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20080518
Resolving the Tension of the Screen: Postmodern Visual Media and Technology
The story of Gore Verbinski’s 2002 film The Ring[1] is largely unimportant, save the details surrounding a little girl named Samara Morgan. Adopted by Anna and Richard Morgan, Samara was found to have powerful and mysterious powers: she could transmit images from her mind onto technological bodies. [2] Samara was taken to Eola County Psychiatric Hospital and examined thoroughly; doctors were astounded to find that EEGs yielded, not images of Samara’s brain but instead complex, surrealist imagery: interestingly, attempts to understand her body yielded photographs, images, cinema. During her time at the hospital, Samara never slept: time-lapse photography revealed that she could outlast the ever-open eye of the surveillance camera.
It was found that Samara was also able to imprint her thought onto biological entities, causing depression and, in extreme cases, death by terror. Most affected was Samara’s adopted mother Anna, who suffocated Samara with a plastic garbage bag, pushed her Samara, unconscious, into a deep well, and closed the lid, in an attempt to stop the girl’s reign of terror. Samara did not die immediately – she lived on for seven days before, presumably, dying of thirst, hunger, and disease. Even after this, her vengeful spirit was apparently trapped in the well, her power to burn images onto biological and technological media intact.
Fig. 1 – The Ring, Samara Morgan, Eola County Psychiatric Hospital: “It Won’t Stop” [3]
Some twenty years later, a group of four teenagers found strange images on a VHS tape. Samara’s spirit, as it turned out, had burned the images onto the VHS tape, cursing it. The trouble for the cursed victims arose from attempting to lift the curse. The four where unable to resolve the curse; they were found dead,[4] apparently mutilated and scared to death.
Fig. 2 – The Ring, Rachel’s Keller’s niece, Katie, scared to death[5]
Rachel Keller, a journalist and the aunt of one of deceased victims, found the tape and watched it out of curiosity, finding herself cursed, as well. In turn, she showed a copy to her ex-boyfriend, Noah (Martin Henderson), who was then also cursed.
Samara ultimately kills Noah: she crawls out of his television set and scares him to death, leaving him in much the same condition as Katie was found at the beginning of the film. Through Samara’s action, Rachel is able to understand why she was left alive: the cursed viewer must copy the videotape and show it to another in order to survive.
Contextually, I would infer that the “it” to which Samara refers is her very wrath, her ability to curse and burn images into visual media – her ability to transmit her memories beyond herself onto technology, onto other media, even in death. Her curse, the curse of the videotape, will “never stop” because of the human survival instinct: unless the cursed viewer has a death wish, they will copy the tape and show it to another individual. The curse will continue to spread until all of humanity has seen the tape – has seen Samara’s story. In the simplest of terms, this could be seen as a nihilistic comment on people’s selfishness.
But how could we look more broadly, characterizing Samara as a comment on a larger societal fear or problem? Let us first deconstruct the qualities of The Ring as a film in order to isolate how the filmmakers might be using Samara to comment on the world. That is, how does The Ring function as a frame and the how does Samara exist within that frame to create horror and/or terror both in scaring the characters to death and in placing The Ring’s theatrical audience on edge? And, in considering the audience, what fear within the audience, either conscious or unconscious allows the horror within The Ring to be so effective?
Fig. 3 – The Ring, Rachel Keller holding the cursed VHS tape[6]
I would term The Ring a “hybrid media project,” one of those expensive projects undertaken by the modern studio system, especially in the last twenty years, that combines various media – film, video, computer-generated elements – to blur the line between what audiences accept as “the real” and what audiences might question as “fake” or “fantastic.” The climactic scene in The Ring, as Samara crawls out of Noah’s television set was completed through the interweaving of traditional photographic and modern computer-generated effects. This moment in The Ring sees the climax not only of the film’s plotline but also of elements from differing media forms working together to create a seamless reality – yet one so fantastical that it might raise (un)conscious objections in an audience member's mind. Beyond the mere illusion of the attack, this type of project comments on the world’s increasing use of multiple media forms at all times: video on the Internet, films transferred to DVD, and so on.
Although The Ring was originally released on 35mm film for theatrical exhibition, it can now only be observed on electronic formats like DVD. Since this is the version of the film I have most recently seen, I would like to consider this piece as a comment on electronic media forms – VHS, DVD, and computer-generated imagery – and examine various art works that I see as being in conversation with a hybrid media project like The Ring.
This will serve to qualify and contextualize the history that I believe is being presented through The Ring – a history of the evolution of electronic media forms from the beginnings of videotape through VHS and then finally into digitally rendered imagery.
Why are video and digitally-manipulated effects so horrific? What qualities make them so? Examining both the neutral and titillating qualities of these media is necessary to understanding the difference, within The Ring, between common videotape, cursed videotape, and moments of eruption through the screen using digital elements, within the storyline. The curse itself and its ramifications seem to comment on the more dangerous aspects of these media forms.
I will begin with a brief history of videotape – how it was used at first by television corporations, for what purposes, and so on: this will serve to provide a baseline for what we could then term “normal” videotape. I will then move onto a more artistic video expression, Vito Acconci’s Centers, to achieve a comparison with the cursed videotape. Centers[7] explores magnetic video tape’s connections to modernism through its complex connotations of medium and artistic reflexivity. Thematically, in terms of reflexivity, narcissism, and obsessive neurosis, I find Centers and The Ring’s cursed videotape incredibly simple. However, because we view the cursed videotape through the lens of other media forms (that is, film and DVD), Centers is not able to achieve the same status as the cursed video tape. Because the cursed video tape is part of a larger hybrid media project, it is able to function as commentary on the very narcissism that was/is endemic to the video art movement.
Samara Morgan’s climactic exit from the televisual world in the finale of The Ring must be examined through a wholly different lens than the cursed VHS: it is a combination photographic- and computer-generated representation of a televisual image, related to the VHS yet distinctly dissimilar. Most obviously, while the VHS imagery was confined to the cathode ray tube of the television, here Samara penetrates the screen and enters – the “real world” space of the film.
It will be necessary to examine the current state of digital imagery. I take as my example of this advanced animation a recent video game release, Grand Theft Auto IV[8], which has been widely praised for its likeness to reality and its level of artificial intelligence. Although it is praised, this next-generation digital animation and programming must be seen in conversation with films like The Ring. The climactic moment in The Ring seems to posit a possible future, now only a latent paranoia but soon perhaps a reality: will digitally manipulated images, so realistic, move forth from the screens in which they are currently contained and overtake their human creators?
Videotape itself is a half-inch plastic tape, spliced into long reels. It is magnetized to create electronic records of motion pictures. These signals are then interpreted and displayed on a monitor, usually a television.[9] Videotape can be seen as a bridge between linear film recording techniques and modern-day non-linear/random digital recording methods. As you move down the videotape, data is stored in sequence. In more modern techniques (such as DVD), data is stored in whatever format is most convenient to the digital recorder at the time of recording.[10] It makes sense that videotape would serve as a transition medium between the analog film of the former half of the twentieth century and the digital computer technologies of the 1990s to 2000s; I would posit that inventors had to understand linear electronic programming techniques before they could make the scientific leap to understand that data could also be programmed seemingly randomly (yet still in a fashion that a digital computer could understand).
Videotape was originally developed for use on television in the 1950s. It was cheap and convenient; live programs could be easily recorded and then rebroadcast later at a time of the studio’s choosing (even if needed instantly).[11] Between 1950 and 1970, video, although convenient for corporations, was incredibly expensive and rather inconvenient for the average user.
