Analogy (Campany)

The Analogy section of the CATTt is highly important. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you had to skip every section of the CAT but one, that the Analogy section is the one that should be held on to. I say this because The Cinematic provides clear-cut examples that can directly directly (not theoretically or contrastingly) help us come up with a system, our a set of instructions.

What makes Cinematic so interesting is that it's not only Campany's view; instead, it is an anthology with many different types of analogies and examples to follow from multiple authors. It is helpful, too, that many of the authors of various chapters are themselves photographers or filmmakers. Their artistic focus (whether its a second or third or etc... focus along with their writing) allows us to get an example of HOW they did things, not only why. It is the how that we are most interested in because we are trying to create a how ourselves.


This is what we look to...

1. Still Movement
2. Reel Time
3. To Infinity
4. Photobombing
5. The Wind's Wind

EMAIL 4 [Campany Email 1] - My Life Flashed Before My Eyes
EMAIL 5 [Campany Email 2] - Electracy As Art

Still Movement (Campany Instructions 1)

Bragaglia's translated piece about Photodynamism is interesting because of the "trash" potential of those pictures that we take and then delete because they are not focused. They are not sharp. They don't capture a perfect image. I think in this day and age when Autofocus technology is so precise  there is something infuriating about producing a picture that's less than crystal-clear perfection.

But it happens all of the time, especially now when everyone is always carrying a camera in their back pocket.

Bragaglia says that "In this way light and movement in general, light acting as movement, and hence the movement of light, are revealed in Photodynamism. Given the transcendental nature of the phenomenon of movement, it is only by means of Phtodynamism that the painter can know what happens in the intermovemental states, and become acquainted with the volumes of individual motions ... Only with Photodynamism can the artist be in possession of the elements necessary for the construction of a work of art embodying the desired synthesis" (29).

What he says here often happens accidentally, but it can also happen quite deliberately in several ways. The instructions, then, are multi-parted.

Instruction 1: Put your camera's setting on the long-exposure (these are usually night-time settings, utilized in very very very steady mode that consists of multiple rapid-fire shots that layer on top of each other so that whatever light that's captured is multiplied onto the same image. Anther way that this works is that the shutter doesn't close, and thus attempt to capture, for as long as possible, the light. This is how people take pictures of the Milky Way). Now, not all cameras have a long-exposure setting, so I would read the instruction manual or Google your camera's ID number to check. What happens if you don't keep your camera steady (usually by not actually touching it), is it causes a highly blurred image, an image that appears to be moving. It works the other way too: If the camera is still, but the subject is not (remember, these long-exposure shots are usually used for taking pictures in the dark of objects that don't usually move: like the stars), the camera will take a Photodynamic shot. In this Instruction, I would like for you to keep your camera as steady as possible, and have someone, your subject (object?) move in some way. 

Instruction 2: Attempt to take a moving shot, a blurry shot, of movement or laughter or talking, or etc... if it helps, turn your auto-focus off (this option is usually available in any camera, even cell phone cameras). Try to capture that moment of horror, as Bragaglia calls it. 

Instruction 3: Manipulation of Photodynamism. On a photo editing program, place your image and then increase your blurring brush to the largest it can go. Swipe the brush once across the screen in an arched curving motion. 

How are these products different? How are they the same? What do they tell us? What do they tell us about Photodynamism?

Reel Time (Campany Instructions 2)

For as long as anyone can remember, theater and film productions have not operated in real time. In fact, it is a rare moment when we see that happening. Sometimes, even conversations that, to us, last three minutes, three hours have passed. We are supposed to imagine that the conversation took a lot longer than that.

We see this conversely as well: Moments that would have actually lasted mere seconds slow down into the slow motion shot so that we can see that "SUDDENLY" moment, the moment of trauma or the punctum moment.

Tarantino states that there is anxiety present in these moments of real time. He says, "Neurotic anxiety has changed in our hands into realistic anxiety, into fear of particular external situations of danger .... we ask ourselves what it is that is actually dangerous and actually feared in a situation of danger of this kind" (34).

