion. Deleuze cites Henri Bergson as saying “[I]f movement is taken from the moving body, there is no longer any distinction between image and object, because the distinction is valid only through immobilization of the object.”5 The Deleuzian image “expresses a whole which changes, and becomes established between objects”6; this is differentiation. The cinematic image, to paraphrase Deleuze, is seen changing. The changes in spatial or temporal position within the framed world situate the cinematic image (image-object) toward an external (and unframed) world. Hence, the image-object acts in a causal manner (the movement-image as spatially and externally causal; the time-image as temporally and internally causal). This requires a schema of causation, and so implies a interval. The interval stems from the second process: specificiation. Where differentiation delineates the image from the whole (so some motion can be understood and perceived; i.e. the passage through a coordinate system), specification more narrowly links images to one another, where one image begets the next. Moreover, differentiation establishes a universal position (e.g. the image-object as distinct from the environment) and specification establishes a relative location (e.g. one image-object as distinct from another).
The image-object acts as a vertex, and the relations formulate the edges of Deleuze’s structure. The relevance of any single vertex stems from the directional edges (and so, previous and subsequent images). Important to remember is that all images are image-objects in the Deleuzian world. A relation, consequently, does not have to be a literal sequence (the progression of cinematic images), but also a perceived connection. These denote a continuity of space that is never seen and the coherence of a world that is never witnessed. Even more, the material progression of cinema–i.e. still images in sequence–is never spoken of in such simplistic terms. Vivian Sobchack explains that:
“What is analyzed by some as a series of discrete incremental photographic ‘moments’ passing themselves off in expression as real movement is real movement. These ‘moments’ achieve real movement though the film’s existential activity. That is, they temporally come into being as they are introceptively perceived through the camera and visibly expressed through the projector. … [T]hey radically resolve themselves into analog fluidity of intentional action … [T]his commutation of the photographic into the cinematic inscribes a very real and intentionally directed ‘momentum.’” 7
For Deleuze, the momentum of the cinematic image transforms perceptions into complexes of cognitive processes and visual form.
+Image-objects
The most salient feature of the imagistic world is that all things are images. For the most part, this seems obvious–the cinematic screen shows the audience a world as images, so all perception is done through images. But, Deleuze extents this characteristic to all things, material and immaterial. As much as images display what is seen outside the body, images also encode the interpretive processes. The basic acts of perception and understanding are fused with the images that inspire perception and understanding. Hence, the experience of the world can be spoken of as sequence of intentioned image-objects, where each seen object is also a thought object.8
Deleuze describes two essential image-objects that populate the image-universe: the movement-image and the time-image. These two objects exist, in their pure form, as diametric opposites. The movement-image acts upon and describes a spatial causality (“sensory-motor schema”); the time-image, a temporal one (sensory-reflexive or sensory-introspection schema). For this to be the case, the image-object must have both independent and dependent variables, or, as Deleuze calls them, direct and indirect representations9. Deleuze argues that the direct or indirect representation of movement and time are the primal capacities of cinema, and constitute the experience of cinema. The cinematic dipoles bring forth and subjugate opposite constraints in order to realize the medium.
++Movement-image:
The movement-image grows out of the dedication of classic cinema to narrative. Similar to mainstream views of narrative as “the construction of causal chains”10, the movement-image forces the audience to bridge the constructed space of the cinematic world. The camera, in turn, exists as if within the world itself as a witness to the actions. This results in a disruption of time (Deleuze’s indirect representation of the time-image) and so a solidarity of durations.11 While image-objects can be generally qualified as being relational, the movement-image exists in an outward relation. “Classical narrative cinema constructs itself from the interaction between space and protagonist … [and] is to be seen as a kind of analogy to the movement of the (biological) organism, where the latter is a kind of perceptual filter, or nodal point, or screen: in this way, an unproblematized link is created between sensation and movement.”12 The movement-image points to the screened space as its referent, making immaterial concerns distinctly visual and bound to their visual counterpart.