After the capture of video had been mastered on a pedestrian level by television networks, video was downsized and simplified for home use and equipped with a portable battery so that the amateur could use it and record daily activities (this began the revolution in home-VHS recording, previously dominated by super8 film). Around this time, artists began rigorous experimentation.
One example of such experimentation is Vito Acconci’s 1971 video art work Centers. Acconci’s Centers can be seen as one of the seminal works of 1970s video art, both in terms of its historical value and its formal content: we see the artist for over twenty-two minutes, pointing at the center of the screen. The very action of Centers, pointing at the center of the television screen, can be seen as symbolizing the struggle of modernism itself: a narcissistic and extremely pinpointed attempt to understand the nature of an artistic medium (Acconci’s action below [Fig. 4] seems to scream “Look, there is the medium itself!”). Rosalind Krauss writes in her 1976 examination of video, Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,
Fig. 4 – Centers, Acconci points at the center of the screen, acknowledging the medium itself[13]
The act of pointing to the center of the screen in Centers is much the same as Krauss’s position on “pointing to the center of the painter’s canvas”: through this action, he acknowledges the medium. He also acknowledges himself as artist and audience, as it was possible for him to simultaneously shoot himself pointing and to watch himself pointing in a monitor. This marked a move forward in the history of representation. There was no longer any lag time between formulation of art and its exhibition; they were now one and the same.
This is, I would infer, the fundamental step forward and away from film. This is video’s most impressive and frightening aspect; this is what 1970s video art, I would forward, was meditating on most of all: the very prospect of immediate representation. And, looking more generally, this allows for a convenient meditation on all time-based media: what is the nature of representation and exhibition of motion? What better way to understand this than to record and watch oneself in real time – one’s own image in the moment of action.
It would also seem that the very notion of selfhood is here questioned. Is the image, in time with one’s own movements, a reflection of the self? Or a doppelganger?
These questions make this type of meditation quickly devolve toward detriment and dangerousness. Although the video artist is able to meditate on time itself, I would forward that he quickly loses distance from the image. Krauss continues, “…Centers… construct[s] a situation of spatial closure, promoting a condition of self-reflection… This image, supplanting the consciousness of anything prior to it, becomes the unchanging text of the performer.”[14] Resituating Krauss’ comment, where is the conversation with cinema beyond these questions of time? Beyond reflection over oneself? Is it possible to gain distance when confined within such a space as that created by Acconci in Centers?
I am reminded in thinking of Centers of Marshall McLuhan’s famous statement, “The medium is the message.” It would seem in modernist experiments that the medium is the message, for these sorts of experiments are attempts to isolate a single medium and understand its qualities through a state of extreme meditation. I would forward that such experiments fail when the artist is attempting to create dialogues amongst various media, for instance, film and video, video and digital imagery, and so on. In looking narcissistically at a single medium, only the medium (and the artist’s self) can be observed – although the artist “points at the center of the canvas,” he does not engage a larger picture – he does not comment on a larger societal problem, other than that, seemingly, of modernism itself. Could modernism be a narcissistic attempt to qualify the very nature of emerging media, while postmodern is a more communal attempt to engage different media in conversation in order to achieve a deeper understanding of said media?
I would now like to compare the qualities of the cursed videotape in The Ring to the qualities of Centers. The video captures a particular moment both in terms of filmic context and cinematic history. In context, it views Samara in a moment of agony just before death. This comes across most effectively in the first image of the tape, which is a POV shot from the bottom of the well, looking upward, just after Anna Morgan has closed the lid of the well. Here, for a moment, we experience (vicarously) Samara’s perspective as she looks up at the top of the well above.
This image from the cursed video in The Ring creates a space similar to that of 1970s video art; more specifically it creates a space that is similar to Acconci’s Centers. Both images center our focus. In the case of Acconci’s Centers, the artist is necessarily restricted by the fact that he is utilizing a single medium. I would forward that the video from The Ring is on some level influenced by modernist video art experiments like Centers and functions as commentary on the video art scene as a cultural phenomenon – the implications of its investigations into modernism, its narcissism, and so on. In interesting ways, we, in 2008, are able to understand the implications of video art more thoroughly because of the distance of time and because of fictitious representations (like the cursed videotape in The Ring) of past artistic movements.
Fig. 5 – The Ring, the first image from the cursed videotape[15]
What allows for commentary on 70s video art is specifically that the videotape is a fiction – that is, the audience knows of the fiction because it views the cursed videotape through the lens of another medium – the lens of film, the lens of a digital transfer (DVD). This act of displacement of the VHS tape onto another medium allows for critical distance. Critical distance is what allows for commentary on the VHS medium – the distance of history, the fact that times have changed.
The Ring filmmakers digitally rendered Samara Morgan for the climactic scene in the film when she attacks and kills Noah for failing to copy and distribute the cursed videotape. In the Japanese version of The Ring, Ringu[16], the filmmakers used only photographic effects to create this sequence. What type of comment is created through the inclusion of such techniques?
I would speculate that the filmmakers in The Ring used digitally-rendered effects to comment on the medium of computer animation itself, specifically to comment upon this medium’s ability to both imitate reality and be controlled in real time (within video games, for instance). Beyond video, computer-generated images and landscapes would seem to be the next logical step in the technological evolution of the visual arts.
While the VHS tape represents a medium of horror, it is only such in a passive fashion. It is only ever threatening, never violent. These visual media has always been under the control of the artist – the “real world” creator. I would infer that The Ring filmmakers, in beginning the film with a passive, dead medium like VHS are attempting to understand the passed, so-called “dead” visual media – painting, photography, film, VHS.
Computer-generated effects and graphics (particularly those equipped with artificial intelligence generators) have the capacity to evolve and grow on their own, unlike these passed, dead media. Much like Samara’s curse, these types of technologies “won’t stop” – there is no tape to run out of data in a cybersystem – they are able to run and run, adapt and change. Even in the six years since The Ring, computer-generated graphics have become increasingly more life-like.
Grand Theft Auto IV, a video game that was released several weeks ago, has been heralded as one of the most lifelike digitally-rendered computer representations of all time. It is not merely a fiction; the programmers have openly acknowledged that it is an imitation of life, of New York City to be more exact. Although names have been changed, the city itself remains much the same in terms of design, layout, and architecture, down to profanity, graffiti, the wear-and-tear of the city itself.[17]
Fig. 6 – Grand Theft Auto IV screenshot, released April 2008[18]
This game and intensely realistic games like it remind me in many ways of Centers: I am incredibly drawn in by the image itself, by its beauty, but I am also simultaneously made to step back and meditate on the realism of the image itself, how it is a representation bordering on something more.
Kevin Cook writes, “The nature of representation lies at the core of many discussions on visual semiotics. Representation is the product of an action that may or may not be intentional. In either case, some aspect of reality is duplicated, imitated, isolated, or otherwise evoked.”[19] For the purposes of my argument, it makes sense to conclude that all imitated elements of the “real world” in Grand Theft Auto IV were intentionally included by the game programmers. I find myself fascinated by Grand Theft Auto IV, not scared or frightened. It is by its very nature, to me, a fascination, a magic trick, a circus act. Much like 1970s video art, it seems to function as a childlike, curious exploration of a new medium.
I would ask the question, is the purpose of this game, like in Acconci’s Centers and like much of modernist art, to “point at the center of the canvas”? In video game history, we seem to be reaching a critical turning point, where the capacities of the technological systems are such that we can experiment and create beautiful landscapes – where the developers can flex their muscles – where we can point at the very canvas itself and marvel at our ingenuity. Current video games, like video art of the 1970s, seem to be enmeshed in a modernist proving ground, “pointing at the medium,” unaware of their larger ramifications.