Hollis Frampton relates that there was a woman who wanted to video tape every moment of her life in real time. This is a production that will never be watched again in full, since it would take another person's whole life to watch this person's lived life, and that's really not fair. But for the moment, I would like us to attempt this. Multi-part instructions are below:

Instruction 1: Take a video that's sped up (May I suggest tutorial videos on youtube) and attempt to slow them down to real time. This may be difficult, of course, because many people choose those moments to cut their video, but attempt to do so. If there is a gap, attempt to put the gap in there.

Instruction 2: Videotape yourself doing something, anything. Washing dishes (like Jeanne Dielman), or driving to school, or whatever. Can you watch it all, start to finish? What does it mean that you can or can't? What happens if you speed it up? Slow it way down? What do you notice that you would not have noticed otherwise? Do you feel the time that it actually took to do whatever it was you did in the video (often, for instance, when we're waiting for something to happen, it seems to take forever)?

Gaensheimer states that "through the extreme slowing down of the movement, the greeting between the women seems to become divided up into a wealth of individual elements: each look, each movement, each fraction of a facial expression is released from the overall context of the story and stands out as meaningful," yet Miriam Rosen, in her interview by Chantal Akerman, states that, when she's filming, she doesn't want  it to "'look real', I don't want it to look natural, but I want people to feel the time that it takes, which is not the time that it really takes" (71, 195). These are two different kinds of times -- of the many that can be looked at -- that I want to investigate here through these instructions. Ultimately, how might they relate to the bigger picture project of Electracy?

To Infinity (Campany Instructions 3)

"As the past is formed not after the present but simultaneously with it, therefore time must divide itself up into present and past in each of its individual moment ... By combining two one-minute videos .... projected one after the other in an endless loop, Rosemarie Trockel opposes the two forms of slowness which constitute the poles ... the representation of slowness by technically extending the moment, and the emergence of a consciousness of duration in the very process of perception" (77). Gaensheimer talks here about the strange way that time is perceived in film, and how it can be manipulated. The looping of films allows the viewer to be stuck in a present at the same time as they are stuck in the past. They have seen it, but they are seeing it still.

That looping mechanism is important to our understanding of time. And it is even more vital to our understanding of Electracy, I think, because time oftentimes doesn't seem like an element when we're thinking about the internet. Also, this kind of looping nature is inherent in the gif image type, where the the group of images that make up the seconds-long film loop constantly. There is time embedded into the gif when there is a sentence that runs through it that denotes the start and the end of the gif. And of course, it is obvious in most looping videos where the start and the end is.

A challenge, then, would be to make the gif in such a way that it would endlessly loop so that we really would not know where the start and the end is, so that the anticipation of a past/future/present can be eliminated. This is something that I think is really inherent in Electracy, and so this is what will make up this part of the instruction.

Instruction: Make an actual infinite looping gif. Remember, you must find a way that will subvert the idea of time. That means that this gif has to defy ontological expectations of some kind of an end.

Photobombing (Campany Instructions 4)

When someone searches something on the internet, sometimes they get some random results that don't have anything to do with each other. That is part of what I want to call the montage-ablity of the internet. The internet automatically puts things together that we otherwise might not have thought to; it allows us to open up new roads for interesting projects. This is where such things as the Google poetry comes from.

Durand talks about a character who "suffers from a powerful mimetic compulsion that makes him crop up willy-nilly in all kinds of periods and situations, in all parts of the globe, like some ... parasite.... it is surely the consequence of never having read Moby Dick ... Not to have read this novel ... is ... to be condemned to floating around without the salutary ballast of a masterpiece ... is to run the risk of not being stabilized by the cohesive power of myth" (154).

I think it's interesting to think about the myth-making process that's involved with something like the internet, a place where objects that are comparable to American classics that are barely read by anyone might be floating. For instance, talk to anyone about Xanga and they might remember it, they might Google it and find it around, but I think a place like Xanga made up the building block of the blog community. To me, Xanga was the predecessor to popular blogging sites like, well, like this one.