For example, the final montage of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation cuts between a cabin of women under siege and the racing horses-bound rescuers. As the women hold back the door (pushing right to left) against the invaders (pushing left to right), the rescuers gallop across the landscape (moving left to right). Switching between the two scenes forces the audience to draw the spatial connection between the screened world and the total cinematic world, where (relative) positions are absolute (or, at least, not deceptive). Time, on the other hand, is relative; this allows the audience to experience two simultaneous durations in a single duration. Cutting between the two scenes does not communicate confluence, but concurrence: the paired actions are happening at the same time although the audience can only experience the durations one at a time. The events are parallel temporal tracks played out along an absolute spatial one. More over, the audience understands that they do not miss any moments through the cutting, and instead re-experience the same time, albeit somewhere else. The sequence turns the immateriality of time into the “materiality” of cinematic space (made even more present in that the durations share the same space: the screen)
The movement-image, in order to be spoken of, is divided it into parts. While there exist many subdivisions, the basic subatomic elements of the movement-image are the perception-image, affection-image, and action-image.13 The subdivisions stem from the necessity of movement (better understood as causation) being discretized (not to be confused with the material discretization of film frames). The processes of differentiation and specification follow from this slowing and separation of matter, forming a “signalectic material”14 that modulates as a wave. The period and frequency of the wave may change, but the existence of beginning, end, and interval do not. In terms of image-objects, the perception-image forms the start and the action-image forms the end of the interval, with the affection-image filling (and modulating) the wave itself.
In the example, the rallying of forces to whisk off to the cabin constitutes an affection-image, where perceptions form decisions and emotions are perceived as effectuating. The affection-image bridges “a perception which is troubling in certain respects and a hesitation of action.”15 Deleuze invokes semiotic firstness. By this, he means the image act as an involution; that is, it stands alone as tautological and understandable. The affection-image distorts the signalectic wave to suture the effectuated response with the visual constructs. The action-image is found in the sprint to the cabin. The action-image denotes an object understood only through relative components or in reaction to some event (in semiotics, this is called secondness). The viewer knows that the speed is that of urgency due to the circumstance instead of, say, revelry. The montage, on the whole, visualizes thirdness (Deleuze’s relation-image) situating the scene within the social construct of Reconstruction and mores of racial relations. The difficult and crucial image-object becomes the perception-image.
The perception-image corresponds to the initial reception or potential formulation of a sensory-motor chain and the marking in of the movement-image’s interval. Where the affection-, action-, and relation-image correspond to firstness, secondness, and thirdness, the perception-image corresponds to a “zeroness.”16 This means the perception-image precedes both any meaning or understanding structures. “The apple is red” exemplifies firstness–understanding without relation. Then, secondness can be found in “This apple is redder than that apple,” understood through relating objects. Lastly, thirdness–”This apple is redder than normal”–positions signs in a holistic context (often said to be societal). To precede these, zeroness (and so the perception-image) must be purely the transmission of information. The perception-image links purely optical sight with purely receptive cognition, where understanding has not yet happened. In our example, the apple is not yet seen as an apple, but isseen and is received. For Sobchack, zeroness resides in the expression of the cinematic world in the projector or projection. For Deleuze, however, zeroness resides in the image itself, not in its material underpinnings. In the former example from “Birth of a Nation”, the perception-image–the image of sight-without-meaning–is the subjectivity of the camera; that is, the perception-image is the recognition of the camera as, to borrow from Sobchack, a viewing subject to be viewed17. The zeroness of the image-object draws the viewer into the perceptive apparatus.
++Time-image:
The time-image stems from the break of cinema from the classic Hollywood model. Where the movement-image seeks to preserve the continuity of spatial relationships, the time-image serves to construct “the cinematic sequence … [as to preserve] the temporal duration of the event the camera [registers].”18 This is done by inverting the causal structure, “for the [movement-image] is dependent precisely on a sequencing process in which the ‘meaning-effect’ emerges out of the construction of a [causal] chain. Insofar as the time-image is ‘liberated’ from the kind of enchainment, the hypothesis emerges that the time-image can be seen as a symptom of” signifiers “unquilted from from [their] symbolic order.”19 That is to say, the time-image generates new meaning amongst co-temporal or sequential elements. Deleuze describes this shift as the privilege of a divergent series of elements over a convergent series20. In other words, the movement-image is prosaic and literal, converging on the execution of a singular event; the time-image is poetic and abstract, diverging toward multiplicities of thought and contemplation.