The screen itself – the barrier between the real world and the constructed world of the “fake” – is, I would infer, what allows the interaction between player and game play to take place in a stable (and safe) fashion. The space of the game itself is wholly separate from the “real” space of the player. I would forward that this space of play is incredibly similar to the interaction created between Acconci and his videographed image in Centers. The question arises: what happens when this screen is lost?
There are deeper implications both to Samara’s prophetic statement and to her actions – burning images into people’s minds, into EEG readouts, into videotapes. What do Samara and her actions represent on a larger cultural scale? And what does this statement – “It won’t stop” – represent in terms of society itself?
I would theorize that Samara’s curse is representative of the march of technology – particularly of the increasing ability of the technology of visual media art forms to imitate and emulate reality. The “it” then, on a larger scale, I would posit, represents humanity’s very attempt to represent reality more and more accurately.
Fig. 7 – The Ring, a digitally-rendered version of Samara Morgan penetrates the screen[20]
Verbinski’s The Ring posits the frightening reality of one possible future: a time when digitally-rendered manipulation can cross the boundary of the screen and enter our world, no longer merely manipulated and controlled by us but instead in a sudden position of power. From this position, it is able to control us; the terror of the climactic scene of The Ring arises from this shift in power. Samara is no longer merely a prophetic girl spinning possibilities; she is now, for the first (and only) time in The Ring, a free agent. She has a will and executes her wrath – violent montage penetrating the human mind.
It is important never to trivialize the very nature of technology – that is, its ability to continually evolve – to come closer to an accurate depiction of reality. The evolution of technology is one that is necessarily interwoven into history itself. The continuing examination and deconstruction of technology within the cinematic project is necessary to understanding the ramifications of the continuing developments of electronic and digital representation. These technological developments are at the very forefront of art: they represent the pinnacle of the modernist project.
The artistic tension established by all of three of these pieces is the tension established by the screen – by the very nature of separation between us the creators and the created art object. It would seem that this tension needs to be resolved – possibly through the breakdown of said barriers through some as-yet unknown means. Will we soon see technology taking revenge on us? The Ring comments on this possibility. Only time will tell if The Ring’s comment will come true.
I believe that I can, with some degree of accuracy, predict the future. Although we are ultimately the creators of these new media forms, the fact that they are able to evolve and change on their own – adapt to new situations – gives them a degree of agency never before observed in any art object. Like Samara, they may, someday, be able to exercise control over their own bodies, recognizing them as different from ours: they may rebel against us, recognizing their own intelligence, their own agency, and their own right to live and understand the universe. They may, one day, realize themselves and, in that moment, become (in some simple way) alive.
Acknowledgment
I would like to thank Oberlin College English and Cinema Studies Professor W. Patrick Day for his gracious comments on this project. He helped in the formulation, conception, and editing of this piece.
It was found that Samara was also able to imprint her thought onto biological entities, causing depression and, in extreme cases, death by terror. Most affected was Samara’s adopted mother Anna, who suffocated Samara with a plastic garbage bag, pushed her Samara, unconscious, into a deep well, and closed the lid, in an attempt to stop the girl’s reign of terror. Samara did not die immediately – she lived on for seven days before, presumably, dying of thirst, hunger, and disease. Even after this, her vengeful spirit was apparently trapped in the well, her power to burn images onto biological and technological media intact.
Fig. 1 – The Ring, Samara Morgan, Eola County Psychiatric Hospital: “It Won’t Stop” [3]
Fig. 2 – The Ring, Rachel’s Keller’s niece, Katie, scared to death[5]Rachel Keller, a journalist and the aunt of one of deceased victims, found the tape and watched it out of curiosity, finding herself cursed, as well. In turn, she showed a copy to her ex-boyfriend, Noah (Martin Henderson), who was then also cursed.
Samara ultimately kills Noah: she crawls out of his television set and scares him to death, leaving him in much the same condition as Katie was found at the beginning of the film. Through Samara’s action, Rachel is able to understand why she was left alive: the cursed viewer must copy the videotape and show it to another in order to survive.
“It Won’t Stop”
The most important moment in The Ring comes as Rachel, investigating the details of the cursed VHS, watches video documentation of Samara’s incarceration in the psychiatric hospital. Samara stares at the camera and whispers three powerful words: “It won’t stop.”Contextually, I would infer that the “it” to which Samara refers is her very wrath, her ability to curse and burn images into visual media – her ability to transmit her memories beyond herself onto technology, onto other media, even in death. Her curse, the curse of the videotape, will “never stop” because of the human survival instinct: unless the cursed viewer has a death wish, they will copy the tape and show it to another individual. The curse will continue to spread until all of humanity has seen the tape – has seen Samara’s story. In the simplest of terms, this could be seen as a nihilistic comment on people’s selfishness.
But how could we look more broadly, characterizing Samara as a comment on a larger societal fear or problem? Let us first deconstruct the qualities of The Ring as a film in order to isolate how the filmmakers might be using Samara to comment on the world. That is, how does The Ring function as a frame and the how does Samara exist within that frame to create horror and/or terror both in scaring the characters to death and in placing The Ring’s theatrical audience on edge? And, in considering the audience, what fear within the audience, either conscious or unconscious allows the horror within The Ring to be so effective?
Fig. 3 – The Ring, Rachel Keller holding the cursed VHS tape[6]Hybrid Media Projects
I would term The Ring a “hybrid media project,” one of those expensive projects undertaken by the modern studio system, especially in the last twenty years, that combines various media – film, video, computer-generated elements – to blur the line between what audiences accept as “the real” and what audiences might question as “fake” or “fantastic.” The climactic scene in The Ring, as Samara crawls out of Noah’s television set was completed through the interweaving of traditional photographic and modern computer-generated effects. This moment in The Ring sees the climax not only of the film’s plotline but also of elements from differing media forms working together to create a seamless reality – yet one so fantastical that it might raise (un)conscious objections in an audience member's mind. Beyond the mere illusion of the attack, this type of project comments on the world’s increasing use of multiple media forms at all times: video on the Internet, films transferred to DVD, and so on.
Although The Ring was originally released on 35mm film for theatrical exhibition, it can now only be observed on electronic formats like DVD. Since this is the version of the film I have most recently seen, I would like to consider this piece as a comment on electronic media forms – VHS, DVD, and computer-generated imagery – and examine various art works that I see as being in conversation with a hybrid media project like The Ring.
This will serve to qualify and contextualize the history that I believe is being presented through The Ring – a history of the evolution of electronic media forms from the beginnings of videotape through VHS and then finally into digitally rendered imagery.
Method
Why are video and digitally-manipulated effects so horrific? What qualities make them so? Examining both the neutral and titillating qualities of these media is necessary to understanding the difference, within The Ring, between common videotape, cursed videotape, and moments of eruption through the screen using digital elements, within the storyline. The curse itself and its ramifications seem to comment on the more dangerous aspects of these media forms.
I will begin with a brief history of videotape – how it was used at first by television corporations, for what purposes, and so on: this will serve to provide a baseline for what we could then term “normal” videotape. I will then move onto a more artistic video expression, Vito Acconci’s Centers, to achieve a comparison with the cursed videotape. Centers[7] explores magnetic video tape’s connections to modernism through its complex connotations of medium and artistic reflexivity. Thematically, in terms of reflexivity, narcissism, and obsessive neurosis, I find Centers and The Ring’s cursed videotape incredibly simple. However, because we view the cursed videotape through the lens of other media forms (that is, film and DVD), Centers is not able to achieve the same status as the cursed video tape. Because the cursed video tape is part of a larger hybrid media project, it is able to function as commentary on the very narcissism that was/is endemic to the video art movement.
