“A philosopher who has evolved his entire thinking from the fundamental themes of the philosophy of science, and followed the main line of the active, growing rationalism of contemporary science as closely as he could, must forget his learning and break with all his habits of philosophical research, if he wants to study the problems posed by the poetic imagination. For here the cultural past doesn’t count. The long day-in, day-out effort of putting together and constructing his thoughts is ineffectual. One must be receptive, receptive to the image at the moment it appears: if there be a philosophy of poetry, it must appear and re-appear through a significant verse, in total adherence to an isolated image; to be exact, in the very ecstasy of the newness of the image. The poetic image is a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche, the lesser psychological causes of which have not been sufficiently investigated.”
‘As the word suggests a link is a way of drawing connections between things, a way of forging semantic relationships. In the terminology of linguistics, the link plays a conjunctive role, binding together disparate ideas in digital prose. This seems self-evident enough, and yet for some reason the critical response to hypertext prose has always fixated on the dissociative powers of the link. In the world of hypertext fiction, the emphasis on fragmentation has its merits. But as a general interface convention, the link should be usually understood as a synthetic device, a tool that brings multifarious elements together into some kind or orderly unit. In this respect, the most compelling cultural analogy for the hypertext webs of today’s interfaces turns out to be not the splintered universe of channel surfing, but rather the damp fog-shrouded streets of Victorian London, and the mysterious resemblances of Charles Dickens. “Links of association” was actually a favourite phrase of Dickens. It plays a major role in the narrative of ‘Great Expectations – arguably his most intricately plotted work, and the most widely read of his ‘mature’ novels. For Dickens the link usually takes the form of a passing resemblance, half glimpsed and then forgotten. Throughout his oeuvre, the characters stumble across the faces of strangers and perceive some stray likeness, something felt but impossible to place. These moments are scattered through the novels like hauntings, like half memories, and it’s the ethereal quality that brings them very close to the subjective haze of modernism and the stream of consciousness.’ Interface Culture, Steven Johnson _ pg 111-112
Been thinking about my video interface where editing structure is of critical importance, decided to re-examine some of the theories of montage that I learnt in film school and have been looking at some Soviet directors namely; Eisenstein, Dovzhenko and Vertov who were all pioneering in the area of filmic montage.
Apart from montage another thing I find interesting about these directors specifically is the optimism and revolutionary spirit that they convey. People are often talking about a digital revolution, personally I am not sure I would use the term revolution in any greater sense than a massive shift in preference for digital over analogue technology, I can’t see the so called ‘digital revolution’ as having any real bearing on the political and social values of an advanced capitalist society. Yet it is easy to understand why many people who are exploring the potentialities of our new technologies do so with an optimism that they are part of something bigger, that technical innovation can inspire social change. In this respect I find it interesting to watch Soviet films from the early era of cinema, as for me they share a similar ideology with much New media art of today, that being a belief that the world is about to change forever and that this new medium is the face of a new era, and a crack in the veneer of the old one. Certainly in the case of Eisenstein, Dovzhenko and Vertov it was this romantic relationship with new technology that motivated such innovation.
Quoting from the book ‘The Technique of Film and Video Editing’ by Ken Dancyger – I will present Eisenstein’s five methods of montage, which interest me from both a technical and an ideological perspective.
‘Metric Montage
Refers to the length of the shots relative to one another. Regardless of their content, shortening the shots abbreviates the time the audience has to absorb the information in each shot. This increases the tension resulting from the scene. The use of close-ups with shorter shots creates a more intense sequence.
Rhythmic Montage
Refers to continuity arising from the visual pattern within the shots. Continuity based on matching action and screen direction are examples of rhythmic montage. This type of montage has considerable potential for portraying conflict because opposing forces can be presented in terms of opposing screen directions as well as parts of the frame. For example in the Odessa Steps sequence of Potemkin (1925), soldiers march down the steps from one quadrant of the frame, followed by people attempting to escape from the opposite side of the frame.