Just as the movement-image exists in pieces, the time-image does too. Unlike the neat causal sequencing of the movement-image, the subatomic aspects of the time-image do not lead directly to or from one another, but are instead nested within one another. The time-image, as a result, points inward, toward the formation of nested image-objects, ending in a relational perception-image.21 The time-image realizes the true potential of cinema: direct perception of duration. This can only be done by forcing the movement-image into an indirect representation and allowing a single duration to exist. In the time-image, “the camera has liberated itself from dependence on the representation of the image … and so it creates what [Deleuze] calls a ‘pure optical situation.’”22 Time–that is, experienced time or duration–is allowed to flow without recourse. The time-image can be described as a visually associative since it allows the nesting of images and the inward vector to be wrapped upon itself.
The nesting structure of the time-image follows a basic logic. A perception-image23 does not lead to an affection-image, but to a recollection-image, known to Deleuze as a virtual-image. Where the movement-image binds cognition with the external world, the time-image binds cognition with the internal past. The virtual-image, like a reflection, exists contemporaneously with the actual-image standing before the reflective surface. The reflection is not of light, but a contemplated duration–the actual-image reflects an allusion. Deleuze invokes Bergson to explain:
“The present is the actual image and its contemporaneous past is the virtual image, the image in a mirror. According to Bergson, ‘paramnesia’ (the illusion of déjà-vu or already having been there) simply makes this obvious point perceptible: there is a recollection of the present, contemporaneous with present itself … ‘Our actual existence, then, whilst it is unrolled in time, duplicates itself along with a virtual existence, a mirror image. Every moment of our life presents the two aspects … perception on one side and recollection on the other.”24
The actual-image never implies the eventual action-image. The actual-image is explored itself and compared a past perception-image (the virtual-image). The actual-image and the virtual-image are bound together and split “each moment as present and past.”25 This linkage of actual- and virtual-image is know as a crystal-image. The crystal-image refracts time, pointing the bound image-objects toward the past and the future (the presentismainfest in the crystal-image). As the actual-image generates a virtual-image, the virtual-image reveals a once-actual, now-perceptual image-object. This second perception-image is where actualization occurs; that is, actualization in the past through contemplative assessment.
The time-image seems to reword a psychological reading of cinema; Deleuze disagrees. Psychoanalysis looks to images as manifestations of subconscious beliefs and “this spiritual dimension becomes the object of cinema.”26 But, “[i]t is questionable whether the notion of ‘the imaginary,’ even, has any bearing on cinema; cinema produces reality.”27 Deleuze’s comparison of the virtual-image to a mirror image defends this claim. What may be called “imaginary” is, to Deleuze, the manifestation of real light from a reality. The actual- and virtual-image exist in an intrinsic link–the actual-image generates the virtual-image and the virtual-image point the existence of an actual-image. The inward relational vector leaves a very real imprint upon subsequent image-objects.
A prime example of the time-image at work comes from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Experiencing a torrid dream, Scottie’s psyche is thrust into a sequence of images that draw connections in his investigation. The actual-image is formed by the camera moving toward Scottie, who is tossing in his bed. The viewer is cued to a “perception of perception,”28 bearing witness to Scottie’s reflexive process. The virtual-image comes from the montage of re-experienced events. For instance, the camera moves toward a necklace Scottie recalls being worn by Judy/Madeleine and found in a portrait of Carlotta Valdes. Here, the virtual-image plays out the fragmentation of a contemplative state. The liberated camera breaks the coherence of spatial continuity by exchanging its position with Scottie’s and the necklace’s position with an open grave site. No longer do the sequenced shots force a spatial or environmental logic (breeding a causality). In contrast, the shots diverge, expanding an instantaneous realization into an extending sequence. The final perception-image of Scottie awakening immediately opens into an affection-image of his distraught face.
+Concluding remarks
The complexity of Deleuze’s image-ontology results in a few upshots. First, the cinematic image can be spoken of as both a visual and a cognitive event. Since the image-object unites what is seen and what is cogent, the viewer is implied in the existence of image-object. Hence, the cinematic experience is an optical as well as a mental task. This means that being situated within the field of sight leads one to being situated in the field of cognition, which has particular implications when the viewer is the viewed object.