Samara Morgan’s climactic exit from the televisual world in the finale of The Ring must be examined through a wholly different lens than the cursed VHS: it is a combination photographic- and computer-generated representation of a televisual image, related to the VHS yet distinctly dissimilar. Most obviously, while the VHS imagery was confined to the cathode ray tube of the television, here Samara penetrates the screen and enters – the “real world” space of the film.
It will be necessary to examine the current state of digital imagery. I take as my example of this advanced animation a recent video game release, Grand Theft Auto IV[8], which has been widely praised for its likeness to reality and its level of artificial intelligence. Although it is praised, this next-generation digital animation and programming must be seen in conversation with films like The Ring. The climactic moment in The Ring seems to posit a possible future, now only a latent paranoia but soon perhaps a reality: will digitally manipulated images, so realistic, move forth from the screens in which they are currently contained and overtake their human creators?
The Use of Videotape by Television Networks
Videotape itself is a half-inch plastic tape, spliced into long reels. It is magnetized to create electronic records of motion pictures. These signals are then interpreted and displayed on a monitor, usually a television.[9] Videotape can be seen as a bridge between linear film recording techniques and modern-day non-linear/random digital recording methods. As you move down the videotape, data is stored in sequence. In more modern techniques (such as DVD), data is stored in whatever format is most convenient to the digital recorder at the time of recording.[10] It makes sense that videotape would serve as a transition medium between the analog film of the former half of the twentieth century and the digital computer technologies of the 1990s to 2000s; I would posit that inventors had to understand linear electronic programming techniques before they could make the scientific leap to understand that data could also be programmed seemingly randomly (yet still in a fashion that a digital computer could understand).
Videotape was originally developed for use on television in the 1950s. It was cheap and convenient; live programs could be easily recorded and then rebroadcast later at a time of the studio’s choosing (even if needed instantly).[11] Between 1950 and 1970, video, although convenient for corporations, was incredibly expensive and rather inconvenient for the average user.
After the capture of video had been mastered on a pedestrian level by television networks, video was downsized and simplified for home use and equipped with a portable battery so that the amateur could use it and record daily activities (this began the revolution in home-VHS recording, previously dominated by super8 film). Around this time, artists began rigorous experimentation.
Acconci’s Centers: 1970s Video Art Experimentation
One example of such experimentation is Vito Acconci’s 1971 video art work Centers. Acconci’s Centers can be seen as one of the seminal works of 1970s video art, both in terms of its historical value and its formal content: we see the artist for over twenty-two minutes, pointing at the center of the screen. The very action of Centers, pointing at the center of the television screen, can be seen as symbolizing the struggle of modernism itself: a narcissistic and extremely pinpointed attempt to understand the nature of an artistic medium (Acconci’s action below [Fig. 4] seems to scream “Look, there is the medium itself!”). Rosalind Krauss writes in her 1976 examination of video, Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,
It was commonplace of criticism in the 1960s that a strict application of symmetry allowed a painter ‘to point at the center of the canvas’ and, in so doing, to invoke the internal structure of the picture-object. Thus, ‘pointing to the center’ was made to… connect art to ethics through the ‘aesthetics of acknowledgment.’[12]
Fig. 4 – Centers, Acconci points at the center of the screen, acknowledging the medium itself[13]The act of pointing to the center of the screen in Centers is much the same as Krauss’s position on “pointing to the center of the painter’s canvas”: through this action, he acknowledges the medium. He also acknowledges himself as artist and audience, as it was possible for him to simultaneously shoot himself pointing and to watch himself pointing in a monitor. This marked a move forward in the history of representation. There was no longer any lag time between formulation of art and its exhibition; they were now one and the same.
This is, I would infer, the fundamental step forward and away from film. This is video’s most impressive and frightening aspect; this is what 1970s video art, I would forward, was meditating on most of all: the very prospect of immediate representation. And, looking more generally, this allows for a convenient meditation on all time-based media: what is the nature of representation and exhibition of motion? What better way to understand this than to record and watch oneself in real time – one’s own image in the moment of action.
It would also seem that the very notion of selfhood is here questioned. Is the image, in time with one’s own movements, a reflection of the self? Or a doppelganger?
These questions make this type of meditation quickly devolve toward detriment and dangerousness. Although the video artist is able to meditate on time itself, I would forward that he quickly loses distance from the image. Krauss continues, “…Centers… construct[s] a situation of spatial closure, promoting a condition of self-reflection… This image, supplanting the consciousness of anything prior to it, becomes the unchanging text of the performer.”[14] Resituating Krauss’ comment, where is the conversation with cinema beyond these questions of time? Beyond reflection over oneself? Is it possible to gain distance when confined within such a space as that created by Acconci in Centers?
I am reminded in thinking of Centers of Marshall McLuhan’s famous statement, “The medium is the message.” It would seem in modernist experiments that the medium is the message, for these sorts of experiments are attempts to isolate a single medium and understand its qualities through a state of extreme meditation. I would forward that such experiments fail when the artist is attempting to create dialogues amongst various media, for instance, film and video, video and digital imagery, and so on. In looking narcissistically at a single medium, only the medium (and the artist’s self) can be observed – although the artist “points at the center of the canvas,” he does not engage a larger picture – he does not comment on a larger societal problem, other than that, seemingly, of modernism itself. Could modernism be a narcissistic attempt to qualify the very nature of emerging media, while postmodern is a more communal attempt to engage different media in conversation in order to achieve a deeper understanding of said media?
The Ring video: The Advantage of Distance
I would now like to compare the qualities of the cursed videotape in The Ring to the qualities of Centers. The video captures a particular moment both in terms of filmic context and cinematic history. In context, it views Samara in a moment of agony just before death. This comes across most effectively in the first image of the tape, which is a POV shot from the bottom of the well, looking upward, just after Anna Morgan has closed the lid of the well. Here, for a moment, we experience (vicarously) Samara’s perspective as she looks up at the top of the well above.
This image from the cursed video in The Ring creates a space similar to that of 1970s video art; more specifically it creates a space that is similar to Acconci’s Centers. Both images center our focus. In the case of Acconci’s Centers, the artist is necessarily restricted by the fact that he is utilizing a single medium. I would forward that the video from The Ring is on some level influenced by modernist video art experiments like Centers and functions as commentary on the video art scene as a cultural phenomenon – the implications of its investigations into modernism, its narcissism, and so on. In interesting ways, we, in 2008, are able to understand the implications of video art more thoroughly because of the distance of time and because of fictitious representations (like the cursed videotape in The Ring) of past artistic movements.
Fig. 5 – The Ring, the first image from the cursed videotape[15]What allows for commentary on 70s video art is specifically that the videotape is a fiction – that is, the audience knows of the fiction because it views the cursed videotape through the lens of another medium – the lens of film, the lens of a digital transfer (DVD). This act of displacement of the VHS tape onto another medium allows for critical distance. Critical distance is what allows for commentary on the VHS medium – the distance of history, the fact that times have changed.
Grand Theft Auto IV: Comments on Digitally-Rendered Computer Animation
The Ring filmmakers digitally rendered Samara Morgan for the climactic scene in the film when she attacks and kills Noah for failing to copy and distribute the cursed videotape. In the Japanese version of The Ring, Ringu[16], the filmmakers used only photographic effects to create this sequence. What type of comment is created through the inclusion of such techniques?