Durand also talks about the movie Film Stills which recorded the filmmaker's life. I think this is important with regards to the quote about Moby Dick because it makes one think about the coorelation between having myth as some kind of a masthead that keeps one's life afloat but also anchored. What happens when one documents their lives and connect them to the lives of others: A genomic vs and individual reality (a la Stiegler).

Instruction: Make a video montage that combines four things: photos of your day, photos of your face at least once every day for a month, photos of random image searches of internet mythology or history or canon (perhaps Google maps), and photos of you imposed on these random images (you would essentially be photobombing these images virtually). These images, when placed together in your mini-film, should be randomized. What can you tell about your place in internet mythology? Are you like the character who hadn't read Moby Dick? If so, then so what?

The Wind's Wind (Campany Instructions 5)

Raul Ruiz says, "In front of my house, wind would move the trees. At a certain point the wind would blow with such regularity that one had the impression the trees were frozen in place, bent over in the same direction ... that moment of immobility gave the impression that movement and its opposite were not contradictory. ... This oscillation [between constant mobility and sudden immobility] gradually gave a new feeling to the scene: when everything moved about one only saw immobility, and vice-versa [sic]. I told myself this was a good way to photograph the wind" (140).

I quote this text by Ruiz because I think it says something both about the photograph (the media he is talking about in here) and film. Of course, filming the wind, it's constant movement and the way it changes the landscape) is a way to film something invisible (like how we film invisible men by the way the haystacks dent to denote his body). To think about the body of the wind in a photograph versus a film is interesting too.

Of course, a person who loves the wind, and as a person who utilized the wind in her Mystory when I talked about Pocahontas I think it's fascinating to try and signify something that is not visible to us. But what about the wind's wind?

In the movie Stay, a film kind of about a mentally distressed artist who can somehow predict future events, the artist is sitting in his lecture class listening to an art historian talk about some Goya paintings. The art historian says that although one cannot paint the wind, one can paint the wind's wind. I always thought that was an an awesome analysis, not only because it made sense, but also because it didn't make any sense at all. There is, for me, something uncanny about it.

We can see the wind's wind when we observe the way that smoke flows, for instance, as the art historian says. But there comes with this phrase a desire to think about a double invisibility: If one cannot photograph the wind, how can one photograph the (logically twice-removed) wind's wind? This is where Ruiz's process along with a kind of time-lapse comes into play, I think, to get us closer to the answer to this question.

Stimson stipulates that "in the first attempts to use serial photography to capture motion and narrative sequence, the aim was not to reproduce life as experienced in time but instead to see what cannot be seen by the naked eye, to see what can be seen only when time is stopped ... the camera was brought in to give visual testimony to what the eye on its own could not see by disarticulating the sequence of events, by breaking the narrative apart" (95).

This quote leads us to the instruction for this blog because it highlights the way that time lapse sequence photography allows for the invisibilities, for the gaps, for the stains of the wind and the wind's wind to show through somehow. This process, unlike but also so much like Ruiz's photographic methods, allows us to get closer to our desire to see the wind (so we can paint with these colors that Pocahontas sings about -- because we can sometimes actually see the wind in the movie).

Instruction: For this part, you need two cameras (one has to have the ability to take videos). Turn your flash off because that usually slows down the process of fast action photography. Put your camera's settings on the "sports" feature - since sports are often filled with fast-action movement, the sports feature allows for a very fast shutter speed that captures someone in motion (a little bit opposite of photodynamism). Some cameras or camera apps allow for sequence shots to be taken by just the click of one button, some cameras you have to keep clicking the button for the camera to take a series of photographs. Figure this out on your individual camera setting. Then, either wait for a windy day or utilize the power of an electric fan to simulate the wind, and take action shots at the same time that you take the video. Analyze the video side-by-side with the sequence shots: what can you see that  you couldn't before? 

Bonus instruction: Take the photographs out of sequence and then look through them again. What changes have occurred? Do you notice something different?