Secondly, the dichotomy of the movement- and time-image visually correlates the distinctions of time. The movement-image is grounded in unempathetic time; that is, time without the presence of durations other than one’s own. While the duration of the self is heterogeneous de facto (via Bergson), the unempathetic time is homogeneous. Essentially, a unit of time is indistinguishable as it is experience through its measurement (e.g. one minute) rather than the experience of the duration of that one minute (e.g. one minute of being grief strict). On the other hand, the time-image unleashes pure duration. In the time-image all is heterogeneous, even the recollection-images. The existence of the two concepts means that a visual form can manifest the particulars of time and duration without necessitating a sutured viewer. Moreover, the viewer can be seen as both involved and not in the process of cinematic expression, which holds potential for feedback.
Lastly, cinematic images as relational grounds the visual in a higher complex. This means that what is seen is a part of a larger data structure that can be perceived indirectly. The screen displays entries and the viewer interpolates the relations. The benefit of placing cinema in the realm of data structures is that now it can be analyzed through computational and algebraic methods. The rigor these imbue foreground potential avenues only currently accessible through mathematical avenues.
Restivo, Angelo. “Into the Breach: Between the Movement-Image and the Time-Image.” In The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, edited by Gregory Flaxman, 171-93. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 176. [↩]
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001. 230. [↩]
Schwab, Martin. “Escape from the Image: Deleuze’s Image-Ontology.” In The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, edited by Gregory Flaxman, 109-39. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 110. [↩]
Schwab, Martin. “Escape from the Image: Deleuze’s Image-Ontology.” In The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, edited by Gregory Flaxman, 109-39. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 111-12. [↩]
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh and Galeta Tomlinson, Robert. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 27 [↩]
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh and Galeta Tomlinson, Robert. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 28. [↩]
Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: The Princeton University Press, 1992. 208. [↩]
This is the primary split between Deleuze and semiotics. Where semiotics explain with images as see-able and legible, Deleuze extends the image to also be actionable. This is what Deleuze means to communicate about images are relational. It is not the being in the image that acts upon the world, but the images that co-relate to structure the our perception of the being as sentient. [↩]
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh and Galeta Tomlinson, Robert. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 34-43. [↩]
Restivo, Angelo. “Into the Breach: Between the Movement-Image and the Time-Image.” In The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, edited by Gregory Flaxman, 171-93. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 174. [↩]
The Bergsonian term duration (durée) denotes the heterogenous experience of/through time. [↩]
Restivo, Angelo. “Into the Breach: Between the Movement-Image and the Time-Image.” In The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, edited by Gregory Flaxman, 171-93. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 174. [↩]
Deleuze establishes a fourth component–the relation-image–that is not unique to the spatial or temporal capacities of cinema. I have decided to explain the relation-image as a tertiary feature of the relatedness of cinematic images rather than as part of the movement-image, as Deleuze does, in order to avoid confusion when it is used with the time-image. [↩]
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh and Galeta Tomlinson, Robert. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 29. [↩]
Schwab, Martin. “Escape from the Image: Deleuze’s Image-Ontology.” In The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, edited by Gregory Flaxman, 109-39. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 119. [↩]
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh and Galeta Tomlinson, Robert. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 31. [↩]
Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: The Princeton University Press, 1992. 41. [↩]
Restivo, Angelo. “Into the Breach: Between the Movement-Image and the Time-Image.” In The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, edited by Gregory Flaxman, 171-93. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 175. [↩]
Restivo, Angelo. “Into the Breach: Between the Movement-Image and the Time-Image.” In The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, edited by Gregory Flaxman, 171-93. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 180. [↩]
Deleuze, Gilles. Negotiations, 1972-1990. Translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. 53. [↩]
This, however, is not inward-looking. The semiotic mode of sight dissects the image-as-is; the time-image creates a vector toward an internal connection. [↩]
Restivo, Angelo. “Into the Breach: Between the Movement-Image and the Time-Image.” In The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, edited by Gregory Flaxman, 171-93. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 175. [↩]
for the time-image, the perception-image is alternately called the actual-image; to avoid confusion, the term actual-image will mean “the first perception-image of the time-image” [↩]
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh and Galeta Tomlinson, Robert. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 79. [↩]
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh and Galeta Tomlinson, Robert. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 81. [↩]
Deleuze, Gilles. Negotiations, 1972-1990. Translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. 59. [↩]
Deleuze, Gilles. Negotiations, 1972-1990. Translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. 58. [↩]
Schwab, Martin. “Escape from the Image: Deleuze’s Image-Ontology.” In The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, edited by Gregory Flaxman, 109-39. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 120. [↩]
Visual feedback has a sorted heritage; it is not a technology, nor a medium (at least in the classical sense), nor purely a use of technology. Partially, visual feedback garners comparison to video, which, as a technology and a medium, suffers from its own identity confusion; both rely on metaphors of perspective and time that, in turn, rely on metaphors from film and television. Partially, it garners comparisons to digital technologies in how grants the physical body a virtual representation and conceives of reflexivity (specifically with regards to the early cybernetics conferences1). Likewise, to call the visual feedback loop the structure of visual feedback foists both concepts into the realm of material situations and situational materials, and morphs the abstract form into materialism. As a result, theorists cushion media theory from visual feedback and the visual feedback loop–they are side effects, oddities, special cases, or anomalies of visual media.