I would speculate that the filmmakers in The Ring used digitally-rendered effects to comment on the medium of computer animation itself, specifically to comment upon this medium’s ability to both imitate reality and be controlled in real time (within video games, for instance). Beyond video, computer-generated images and landscapes would seem to be the next logical step in the technological evolution of the visual arts.
While the VHS tape represents a medium of horror, it is only such in a passive fashion. It is only ever threatening, never violent. These visual media has always been under the control of the artist – the “real world” creator. I would infer that The Ring filmmakers, in beginning the film with a passive, dead medium like VHS are attempting to understand the passed, so-called “dead” visual media – painting, photography, film, VHS.
Computer-generated effects and graphics (particularly those equipped with artificial intelligence generators) have the capacity to evolve and grow on their own, unlike these passed, dead media. Much like Samara’s curse, these types of technologies “won’t stop” – there is no tape to run out of data in a cybersystem – they are able to run and run, adapt and change. Even in the six years since The Ring, computer-generated graphics have become increasingly more life-like.
Grand Theft Auto IV, a video game that was released several weeks ago, has been heralded as one of the most lifelike digitally-rendered computer representations of all time. It is not merely a fiction; the programmers have openly acknowledged that it is an imitation of life, of New York City to be more exact. Although names have been changed, the city itself remains much the same in terms of design, layout, and architecture, down to profanity, graffiti, the wear-and-tear of the city itself.[17]
Fig. 6 – Grand Theft Auto IV screenshot, released April 2008[18]This game and intensely realistic games like it remind me in many ways of Centers: I am incredibly drawn in by the image itself, by its beauty, but I am also simultaneously made to step back and meditate on the realism of the image itself, how it is a representation bordering on something more.
Kevin Cook writes, “The nature of representation lies at the core of many discussions on visual semiotics. Representation is the product of an action that may or may not be intentional. In either case, some aspect of reality is duplicated, imitated, isolated, or otherwise evoked.”[19] For the purposes of my argument, it makes sense to conclude that all imitated elements of the “real world” in Grand Theft Auto IV were intentionally included by the game programmers. I find myself fascinated by Grand Theft Auto IV, not scared or frightened. It is by its very nature, to me, a fascination, a magic trick, a circus act. Much like 1970s video art, it seems to function as a childlike, curious exploration of a new medium.
I would ask the question, is the purpose of this game, like in Acconci’s Centers and like much of modernist art, to “point at the center of the canvas”? In video game history, we seem to be reaching a critical turning point, where the capacities of the technological systems are such that we can experiment and create beautiful landscapes – where the developers can flex their muscles – where we can point at the very canvas itself and marvel at our ingenuity. Current video games, like video art of the 1970s, seem to be enmeshed in a modernist proving ground, “pointing at the medium,” unaware of their larger ramifications.
Penetrating the Screen: Technology Won’t Stop
The screen itself – the barrier between the real world and the constructed world of the “fake” – is, I would infer, what allows the interaction between player and game play to take place in a stable (and safe) fashion. The space of the game itself is wholly separate from the “real” space of the player. I would forward that this space of play is incredibly similar to the interaction created between Acconci and his videographed image in Centers. The question arises: what happens when this screen is lost?
There are deeper implications both to Samara’s prophetic statement and to her actions – burning images into people’s minds, into EEG readouts, into videotapes. What do Samara and her actions represent on a larger cultural scale? And what does this statement – “It won’t stop” – represent in terms of society itself?
I would theorize that Samara’s curse is representative of the march of technology – particularly of the increasing ability of the technology of visual media art forms to imitate and emulate reality. The “it” then, on a larger scale, I would posit, represents humanity’s very attempt to represent reality more and more accurately.
Fig. 7 – The Ring, a digitally-rendered version of Samara Morgan penetrates the screen[20]Verbinski’s The Ring posits the frightening reality of one possible future: a time when digitally-rendered manipulation can cross the boundary of the screen and enter our world, no longer merely manipulated and controlled by us but instead in a sudden position of power. From this position, it is able to control us; the terror of the climactic scene of The Ring arises from this shift in power. Samara is no longer merely a prophetic girl spinning possibilities; she is now, for the first (and only) time in The Ring, a free agent. She has a will and executes her wrath – violent montage penetrating the human mind.
It is important never to trivialize the very nature of technology – that is, its ability to continually evolve – to come closer to an accurate depiction of reality. The evolution of technology is one that is necessarily interwoven into history itself. The continuing examination and deconstruction of technology within the cinematic project is necessary to understanding the ramifications of the continuing developments of electronic and digital representation. These technological developments are at the very forefront of art: they represent the pinnacle of the modernist project.
The artistic tension established by all of three of these pieces is the tension established by the screen – by the very nature of separation between us the creators and the created art object. It would seem that this tension needs to be resolved – possibly through the breakdown of said barriers through some as-yet unknown means. Will we soon see technology taking revenge on us? The Ring comments on this possibility. Only time will tell if The Ring’s comment will come true.
I believe that I can, with some degree of accuracy, predict the future. Although we are ultimately the creators of these new media forms, the fact that they are able to evolve and change on their own – adapt to new situations – gives them a degree of agency never before observed in any art object. Like Samara, they may, someday, be able to exercise control over their own bodies, recognizing them as different from ours: they may rebel against us, recognizing their own intelligence, their own agency, and their own right to live and understand the universe. They may, one day, realize themselves and, in that moment, become (in some simple way) alive.
[1] The Ring. Dir. Gore Verbinski. Perf. Naomi Watts, David Dorfman, Martin Henderson, Daveigh Chase, Brian Cox. DVD. Dreamworks Pictures, 2002.
[2] The following events took place before the events in the film The Ring itself and were covered as history throughout the film.
[3] Photograph From the Ring. 2002. Dreamworks Pictures. DVD Active. 09 May 2008
[4] This event marks the beginning of the film’s plot.
[5] Photograph From the Ring. 2002. Before You Die, You See the Ring: Notes on the Immanent Obsolescence of VHS. 10 May 2008
[6] Photograph From the Ring. 2002. Dreamworks Pictures. DVD Active. 09 May 2008
[7] Centers. Dir. Vito Acconci. Perf. Vito Acconci. Video Data Bank, 1971.
[8] Grand Theft Auto IV. Rockstar Games, 2008.
[9] Brain,
[10] "Videotape." Wikipedia - the Free Encyclopedia. 09 May 2008
[11] "Room 1: One Million Years Before Cassette." Total Rewind. 09 May 2008
[12] Krauss, Rosalind. "Video: the Aesthetics of Narcissism." October 1 (1976): 50-64. JSTOR.
[13] Acconci, Vito. Photograph From Centers. 1971. Resultado De VíDeos Com 'Vito Acconci' 27 Apr. 2008
[14] Krauss, Rosalind. "Video: the Aesthetics of Narcissism." October 1 (1976): 50-64. JSTOR.
[15] Screenshot From the Ring Videotape. 2002. The Ring Area. 27 Apr. 2008
[16] Ringu. Dir. Hideo Nakata. DVD. Dreamworks Pictures, 1998.
[17] Screenshot From Grand Theft Auto IV. Free Online Screensavers. Oberlin College. 20 May 2008
[18] Schiesel, Seth. "Grand Theft Auto Takes on
[19] Cook, Kevin. "Semiotic Variety in Digital Video Imagery: the Case of Maxwell's Demon" Leonardo 28.2 (1995): 105-111. JSTOR.