Tonal Montage
Refers to editing decisions made to establish the emotional character of a scene. Tone or mood is used as a guideline for interpreting tonal montage, and although the theory begins to sound intellectual, it is no different from Ingmar Bergman’s suggestion that editing is akin to music, the playing of the emotions. Emotions change and so too can the tone of a different scene. In the Odessa steps sequence, the death of a young mother on the steps and the following baby carriage sequence highlight the depth of the tragedy of the massacre.
Overtonal Montage
Is the interplay between of metric, rhythmic and tonal montages. That interplay mixes pace, ideas and emotions to induce the desired effect from the audience. In the Odessa steps sequence, the outcome of the massacre should be the outrage of the audience. Shots that emphasise the abuse of the army’s overwhelming power and the exploitation of the citizens powerlessness punctuate the message.
Intellectual Montage
Refers to the introduction of ideas into a highly charged and emotionalized sequence. An example of intellectual is a sequence in October (1928). George Kerensky, the Menshevik leader of the first Russian revolution, climbs the stairs just as quickly as he ascends to power after the czar’s fall. Intercut with his ascent are shots of a mechanical peacock preening itself. Eisenstein is making a point about Kerensky as politician this one of many examples in October. ‘ pg 17 -20.
Odessa Steps Sequence
October (the mechanical peacock scene is about 25 mins into the film)
Here are is some work I did for an essay, which I have put on the back burner for a while. Figured I might as well post it on my blog as evidence of work or a thought process that did not take flight.
How dysfunction can evoke emotion within digital art?
Abstract
This study firstly attempts to identify some key features within the historical movement of German Expressionism which reached it’s peak during the 1920s.
I will consider expressionism within the mediums of Painting, Theatre, Literature, Architecture, Dance and Sculpture in order to establish a rudimentary overview of this wide branching art movement.
I will start to push Expressionist Cinema into the main focus of this study by analyzing the role of editing, set design, and movement within the early silent films of Fritz Lang, F.W Murnau and G.W Pabst.
I will look at some of the philosophy that was contemporary and influential to that era of art history, notably the works of Fredrick Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger while briefly discussing some metaphysical ideas about perception, and of ways in which time defines space and location, in relation to theories of Timelessness, and nowhere.
I will illustrate some ways in which these great expressionist filmmakers where concerned with such metaphysical ideas.
I believe certain artworks are at war with their own interface because of the way they disrupt time and place, while sharing a desire to absorb empty space and dysfunction within themselves. I see this as a prominent feature of artwork from the expressionist era and also much art work from the digital era.
I will look at Lev Manovich’s Soft Cinema project, Mike Figgis’s Timecode, the Work of Raphael Lozano Hemmer, David Em and Dave McKean, while I explain how and why a new kind of expressionism is achieved when artists from a contemporary, digital culture, express soul and feeling through a decoration or exaggeration of the interfaces they employ.
I will conclude by suggesting some answers to my initial question and I will explain how the expressionist interface might be seen as a prominent feature among much Digital, or/and New Media Artworks
Key Words: Expressionism, Interface, Dysfunction, Subjectivity, Negative Space, Digital Art.
“In an ideal world, New Media institutions would employ at least one non-technological artist.”
“You know your amazing new computer art, rich in metaphors and analogies? It’s been done. Years ago. Without a computer.”
“Just as everyone has a novel inside them, many believe they have an artwork. The purpose of a good art school is to seek out these people and stop them.”
“What would be pretentious or nonsensical if one said it oneself does not become more worthy when spoken by a computer-generated avatar.”
“When the first solitary Metro station was built in Paris, where could people travel to? They just admired the station.”
“Computer artist: the unemployable producing the unsaleable for the uninterested.”