When the more-generic feedback loop enters into a discussion, the product dominates. For example, Lev Manovich states that the various forms of cellphone feedback foster interaction in order to produce the interaction itself, ostensibly making feedback invisible.2 In another example, Rosalind Krauss claims that video feedback panders to narcissism by directly representing the “ego-libido”, thereby producing a psychological state.3 In this logic, the feedback loop–and, by extension, the visual feedback loop–is essentialized: the product comes from a circumstantial process. The process is a reification and not the reification.
In visual media, the logic has one end to visual forms and processes: analysis identifies the image and denies the image-making. For instance, the medium of film becomes solely profilmic–to speak of a film is to speak of what is seen. The interior space of the screen summarizes the entirety, and representative and interpretive logic beget readings that assume the illusion of film is fully informational and necessarily self-contained. In exchange, the cinematic spectator and the cinematic apparatus are excluded from the equation. When the forms and processes are exposed, they expose a phenomenology toward the image and not a phenomenology of the image.
Images–whether cinematic, photographic, or otherwise–become vessels. Hence, the framed space houses all meaning in that the framed space contains all representation. As a result, the image-as-vessel engenders a particular mode of looking to reconcile the logic of an image with the opaqueness of its illusion. This mode, I call, inward-looking. Inward-looking privileges what an image shows, and inherently presupposes an image has something to show. Furthermore, to see something directly in an image presupposes that mediation is a characteristic of information and not of representation.
In this mode, what an image shows is precisely what an image means. Comprehension comes out of the image (as-vessel); the image-itself simply stages comprehension. The interpretation qua meaning rests below the material image plane. The state of being an image (the Deleuze-cum-Schwab term “imagehood”4 ) becomes exchangeable with the state of being a perspective, that is, subjecthood. Here, subjectivity engineers comprehension by structuring that which is visible. In truth, while subjectivity and imagehood mutually arise, subjectivity characterizes imagehood as much as objectivity does; that is, imagehood extends beyond subjectivity.
Rudolph Arnheim provides a discursive example of how the collapse of representation occurs. In discussing visual rhetoric, he distinguishes “between three functions performed by images”, that is, “picture, symbol, sign”.5 Deftly, Arnheim explains, “[t]he three terms […] do not stand for kinds of images. They rather describe three functions fulfilled by images. A particular image may be used for each of these functions and will often serve more than one at the same time. As a rule, the image itself does not tell which function is intended.”6
In theory, there is a separation between representation and function. Arnheim explains that the functions traverse a dual-gradient. Signs exhibit no abstraction7, while maintaining a diverse and complex meaning. The ambiguity can be positive–as in the intentional invocation of multiple meanings in visual poetry–or negative–as in unintentional multiple meanings in new road signage. Pictures express a low level of abstraction (pictures depict select inborn qualities8 ), and so cut off certain associations or alternate definitions. Symbols formulate a high level of abstraction (symbols inscribe or encode concepts9 ), and embed a more rigid semiotic structure onto the denotative and connotative components. Where signs and pictures exist in a tight coupling with their definition, symbols move beyond definitions to imply loftier metaphors.