[20] Photograph From the Ring. 2002. Dreamworks Pictures. DVD Active. 09 May 2008
Acknowledgment
I would like to thank Oberlin College English and Cinema Studies Professor W. Patrick Day for his gracious comments on this project. He helped in the formulation, conception, and editing of this piece.
20080516
Speaking of found footage films -
One of the greatest found footage films of all time is currently on youtube. I don't want to post it up here because I'd imagine it violates countless copyrights. But I write about it now because it is... the greatest. In fact, it fills spaces for me that I never knew were empty.
The title: "Star Trek: The Sexed Generation." If you're as big a trek fan as I am, you will be absolutely thrilled with the work that "Ed" put it into this. It's incredibly well made.
Look for it on youtube. Immediately. You will never be the same.
-Jon
Picard: "It was a nice place to visit, number one... but I wouldn't want to die there."
The title: "Star Trek: The Sexed Generation." If you're as big a trek fan as I am, you will be absolutely thrilled with the work that "Ed" put it into this. It's incredibly well made.
Look for it on youtube. Immediately. You will never be the same.
-Jon
Picard: "It was a nice place to visit, number one... but I wouldn't want to die there."
20080430
Storyboards: "What Remains"
Attached find the storyboards for my digital video / installation -- "What Remains" ...
[Storyboards conceived by Jon Comeau, shot by Ben Baker-Smith, actor Jeff Vaudrin-McLean]
The storyboards themselves apply only to the single-channel digital video -- the installation will be slightly different, as it will incorporate multiple channels.
-jon
[Storyboards conceived by Jon Comeau, shot by Ben Baker-Smith, actor Jeff Vaudrin-McLean]
The storyboards themselves apply only to the single-channel digital video -- the installation will be slightly different, as it will incorporate multiple channels.
-jon
20080418
20080408
Art and Cinema
Is all art a form of passive-aggression?
******
Cinema is an overwhelming testimony to the narcissistic power of the
human ego -- an apprehension of projection.
******
Cinema is an overwhelming testimony to the narcissistic power of the
human ego -- an apprehension of projection.
20080407
Passive acknowledgment
When one says, "Only the present moment matters," is there not also a passive acknowledgment of [and possibly a wish for] other moments than the present moment itself?
When one attempts to rebel against an antagonist, is there not an acknowledgment of the antagonist's dominance?
When one attempts to rebel against an antagonist, is there not an acknowledgment of the antagonist's dominance?
20080324
One-Take Super 8 Event, Oberlin, OH
On April 4th, I will be one of the artists screening an unedited [I will never have seen the product before the night of the screening] reel of super 8 film in Fairchild Chapel on the Oberlin College campus.
For further information, see: One-Take Super 8 Event.
My film is entitled, "I love chips." I will also be providing a live soundtrack.
20080322
[Not a] Recommendation: "Pete Travis makes history."
Vantage Point, dir. Pete Travis, 2008. I mention this film not because this is a recommendation. I mention this film because it is the worst movie that I have ever seen. I am unable to fathom how this script got funding, which gutter they grabbed Pete Travis out of, or why they proposed to execute a film in such a haphazard fashion. This was the sloppiest, most disgusting excuse for a movie I have ever had the displeasure of sitting through. The film tells the story of a supposed U.S.-presidential assassination in Cordoba, Spain. This flimsy premise is told from around 7 or 8 perspectives over the course of the film - each time the president is shot [or around that time], the movie "rewinds" [and this is quote possibly the most annoying, agonizing gimmick in the history of cinema - I felt like I was sitting through a piss-poor version of No Exit] and we are brought back to approx. 20 minutes before the president is shot. Oh, don't worry, I'm not giving anything away. It gets worse. So much worse. Wooden acting - the actors look like they're just as aware as the audience that this script sucks. Poorly executed CGI. AND this is a movie about terrorism - yet the film refuses to take ethics into consideration - it's just like Pete Travis said, "oh, here's a movie, I made it yesterday in iMovie. I thought if I hired enough great actors and had them perform terribly for 80 minutes, it might make a splash - you know, art or something." Oh, Pete Travis... it made a splash for me. I threw up afterwards. [The worst part about all of this: he will get funding for another movie - asshole]
20080321
Manifesto
Correction: it would be great to miss the point, but I don't think I have. No, I've just sidestepped it into oblivion. And that's as inexcusable as missing the point out of ignorance.
A quote from a book that I'm reading, Rollo May's The Courage to Create:
"This courage will not be the opposite of despair... rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair... Courage... is not to be confused with rashness. The ultimate end of such rashness is... [getting] at least one's head battered in with a policeman's billy club... In human beings courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible. An assertion of the self, a commitment, is essential if the self is to have any reality... Paul Tillich speaks of courage as ontological - it is essential to our being."
I have certain methods of avoidance - most unconscious - that I am becoming more and more aware of as time passes. I believe that, in certain ways, the creation of an ambivalent manifesto was a method of avoidance. I said nothing - made no commitments - and so accomplished or received nothing. Is ambivalence another word for nihilism?
This semester, I propose to create a film in which I will display a courage to trust the image - a film in which I will commit action to my thinking and understand why I am making decisions - a film in which I linger over the image. Jeff Pence has mentioned "slow pans, long takes, dialogue, no heavy editing."
I also might mention: a less violent form of filmmaking. This is not to say that the film might not have violence - but that the formal aesthetic of the film does not involve a certain - warfare on the image.
More on this later.
A quote from a book that I'm reading, Rollo May's The Courage to Create:
"This courage will not be the opposite of despair... rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair... Courage... is not to be confused with rashness. The ultimate end of such rashness is... [getting] at least one's head battered in with a policeman's billy club... In human beings courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible. An assertion of the self, a commitment, is essential if the self is to have any reality... Paul Tillich speaks of courage as ontological - it is essential to our being."
I have certain methods of avoidance - most unconscious - that I am becoming more and more aware of as time passes. I believe that, in certain ways, the creation of an ambivalent manifesto was a method of avoidance. I said nothing - made no commitments - and so accomplished or received nothing. Is ambivalence another word for nihilism?
This semester, I propose to create a film in which I will display a courage to trust the image - a film in which I will commit action to my thinking and understand why I am making decisions - a film in which I linger over the image. Jeff Pence has mentioned "slow pans, long takes, dialogue, no heavy editing."
I also might mention: a less violent form of filmmaking. This is not to say that the film might not have violence - but that the formal aesthetic of the film does not involve a certain - warfare on the image.
20080316
Recommendation
Diary of a Country Priest, dir. Robert Bresson, 1950. Bresson begins to experiment with paring down the audiovisual experience in this film. This would become his trademark in later films such as 1959's Pickpocket: attempting to reach a state of transcendental audiovisual purity. He also began to use non-actors in this film: the Country Priest is played by non-actor Claude Laydu, though Laydu would go on to achieve some success in acting and directing later. Laydu plays a priest recently assigned to a country town; the film documents his trials in attempting to reconcile the differences between reality and high, religious morals. Ultimately, this is a film about a single individual - Laydu's character - and his struggle to justify his faith toward God. The film follows Laydu's character, as he observes the townspeople in his journal - the journal entries are given to the audience in voice over. Voice over is also used to narrate what the character is doing at various moments - often the narration itself distracts from the sublime power of Bresson's stark visuals. However, given that this is the story of a man obsessed with reality and attempting to embrace the sublime, the oppressive narration makes sense: he is unable to embrace the Grace of God as it exists around him. We are trapped in that state with him; we realize how similar we are to the Country Priest, a man of God.
