During my first semester, I did a Powerpoint presentation on the use of modernist and industrial architecture in Antonioni's Il Deserto Rosso (1964). I was taking screencaps using VLC Media Player and found that scanning back and forth through the .avi file (the film was not yet available on R1 DVD, so I pirated a Russian DVD rip) often produced these bizarre layerings of imagery and digital distortion. I started taking caps during these short instants of distortion (the program would quickly correct these layerings, so you had to be very quick to grab them before they disappeared), and this one really struck me as a nice exemplification of the film's take on the violence of industrial Ravenna on the films' protagonists' subjectivities.
Unfortunately, an update to VLC all but nixed this effect, and I haven't been able to control the glitch to grab more of these great images (that's what you get when you rely on contingency for effects). Anyway, I'd like my image to take on these kinds of qualities, for the layering of different regimes of images really works, I think, to produce abstractions of otherwise transparent imagery.
My current plan is to utilize video editing cross dissolves in order to produce some kind of image. If one takes a still in the midst of the cross dissolve, one gets an intermediate image, often with blurred contours and cross-bleeding.
But what will these elements be?
Right now, I'm thinking it through in these ways:
1) E-Waste as a concept thrives on a disconnect between our virtual experience of computer hardware/software and the organic natural world. So, the first condensation will be between virtual/real worlds (my master's thesis also concerns these topics, so they've been rattling around the brain for awhile).
2) Yet, the issue is that our experience...well, my experience involves the simulacrum rather than the tangible hardware. That's, of course, part of why the problem occurs. So, I guess the image would have to also deal with the disjunction between the material devices producing my experience (probably while they're poisoning organic beings) and experience of actually using these things.
So, what I'm trying to do is to produce an image that involves: the natural world, the decaying electronics, and their juxtaposition to the regime of memory and GUI's.
Using dissolving techniques, I could ostensibly produce a kind of blurred image, approaching abstraction. BUT I'm not sure I want to go into full abstraction...the question then is how to negotiate visual force without losing any semblance of the denotative power of images...
Another memory I have from that course was working with Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy (1907), a text that sets Eastern (abstract) art against Western (realist) art. It suggests that art turns to abstraction to express comfort with indeterminacy and that realism can be taken as a sign of a culture's needing to assert its control over reality. Perhaps in our project of taking on an incredibly indeterminate time, we need to turn to abstraction as a way to reflect a growing comfort with indeterminacy. Maybe my desire to maintain some recognized imagery of the world reflects a discomfort with embracing indeterminacy.
Maybe I can pursue something akin to Kristeva's notion of signifiance, a term used to indicate something that falls between the signifier and the signified. Maureen Turim uses this as a key structural principle in her first book, Abstraction in Avant-Garde Films, which is where I stumbled on it. She cites the North American avant-garde film movement of the 60's and 70's (often called "structural" film, I think Sitney came up with that term) as utilizing an indeterminacy between signification and nonsense as a key way of producing force in the image. Barthes uses the term too in Image, Music, Text but takes a different spin on it (basically saying that it's a way of understanding our reaction to photographs beyond any informational or discernible aesthetic applications). Anyway, the challenge would then be to harness the force of indeterminacy produced by an image that we can almost figure out.
Todd,
ReplyDeleteI was also thinking about this idea of indeterminacy and my preliminary pictures are a messing around with laying images on top of one another, playing with the transparency, until it is unclear which image is which and that it creates an abstract pattern. . .there is a hint of meaning without revealing a definitive object that we can point to and say "there--that is a ___"