A tension–namely, image-as-vessel versus image-itself–arises when the function stands for the inner-relationship of visible objects; visibility and comprehension determine visuality in that the image is only a transmission of information (i.e. a medium). The application of functional significance reduces the image to its ability to contain icons, and so the icons are reduced to direct signification. Since the comprehension of an image defines the purpose of the image-as-vessel, the image contains nothing more than its functional contents. Martin Schwab explain it as follows:
“In general, we think of images in semiotic terms. Images are signs or, more precisely, signs that present their meanings in an iconic mode, traditionally understood as representation via similarity or resemblance. What a picture or image shows us, it does by presenting us with a structural analogue (it re-presents something).”10
Inward-looking, then, cultures icons within images. That is to say, the image contributes nothing more than visibility, and eliminates itself from view. The image serves as a wax tablet, allowing icons to be inscribed.
Important here is that by image, I do not mean still image. Instead, I mean “some visual form.” Just as the imageness is negated, so too is the specifics of the image medium in the previous example. The image of dog in cinema versus the image of a dog in photography should (and, in fact do) present radically different understandings of what the dog denotes and connotes. Inward-looking, on the otherhand, treats the image of a dog as a perti dish for the concept of “Dog”. And so, the cinematic or photographic image of a dog can be simplified into just the image of a dog, and still relay the same information despite the medium.
While it does command a certain amount of attention, inward-looking fails to translate medium-specifics to differences in meaning. Its main failure stems from the seclusion of the image. For photography, the image exists as a solitary unit. The roll in which the photograph exists does not necessarily correlate the content of one image to the content of another. The current photograph has no bearing on the subsequent photograph, and takes no cues from the previous one. The photographic image is then non-relational; the cinematic image, however, is.
The cinematic image results from what Lev Manovich calls the “dynamic screen”. The dynamic screen is defined as a screen that “can display an image changing over time.”11 The change that is witnessed, at the material level, is simply a sequence of slightly differentiated images. In this way, the outward dynamic image on the screen corresponds to a sequence of static images (conceptually) behind the screen. While the expectation often is for a narrative, one can generally claim that all film relies on the inherent relational nature of the cinematic image. This is the core ontological difference between photography and film: where the photographic image is assumed to be autonomous, the cinematic image is never assumed to be autonomous. The cinematic image, in this way, is always understood through relations to other images. Semiotic readings of the cinematic image/screen negate this condition of the image, while recognize it with regard to the world. Through semiotics, icons in the world are treated as exhibiting relations to one another across images, while the cinematic images are treated as perspectives rather icons themselves. Gilles Deleuze, on the contrary, asserts the relational nature of the cinematic image is the founding principle of cinema.
Now, the feedback loop currently exists under pre-Deleuzian circumstances. The loop is often essentialized as simply the screen. The visual groundings seem sufficient as synecdoche. The purpose of this chapter is to establish a parallel argument for the visual feedback loop as a relational to that of Deleuze with regards to cinema. The first goals are to pinpoint the failings of essentializing cinema as purely inward-looking by understanding Deleuze’s ontological conditions for the image, as well as identify the two main relations of image-objects. The second goal is to see how Deleuzian ontology impacts (film) theory directly by way of Sean Cubitt’s three-fold criteria. The final goal is to use Deleuze and Cubitt to construct a more comprehensive ontology and theory of the visual feedback loop as a relational whole.
Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. 9. [↩]
Manovich, Lev. “Information as an Aesthetic Event.” Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007. [↩]
Krauss, Rosalind. “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism.” October 1, no. Spring (1976): 50-64. 57. [↩]
Schwab, Martin. “Escape from the Image: Deleuze’s Image-Ontology.” In The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, edited by Gregory Flaxman, 109-39. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 110. [↩]
Arnheim, Rudolph. “Pictures, Symbols, and Signs.” In Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World: A Critical Sourcebook, edited by Carolyn Handa, 137-51. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004. 137. [↩]
Ibid., 137-38.; “An image serves as a sign to the extent to which it stands for a particular content without reflecting its characteristics visually.” [↩]
“Duration and Simultaneity”, Henri Bergson (translated by Leon Jacobson)
A measurement is an exterior quality of the object being measured. For instance, the material and strength of a string constitute how the string is composed. The length measurement of the string must be imposed upon from an exterior source, such as a ruler. To equate the materiality of the string with the length measurement as primary qualities results in a fundamental confusion of type. The material qualities are ontological; measurements are phenomenological.