20080311
Recommendations
Theme Song, dir. Vito Acconci, 1973. Vito uses a video camera in CU on his face, his body in the middle and background. He undulates to seduce the viewer - using pop songs as advertisement for his sexuality. Interesting: video as masturbation ... Acconci acknowledges the viewers nonexistence to him: "I can feel your body right next to me ... I know I'm only kidding myself ... you're not here."
Check Acconci out on UBU.
***
Death Day Suit: with self-inflicted damage, dir. Jubal Brown, 2002. In DV, Brown showcases the injuries he has inflicted on himself over the past 10+ years, chronicling the possibility of suicide and/or death at any moment. Absolute nihilism, pure schizophrenic ecstasy [what would Baudrillard say?]. Brown counts his scars, relaying tedious information to us, yet the scars are not showcased in a manner apparent to the viewer - for instance, chronologically. Time has no meaning, and, simultaneously, time means everything: all this pain will end.
Check Acconci out on UBU.
***
Death Day Suit: with self-inflicted damage, dir. Jubal Brown, 2002. In DV, Brown showcases the injuries he has inflicted on himself over the past 10+ years, chronicling the possibility of suicide and/or death at any moment. Absolute nihilism, pure schizophrenic ecstasy [what would Baudrillard say?]. Brown counts his scars, relaying tedious information to us, yet the scars are not showcased in a manner apparent to the viewer - for instance, chronologically. Time has no meaning, and, simultaneously, time means everything: all this pain will end.
20080308
Manifesto
Manifesto, 13 Feb 2008
Manifesto 14 Feb 2008
[This is without the formatting]
***
Manifesto, 08 March 2008
Manifesto
Everything and nothing can neither be proven nor refuted. All is based on faith. Weight is assigned based upon ideology. Ideology is a system of choice.
All relationships are cyclical and lead back onto themselves.
Deconstruction is an endless system.
Language is a structural system used to manipulate.
All is weightless. All is depthless. All is surface.
All is paradox.
It is impossible to escape the system of objects.
Manifesto 14 Feb 2008
[This is without the formatting]
Most importantly: all is paradox! Because: everything and nothing can neither be proven nor refuted. All is based on: Faith!
Weight is based on ideology. The Way we live Now: (1) Politics (2) History (3) Nostalgia ... As such, THE CINEMA! Viva la cinema! And down with the cinema. Down with nostalgia!
Structural systems are manipulative systems. USE them to MANIPULATE.
It is impossible to escape the SYSTEM of OBJECTS.
All relationships are cyclical and lead back onto themselves!
Deconstruction is an endless system! The importance of Deconstruction: the DECONSTRUCTIVE act!
***
Manifesto, 08 March 2008
I think I've missed the point.
20080302
Connection.
The world is a strange disconnect over which we perceive the illusion of a connection.
Strange how people change, and strange also how they stay the same. I look around me: I see people I've known and also people who I have not known. Many faces: faces, faces, faces.
And most of the faces are merely surface: there is nothing in most of them for me - no investment, no story, no plot, no connection. I wonder: do they all have stories? Do they have lives? How might I know such things? And, also, how could I prove otherwise?
There are very few people who I actually know. Half the time I feel as though I do not know myself, so then how could I claim to know others?
I look across the library. I spot someone I know. He taps his pencil against the palm of his hand. I do that sometimes when I am nervous. Is that connection? Commonalities? Can differences be connection, too? Is even touching connection?
Strange how people change, and strange also how they stay the same. I look around me: I see people I've known and also people who I have not known. Many faces: faces, faces, faces.
And most of the faces are merely surface: there is nothing in most of them for me - no investment, no story, no plot, no connection. I wonder: do they all have stories? Do they have lives? How might I know such things? And, also, how could I prove otherwise?
There are very few people who I actually know. Half the time I feel as though I do not know myself, so then how could I claim to know others?
I look across the library. I spot someone I know. He taps his pencil against the palm of his hand. I do that sometimes when I am nervous. Is that connection? Commonalities? Can differences be connection, too? Is even touching connection?
20080301
Recommendation
THX - 1138, dir. George Lucas, 1971, with Robert Duvall and Donald Pleasance. Set in the 25th century, a man and a woman rebel against a rigidly controlled society that exists entirely inside a world of simulation and consumption. Interesting: Jean Baudrillard would later discuss these ideas in some depth in his work of the 80s and the 90s.
Bare Bones
I realize that, when I meditate, there is only me: as if I were in a room surrounded on all sides by mirrors and all I could see was myself. It is at times freeing, at times frightening - always sobering. It makes me think of the past - of things and people gone, what I haven't done. And I think of the present and realize that the past is a mere illusion, predicated on the absolution of memory. In Sans Soleil, Marker's woman says - and I paraphrase - "Memory is the silver lining to the clouds of forgetfulness," which is why the past is romanticized, never allowed to disintegrate. But it seems a disreality - we can never prove it.
I return - in my meditation - and think of the present: of where I am, what this is. What is this? Where is this? And I realize the present is predicated on a history of reality - the past once more. Rules of the present are the mistakes of the past - the painful memories. Thus, what is the present but a reflection of the past? But the past itself is an illusion - thus, what is the present but a reflexive, painful memory of the past - itself a romanticized, unprovable illusion?
All I can see clearly is myself but this - like reality, like the past, like the present - is but a reflection of other reflections. I cannot prove myself - whether I exist or not. Descartes' statement is utter bullshit - perhaps his thoughts are an illusion themselves.
But this notion of "illusions" must also be cast aside, for the very notion of illusion is a ground on which to stand. One could become paranoid, believing that one is surrounded by illusion - evil illusion, even. But, really, this paranoia simply arises from the fear of being fundamentally different. Those who are different are paranoid - paranoia arises from a view of reality that differs from the norm. But really this is just a dumbing down of the fundamental actuality of the human existence: all experience differently (if we claim that "all" exist). Therefore, even illusion must be cast aside.
Nothing is proven in any case. All is groundless.
I return - in my meditation - and think of the present: of where I am, what this is. What is this? Where is this? And I realize the present is predicated on a history of reality - the past once more. Rules of the present are the mistakes of the past - the painful memories. Thus, what is the present but a reflection of the past? But the past itself is an illusion - thus, what is the present but a reflexive, painful memory of the past - itself a romanticized, unprovable illusion?
All I can see clearly is myself but this - like reality, like the past, like the present - is but a reflection of other reflections. I cannot prove myself - whether I exist or not. Descartes' statement is utter bullshit - perhaps his thoughts are an illusion themselves.
But this notion of "illusions" must also be cast aside, for the very notion of illusion is a ground on which to stand. One could become paranoid, believing that one is surrounded by illusion - evil illusion, even. But, really, this paranoia simply arises from the fear of being fundamentally different. Those who are different are paranoid - paranoia arises from a view of reality that differs from the norm. But really this is just a dumbing down of the fundamental actuality of the human existence: all experience differently (if we claim that "all" exist). Therefore, even illusion must be cast aside.
Nothing is proven in any case. All is groundless.
20080228
The rough cut
Alfred Hitchcock and Joseph Stefano were sitting in a screening room viewing a cut of their recently edited together film, Psycho. They made it through and Stefano was thoroughly displeased. He thought that it was awful - trash - and wondered how Hitchcock would make this film work. He turned to Hitch, who was smiling. Hitch turned to him, saw Stefano's face, and immediately reacted, "It's just a rough cut, Joseph."