My Life Flashed Before My Eyes (Email 4//Campany1]

Hi Everyone,

It's a cliché phrase, "My life flashed before my eyes," one that we're all familiar  with as an instant highlight replay reel that apparently plays at moments of death or near death. But if we place it next to Pier Paolo Pasolini's conjecture about montage and death, I think that it starts to mean something else, something more. This chapter of The Cinematic also really highlighted the other texts for the CATTt and for the semester, most particularly Ulmers' Internet Invention and Lacan's The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Ulmer's Mystory construction is, I think, an apt example of a montage. It reiterates patterns, even as it continuously presents us with something different. Moreover, I remember one week when Ulmer stated that our Mystories wouldn't ever be complete until we died (meaning, of course, that if no one was there to complete them, they would essentially never be complete). This, of course, is for the same reason that Pasolini says that "an honest man may at seventy commit a crime ... (that) modifies all his past actions ... so long as I'm not dead, no one will be able to guarantee he truly knows me" (Pasolini 86). The present will always filter out the past, which means that the past is in constant flux mode always, until our last breath. Oddly, this is a depressing – a lonely – notion, that no one, not even I, will ever know who I am, except maybe until that last moment before I die (if I'm even conscious enough to watch it). Though, at that point, I become a "was" and not an "am," essentially insuring that no one will ever know who I [present tense] am. Our timeline's convoluted and tangled Persistent Presentness, simultaneous as it is, is just as oddly comforting: "It's not over until it's over," as another cliché goes.

I want to think about the importance of time to our current project. What does time do to, how does time affect, Electracy? To think about this, we must first go back an excerpt to Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's piece (page 83). He says that we have to first understand that "the knowledge of photography is just as important as that of the alphabet. The illiterate of the future will be the person ignorant of the use of the camera as well as of the pen," before we can realize that a series of photographs can be as potent as a weapon or as tender as a poem (83). These days, I think that his position about the camera/pen equilibrium/dichotomy is very valid. Of course, our writing these days is less through a pen than through a keyboard (this email is a case-in-point), but for the moment, I will allow myself to think that the pen is any machine that allows for a written language to be transcribed or translated for later use (such as a computer, or a phone). It is quite fascinating to find that, currently, one machine that allows us to write is also the one that allows us to take images (the phone/tablet). It is just as common to take a picture of a product, video tape a recipe, take a picture of a written recipe, than it is to write it down. 

But, with Electracy, we're not trying to take the rules of writing and change them to fit an Electracal platform. We're trying to make our own instructions for Electracy. I think this is where Lacan's and Pasolini's input about the montage is the strongest. It's difficult to find montage in writing (that's not saying that it doesn't exist in some forms, perhaps something Joyce-ian). But it's strong in visual language. A camera can make a montage quite easily, especially with the use of apps that allow for montages to be constructed on the spot. For instance, I have an app called PicCollage that allows a person to pick random (if they want) images from their gallery and mesh them together. This kind of surrealism enables a situation where a "single picture loses its separate identity and becomes a part of the assembly, it becomes a structural element of the related whole which is the thing itself" (Moholy-Nagy 83). This brick-laying, rather than tent-unfolding, to try and ironically use paradoxically-static architectural terms, is what gives movement to a piece, to a life.  

How can we think about montage and time in terms of Electracy; how does Electracy provide that foundation for montage? I think the important thing to note is that montage is a way that supersedes the idea of linear time, in a way. If a single picture loses its singular identity when put in a sequence, although that perhaps is not always a montage, that's a similar position to Pasolini's, where he says that a life is made up of these images that are "non-symbolic signs" when looked at from the present tense -- until they are put in a montage, at which point they become the past. This simultaneous idea of present and past is confusing. But at the same time, it's not, because we are living with it all the time, and because time is never linear.

I will bring into play my idea of drafts again. Especially with Gmail, whenever one saves a draft, a completely different link is provided. What that means is that there exists, simultaneously, a sequence of urls that denote different changes that one has made to their email messages. These are past drafts, yet they exist at the same time always. Now, I don't know if they recycle these urls (probably, they do), but for the time that they exist, they are singular and individual in their incompleteness, and they aren't, because they lose their uniqueness if put next to the rest of the urls. 