For string, rarely would one describe the type (e.g. heavy-gauge or thread) of string by the length of string. Time, on the other hand, is typically quantified as a description. The interval communicates nothing intrinsic about the time itself, but acts as a stand-in. This results in two deep assumptions:
(1) time is homogeneous
(2) time lacks direct description; that is, time lacks materiality.
The difficulty with approaching time as measurable intervals of homogeneous content, according to Henri Bergson, is that time is not simply measurable and homogeneous. Time is instead inherently heterogeneous–subsequent moments do not “contain” the same experienced time–and so immeasurable in these qualities. More over, time lacks direct description in so much as description is limited to time as solely a scientific concept. (Bergson explains such treatment of time as homogeneous and lacking materiality as factors of time’s independence from manipulation.)
Instead Bergson offers up a different understanding of time: duration (durée). Bergson explains:
“Duration is essentially a continuum of what no longer exists into what does exist. This is real time, perceived and lived. Duration therefore implies consciousness; and we place consciousness at the heart of things for the very reason that we credit them with a time that endures. However, the time that endures is not measurable … Now, our inner duration, considered from the first to the last moment of our conscious life, is something like [a] melody. Our attention may turn away from it and, consequently, from its indivisibility; but when we try to cut it, it is as if we suddenly passed a blade through a flame–we divide only the space it occupied.” (49)
Duration quantifies not the motion through scientific time (i.e ever-progressing time), but the experience of that motion (i.e. movement through/in time). The important concept to take away from Bergson is that duration does not exclude scientific time, nor does it presuppose that scientific time is wrong. Instead, duration links time and experience into a single concept, where progression is a quality of time itself. In other words, experience should be thought of as time-experience. To strip time from experience or experience from time is impossible for Bergson.
Scientific time does this however. By treating time as independent, experience is thought of a separate stream, distinct and parallel, such as a series of photos. The photo are associated with one another, but striped of the time when they occurred. For experimentation, this line of thought makes sense. In order to be repeatable and objective, time should not play a role in when an experiment takes place. But, this is a special case of time; time that is exchangeable and homogeneous.
Bergson’s claim is that time is more typically heterogeneous, and so non-exchangeable. This is due to Bergson’s claim that duration stems from consciousness. Before and after are results of a person’s perception. Just as with spatial features, depending on one’s position, front and back are relative to the observer.
Since before and after result from consciousness, then absolute before or after–that is a single absolute system of reference–must result from consciousness or not exist at all. Philosophically this is a far greater deal than it is mathematically and empirically. For my purposes, the initial understanding of time and experience leads nicely into Deleuze’s time-image.
Where Bergson links time and experience, Deleuze links time and image. As the cinema is primarily visual, the experience of watching is equatable to experiencing the world through the cinematic screen. The observer’s time is a complex interplay between running time (the time of the film itself) and the narrative time (the time of the film’s narrative). The former is more scientific understanding of time–time is interval and not experience; the latter is closer to Bergson’s idea of duration.
“But if out science thus attains only to space, it is easy to see why the dimension of space that has come to replace time is still called time. It is because our consciousness is there. It infuses living duration into a time dried up as space. Our mind, interpreting mathematical time, retraces the path it has traveled in obtaining it.”(60)
The materiality of film lends itself to a different mode of duration. Where duration is fluid and indivisible, cinematic duration is discretely fluid (i.e. faster than the eye’s perception). More over, cinematic duration fixes running time to allow the narrative time to surface and supplant inner duration with cinematic duration. Now, this process is not stable; one oscillated between inner and cinematic durations as attention shifts.
As to whether these events are simultaneous, the answer is no–they are concurrent and adjacent. Simultaneity, as Bergson defines, is a coalescence of events into a single point. To compare events–that is, establish simultaneous events–there must be an observer that is perceiving all durations.
“Thus is born the idea of a duration of the universe, that is to say, of an impersonal consciousness that is the link among all individual consciousnesses, as between these consciousnesses and the rest of nature. Such a consciousness would grasp, in a single, instantaneous perception, multiple events lying at different points in space; simultaneity would be precisely the possibility of two or more events entering a single instantaneous perception.” (45)
While no known human can observe like this, machines have a distinct advantage. (I am not implying consciousness to machines, but a claim for phenomenology of machines.) The game data log, for instance, does just that–it records all action everywhere. This is, of course, for another thesis.