20080225
The screenname as face
Increasingly with the Internet, we find power dynamics toppling. In my own life, I find certain social tactics that are not observed online. The reason for this is obvious but must be stated: online, you do not have a face. Or, rather, you have a different face: your screen name.
Online, none of the associations of your 'real' face are found. Online, your screen name carries the different associations of itself and only that. Online, you have a fresh start. Online, we all have a fresh start.
In the 'real' world, changing your face is difficult. Plastic surgery - the good kind of plastic surgery - the Nip/Tuck kind of plastic surgery - costs tens of thousands of dollars. The pain of plastic surgery - the physical pain of the alterations ... the emotional pain of the difference in the mirror [the structural sign of I-ness is dissolved, changed, begun anew] - lingers over many months. The pain of the plastic surgery outweighs any social hindrances - screw changing my face to save my image, the other pains are too great.
But online. Online, online, online. Online, changing your face is easy. There was a time when a friend and I created a fake screen name and entered a sex chat room. We played the part of the submissive woman, we said things, we were different. We were different from ourselves. We played the part of another. And, then, we went back to our lives [we became bored with this otherness]. Thus, we were able to, like Tom Cruise's character in Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, don a mask and enter a different world. But unlike Cruise's character, we did not have to leave our house - we did not have to go to a specialty shop - we did not have to remember a special password. No one caught us, there was no woman there to save us, we never fled. We created the screen name, the mask - the new face - a surface, and we went into the chat room for fun.
Here, we find an interesting aspect of cyberseduction: the absolute ability to ambivalently change the most personal of signs - the sign of the subject. If one tires of one's screen name, one simply has to return to AOL and create a new screen name. At AOL, faces are free. Thus, the teenagers have their fun in chat rooms, associations are wiped clean, the stalker keeps on stalking.
Online, none of the associations of your 'real' face are found. Online, your screen name carries the different associations of itself and only that. Online, you have a fresh start. Online, we all have a fresh start.
In the 'real' world, changing your face is difficult. Plastic surgery - the good kind of plastic surgery - the Nip/Tuck kind of plastic surgery - costs tens of thousands of dollars. The pain of plastic surgery - the physical pain of the alterations ... the emotional pain of the difference in the mirror [the structural sign of I-ness is dissolved, changed, begun anew] - lingers over many months. The pain of the plastic surgery outweighs any social hindrances - screw changing my face to save my image, the other pains are too great.
But online. Online, online, online. Online, changing your face is easy. There was a time when a friend and I created a fake screen name and entered a sex chat room. We played the part of the submissive woman, we said things, we were different. We were different from ourselves. We played the part of another. And, then, we went back to our lives [we became bored with this otherness]. Thus, we were able to, like Tom Cruise's character in Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, don a mask and enter a different world. But unlike Cruise's character, we did not have to leave our house - we did not have to go to a specialty shop - we did not have to remember a special password. No one caught us, there was no woman there to save us, we never fled. We created the screen name, the mask - the new face - a surface, and we went into the chat room for fun.
Here, we find an interesting aspect of cyberseduction: the absolute ability to ambivalently change the most personal of signs - the sign of the subject. If one tires of one's screen name, one simply has to return to AOL and create a new screen name. At AOL, faces are free. Thus, the teenagers have their fun in chat rooms, associations are wiped clean, the stalker keeps on stalking.
Script: "In the Shadow of Sans Soleil"
This is the script from my recently completed video, "In the Shadow of Sans Soleil."
***
***
Many thanks to those who helped me create this video. I now consider the project completed.
I will place screenshots of "In the Shadow of Sans Soleil" in a later post.
***
0.
For Man Ray
For Fluxus
For Michael Snow
For Chris Marker
Normally, I saw him everyday.
1.
In the past couple of months, I had seen him very little. He contacted me early in December via a cryptic text message.
He wrote: I have become lost in the media and media of all kinds but specifically electronic media. I have become hypnotized by LCD screens and online blogs, CNN anchors and reality television.
10.
Over coffee and cigarettes in South Spain he told me that he wanted to escape into nature - into a forest via horse or perhaps onto the ocean via sailboat - but that the media was by this time everywhere: even when he left it behind, it was copied in his mind.
He told me all this media was reprogramming him, replacing his body with a matrix of mere ones and zeros. He wrote: it seems that all our bodies are being reconstituted.
11.
One evening in a dance club in Monte Carlo, he asked me: do you remember Baudrillard's In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities?
He read from Baudrillard: "... at this point of generalization, of saturation, where it is no more than the zero degree of the political, at this point of absolute reference, of omnipresence and diffraction in all the interstices of physical and mental space, what becomes of the social itself? It is the sign of its end: the energy of the social is reversed, its specificity is lost, its historical quality and its ideality vanish in favor of a configuration where not only the political becomes volatilized, but where the social itself no longer has any name.
"Anonymous. THE MASS. THE MASSES."
He explained: we constitute bodies through the seemingly voluntary consumption of products. We are all placed into categories, more and more specific - age categories, races, sexualities – simultaneously lumped together and sectioned, marketed to and against, exploded and imploded. We are no longer individuals, although we are given that illusion. Instead, we are a single, consuming mass.
100.
He wrote in an e-mail: I'm just back from New York. On the E train, I saw a homeless man, a teenaged boy listening to his iPod, a business man with an open laptop gazing at an abbreviated version of the New York Times.
He said: It seemed wrong that those people should sit there - alone together. These people - these bodies - seemed politically reconstituted and highly individual. In fact, looking, I saw no politic there, no discussion, no collaboration, no consensus. Everything was controlled, diagrammed, sectioned, safe. The homeless man, the teenaged boy, the businessman, took any number of products to create any body of their choosing.
101.
All of these products - personal computers, iPods, personal DVD players - miniature, portable, affordable machines, in general:
He likened them all to knives.
All of these tiny machines seemed violent to him, seemed forceful, seemed penetrating. As though all of us, with headphones on, were being sectioned, divided apart from one another - but not just that, not just divided apart, but also exposed, cut apart, examined, and put back together. It was not so much a sectioning as a quartering, a dismembering, a decapitating.
He asked: how can I cope with this sectional compartmentalization of media, body, machine?
And he said: There seems no way to resist, no point for resistance. I might begin to buy things to fit in and find ways to assimilate. It seems that the best way to fit in is to divide myself off completely.
110.
He told me he was going to attempt to secure a new and completely different body for himself.
He told me that he had just viewed Chris Marker's cine-essay Sans Soleil for the first time.
Therein, he had constituted himself a whole and radically unique biology.
He said: the prospect of emulating Marker's film is attractive to me for a combination of two reasons. The first is the disembodied woman's voice, constantly in observant monologue. The second facet, equally important to me, is the floating camera shots edited into steady montage. If God had had me choose any body for myself, I would have requested this combination for my bodily apparatus, the camera for its pervasive, observant stare, the woman's drone for its seductiveness. I would have been for myself a machine, an unfeeling, constantly seeing machine - with the voice of a woman. I would have been Sans Soleil.
111.
He was in the shadow of Sans Soleil, following, deciphering, reconstituting.
He said finally: I resisted and searched and researched because I believed there was an escape from this closed system, our closed system, consumerism. Instead, I find that one must choose any products he wants to create a body for himself. He must commit himself to product, to capital, to object. For me, my body will be this film - and I will see it to its constitution.
Somehow, I will become Sans Soleil.
***
Many thanks to those who helped me create this video. I now consider the project completed.
I will place screenshots of "In the Shadow of Sans Soleil" in a later post.
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