Therefore, when we say or think, since that experience (if it's real) is a cliché because of film, and it is usually only in film when we really hear people saying that (or having the time afterwards to say that), about our life flashing before our eyes, it immediately becomes a finished work, a singular work made up of many other tiny singular works that make us a "past." It is an anthology of things that have become our canon. But what can we do with this construction in the mean time. You know... while we're still alive?

These different ideas about montage and time are definitely worth looking into further, and I am planning to do so in a blog.

Again, I apologize if I made no sense at all. 

See you soon,

Asmaa

----------------------------------------------------------Response

Of course you made (no) sense!  Or rather, you are a HEUretic.  We are inventing, and part of the interest of the email as back-channel is what each one selects and puts forward as worthy of attention.  Pasolini is hugely interesting in his own right, and I suppose the downside of a collection is that most of the individual pieces leads away to wonderful riches.  On the positive side as I noted is the accumulation expressing the propensity of the argument (regarding cinematics in this case), from which we may derive some confidence about the terms of our experiment.

    Pasolini is one of the  best representatives in the collection of the other major scene of instruction for electracy, along with training analysis in Psychoanalysis.  Pasolini was an auteur, as you no doubt are aware, and original even in that select group (thinking of the French New Wave, who invented the idea, but also Italian Neorealism).  He was a major poet to begin with, and also a significant theorist of semiotics, in addition to being an important filmmaker.  The argument touched on in our collection is worth extracting for further attention, as you have done. Pasolini's term was the "image-sign," (im-sign), by which he  meant that  the  world is already coded, such that photography (film) "writes with the world." You will recognize here my point about popular culture being to electracy what native Greek (and its culture) was to literacy.  The "code" supposedly missing from photography (according to Barthes, for example) is actually there, as ideology (as Barthes himself showed in his mythology). 
   What auteurs do, Pasoline said, is develop a particular vocabulary specific to them, which turns out to be close to mystory.  A commonplace of discussions contrasting word and image is such points as that "dog" as concept is a transcendent abstraction, but a picture of a dog has to be particular:  it must be a spaniel, a terrier... and some dogs are doggier than others (a concept is distributed from center to margin, with German Shepherds near the center and Pekinese on the margin).  Auteurs replace both universals and generic particulars with singular elements of their personal circumstance. Lacan would call this peculiarity "sinthome" (archaic symptom), to say that it is irreducible, and ultimately must be embraced as the core nonsense of being.  

Electracy As Art (Email 5//Campany 2)

Hi everyone,

For my last email, I'd like to think about the whole semester... as a whole CATTt (let's say), instead of just amputated parts like a puzzle. I want to instead focus on the propensity of this class, to think about it as a work of art in its own right. To do this, I want to focus on everything that made it what it was, our paint and canvas, our Shi, our weapons fired from afar and from close up. Four books, a room with computers inside a room with computers, .... and that small whistling noise that happened often during the end our sessions (was it a bird?). Also, did you notice the camera mounted on the wall, that we are constantly being photographed/filmed for three hours a week (and obviously more, but I'm talking about specifically in the context of this class)?

For a painting to be painted, or for a picture to be taken, the artist needs several things to work in her favor. The light has to be just right, and for that to happen, the dark has to be just right too. When we're creating our system of poetics, we're obviously choosing our materials very carefully. The path that we choose to take, whichever that will be, will lead us to different ideas, different experimental outcomes. This is where our process looks like possible time lines, branching off into a multitude of different directions: do we choose the yellow paint or the green? It will change the picture.

If we think about this process as photographic, or filmic, I think it allows for us to realize even more things about Electracy particularly, since the translation from photography to Electracy (is translation needed?) is smoother. The process is like a photograph when we choose a single shot to represent the event of the Heuritics of Electracy. In this sense, our blogs are pictures. Each blog is one picture, like the mystory where we ended up with a resulting wide image (not wide imageS). These days, although people obviously did this before as well, photo manipulation is also quite easily done. As we saw in my band presentation when Anastasia showed us the inverted images that totally transformed the picture into something Other than either of the two kinds of photographs that Thierry de Duve talks about, this manipulation is unique to the computer age, early computer age. In fact, early film experimented with this style often - an image would suddenly become its inverted self. This shift in the film form is jarring of course, because dark things become light and light things become dark. The contrasts are startling: the once-real becomes a total hoax, a fiction. But a fiction that tells us something. 