The need for sincerity in literary expression, felt strongly in France during the first twenty years of the century, is really the belief that the conscious states of mans being are not sufficient to explain him to himself and to others. His subconscious contains a larger and especially a more authentic or accurate part of his being. It was found that our conscious speech and our daily actions are usually in contradiction with our true selves and our deeper desires. The neat patterns of Human behavior, set forth by the realists, and which our lives seem to follow, were found to be patterns formed by social forces rather than by our desires or temperaments or inner psychological selves. This discovery or conviction that we are more sincerely revealed in our dreams and in our purely instinctive actions than in our daily exterior habits of behavior (tea drinking or cocktailing etc) is of course basic to surrealism. It is admirably summarized in a sentence of Andre Gide’s autobiography, Si le grain ne meurt, when he speaks of the difficulty of our knowing the real motivation of any of our actions. ‘le motif secret de nos actes nous echappe’ pg 15 Age of Surrealism Wallace Fowle, Bloomington a London, Indiana University Press, fourth printing 1966
This is an image of Urizen who is the embodiment of conventional reason in the Mythology of William Blake, and is used to convey an example of technocratic repression, and is an important character in Blake’s opposition to a politic of empiricism and industrial power.
Will write more about William Blake later as am studying his work and considering his political ideology which existed in opposition to figures such as Lock and Newton .
In preface to Plato, the scholar Eric A.Havelock argues that the realm of the forms may also have revealed it’s self to Plato through the alphabet.
Havelock points out that the etymological root of the term idea, which also gives us the word Video has a visual connotation. Havelock argues that Platonic forms were conceived as analogies to visual forms, not just the perfect shapes of geometry, but the visual forms of the alphabet. Like letters Platonic ideas were immobile, isolated, and devoid of warmth and secondary qualities; they seem to transcend the world at hand. As David Abram observes, ’the letters and the written words that they present, are not subject to the flux of growth and decay, to the perturbations and cyclical changes common to other visible things; they seems to hover as it were, in another, strangely timeless dimension.’
Pg 34
TechGnosis – Myth and Mysticism in the age of Information
Erik Davis
The need to externalize oneself, to achieve recognition from the other, and self recognition through the other, are needs intrinsic to embodied subjectivity, if therefore, it can be shown that certain kinds of artefacts fulfil these needs in a distinctive and positive way, then we would rightly assign to them (whatever ostensible, social or utilitarian functions they may serve) a universal significance in the ecology of human experience. In this study I shall claim this status for Art.; as Symbolically Significant, Sensuous, Manifold.
pg 10 Art and Embodiment: From Aesthetics to Self-consciousness
Paul Crowther
Publisher: OUP Oxford; New edition edition (5 April 2001)
By creating a new interface between the self, the other, and the world beyond, media technologies become part of the self, the other and the world beyond. They form the building blocks, and even in some sense the foundation, of what we now increasingly think of as ‘the social construction of reality’.
Historically the great social constructions belong to the religious imagination: the animistic world of nature magic, the ritualised social narratives of mythology., the ethical inwardness of the ‘religions of the book’, and the increasingly rationalised modern institutions of faith that followed them. These various paradigms marked the their notions and symbols in the world around them, using archetecture, language, icons, costumes, and social ritual, – and often whatever media they could get their hands on .
For reasons that cannot simply be chalked up to the desire for power and conformity, the religious imagination has an irrepressible and almost desperate urge to remake the mental world humans share by communicating itself to others. From hieroglyphs to the printed book, from radio to computer networks, the spirit has found itself inside a variety of new bottles, and each new medium has become, in a variety of contradictory ways, part of the message. When the Norse god Odin swaps an eye for the gift of the runes, or when Paul of Tarsus writes in a letter that the World of God is written in our hearts, or when New Age mediums ‘channel spiritual information‘, the ever shifting boundaries between media and the self are redrawn in technomystical terms.
p g 8
TechGnosis – Myth and Mysticism in the age of Information
Erik Davis
This is an image of Urizen who is the embodiment of conventional reason in the Mythology of William Blake, and is used to convey an example of technocratic repression, and is an important character in Blake’s opposition to a politic of empiricism and industrial power.