If we aim to think about the world in an Apophatic way, then inversions are necessary. Inversions too, help one see where something is missing in their painting. Here is an experiment: Color something in, with an actual paintbrush, on MS Paint, and then invert the image. You will have probably missed a spot. I think that's one of the things that Electracy does: it allows us to see the missed spots. And the best way to exemplify this is through art. It's hard to think about "missing spots" in photography, but inverting photography allows us to find parts of the picture that we otherwise missed.

These missing pieces and inversions make me think of ink blots, and of Lacan. One of Lacan's arguments in his text is that analysis, the process of the analyst and the analysand, the painting, the coloring in sessions, reveal things in an inverted fashion: The analysand might not only understand himself, but he might retroactively understand his psycho-analyst better too. In Electracy, we see this kind of thing all the time with the idea of the gaze. The gaze is always (perhaps) an inversion. In our poetics, it is essential, I think, to focus on this concept of the gaze, because we are the gazers here: We are walking through the city and picking out windows to stare into, to see ourselves from and through, to make ourselves transparent and empty, to soak in a kind of opaqueness. To change our focus (we have the ability to do that with our eyes and with our ears - remember the mysterious whistling noise in our classroom, how can we think about that in electrical terms, how can we use it).

I have gone on too long, I fear, so I will end with the idea that our seminar can be seen as a work of art, perhaps a dance rather than a painting or a photograph. Something thought out and choreographed with space for constant spontaneity. Are we all then taking pictures, screen caps, of the event? Do we function in the same way that the Instigram video we watched last week function, together capturing the apparent whole of the semester (in the notes we take)? What about the camera that's constantly filming...? Does it matter? 

Peace,

Asmaa 

------------------------------------------------------------------Response

A thoughtful reflection on process and time...  You identify a feature of Electracy that we have not discussed in any detail, which is that its fundamental outcome and purpose is "well-being."  The complexity  of this purpose is evident in the historical lesson that every apparatus seeks "well-being" in its own way (through salvation, or through empirical truth, for orality and literacy respectively).  But now Electracy turns upon this dimension itself, not to address it indirectly, but to consider how or in what way a body thrives.  Commentators on Aristotle will tell you that when the Greeks discussed well-being they did not promise happiness (that may be an accident of translation) but "thriving," measured more in terms of surface or worldly excellence rather than a state of mind or an intimate satisfaction. 

  Holistically, what does Electracy require?  You gave us one  good example that may be generalized.  The temporality of electracy (as readers of Avatar Emergency know) is Moment Against Now (to invoke a forumla). The formula gestures towards the heterotopia already discussed-- against Cartesian Cogito, the fact that I am not where I think, and think where I am not, meaning that my being is dispersed and the best we can do to gather it is an assemblage without unity let alone good form.  The new dimension opened to ontology is that of "nonsense," so to speak, of the sort Joyce penned in Finnegans Wake, of the sort explored in the non-figurative, abstract art experiments of the vanguard.  It concerns just the dimension of style, ornament, decoration, formerly marginalized and now foregrounded as the dimension of manner, style, concerning just intensity or quality of experience.  The promise of the apparatus is that this  sort of quality may be captured, enhanced, extended, shared (the Hadron Collider of jouissance).

   We noted that another scene of apprenticeship of Electracy besides Training Analysis in Psychoanalysis, is Auteurism is film.  How may an auteur be detected? not so much in story or even discourse, but style (here is the  import of Russian Formalism and its immense influence on textualism).  The other temporalities of orality and literacy persist (cyles and lines).  The temporality specific to electracy, beyond "history" (needing to reoccupy the abandoned bunkers of historiography to find new answers), is Moment (click).  What does that mean in practice, as comportment in the world? (how should I behave).  That there is an ethics following from an aesthetics of our meetings Wednesdays at 4:05, Spring semester 2014.  Well-Being is here now there then.