Like Jason, the Blog returns from the dead

or maybe more like Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse.

So, this post will be a little slap-dash, but we were making so much sense before that it'd be a shame not to re-energize the blog with some good old fashioned information sprawl.

So, I missed class on Wednesday, so this post will serve two purposes: 1) to report on my progress towards an image representing my disaster and 2) parsing the notes in that context in order to arrive at something like a plan for part 2.

Section 1:

So, working from my previous failures, I created a new image:

Clearly, we're not quite there yet, but we're making progress all the same.

Okay, so what we have is an image of a computer emanating multi-colored rays, those centered on an image of Sylvia Sidney, one of my favorite actresses. Why her? I guess it has something to do with...er...seduction (ahem). Outside of the computer, we see E-waste that gives texture to the colored sprawl. Finally, we have static running over the image.

The problems: Sidney's not the emblem we need here. She's evocative, to be sure, but we need something that pushes it in a different direction. I'm thinking Mabuse might be an image to consider. Something from these below perhaps...

I especially like the 2nd design.

Problem 2 is that the static isn't integrated terribly well as a formal strategy. Don't know what I was thinking there, but I layered and saved the image without creating another copy, so it's there for keeps. I'm thinking I'll start from scratch again anyway. I like a lot of it, but the colors need touching up.

Section 2:

John was nice enough to send me his well-organized notes, and I'd like to highlight some of what seem like the key points. I'll go through them and then organize a paragraph or something highlighting what I'd like to do:

"Look at your accident as a festive event of vertigo"

I guess my earlier personification of the object attempted to do something like this. I think the key here might be to think of the production of E-waste not as a complicated network of geopolitical insanity resulting in physical poison but as a good time, as a party, as a festival.

So, what would have to be highlighted then is A) The joy of seeing appropriate to E-Waste and digital imaging. I think I might have this (the multi-color spiral giving us a "shinyness" that might help. B though) There's a joy in cracking these objects open, having been seduced into believing them the receptacle of our desire to see. We want to see through them, but eventually we also want to see in them. Do the images of E-Waste get at this? How do you get across the joy of destruction without motion or sound?

"Ethics of cooperation: why do people cooperate? (game theory addresses this from the dimension of the subject ('I think he thinks') -- it recommends defection). Why do people reciprocate in the gift economy? (belief in the 'Hau'). Fatal Strategies thinks, more ecologically, from the position of the object/event. The accident/disaster is the object's reply to the subject."

So, why would people cooperate in an electrate society? Well, we're not concerned with subjects; we're concerned with the will of the object. Why does the object cooperate? Well, in the accident, it doesn't. So, I guess the exchange might go something like this (for my disaster):

Subject: I want to see.

Object: Here ya go.

Subject: I want to see better. See you later.

((at this point, the object is set into motion, moving overseas or into a landfill))

Subject B: I want to see too!

Object: Here ya go.

((smash smash))

Subject B: *cough**cough*

Object: Hey, pal, you wanted to see. Don't get mad at me.

So, I guess the desire for the object might be to sustain its seduction as long as possible, by infiltrating the subject, if necessary.

"Use one thing to say something about something else, use the 'outside' to say something about the 'inside'"

I think if I can somehow get across the logic of visual media (in its constant improvement/replacement), the seduction (with Mabuse/visual pleasure), and the consequence (the production of E-Waste and the obscenity of visibility), perhaps I can get at something having to do with an innate desire to see.

"Beauty no longer applies as the measure -- now it's closer to the absurd or the sublime"

Exactly my logic in using Mabuse over Sidney. Sidney's beautiful; Mabuse's grotesque but grabbing. The logic of the image would be to abstract the power of imagery via sublime coloration.

One more point:

Near the end of John's notes, he talks about the musical slope of language and speaks to our project's relationship to psychoanalysis. A potential question for email: how does this relate to our sense with working w/ images? That is to say, we could think of some of the ways in which written or verbal language might create chains of displacement or condensation and, in that way, trace back a symptom (that's pretty much Lacan's take, more or less). But we're working with visual images. Do we rely on iconographic resemblance? Symbolic resemblance? Affective resemblance (a little more open)?

Provisional sketch of new image (Parts 1 & 2)

a) the accident reveals the substance
b) follow the accident
1) Conceive the accident as sign
2) Model the accident onto object in pop narrative
3) Put yourself in the shoes of accident-as-commodity

1) E-Waste as sign involves processes of displacement and diffusion. Most of the imagery of E-Waste I've seen are perversely beautiful due to the sheer accumulation of wires, empty computer husks, etc. But its actual method of accident (ecological and biological damage) has primarily involved processes of chemical diffusion: the diffusion of lead, beryllium, cadmium, etc. from the computer products into the lungs of workers and into the earth over which they're burned or otherwise destroyed. The process into a sign must take these things into account. So, we may have a layering of the earth, the biological, and diffusion. Some methods have already been tried at this, some in the right direction and some in the wrong. But now, as a sign, we can develop an abstraction, something reveling in signifiance, something able to get across the obscure feeling, bringing together its obscure desire for us to experience it vicariously. Layering, dissolving, and trailing will be our strategies in this.

2) As I did a few posts ago, the accident is modeled on the object of Vertigo. In that film, Jimmy Stewart attempts to get back many things: his manhood, his balance, his occupation, etc. But all of those things become wrapped up in the love interest, his romantic obsession with the deceased Madeleine. Judy offers him the key to regaining his lost love and all of the symbolic material that comes with her, but the twist is that, as donor, Judy is also the object. Judy eventually encourages Stewart to take her as object, to allow him to wrap her up in his own obsession. At the end of that post, I concluded that E-Waste as sign and computer at object should encourage us to do the same: experience me as object, wrap yourself in my virtuality. Yet the object takes its revenge, infecting our bodies, revealing a different desire: to become one with us. To step outside of its virtuality and to merge somehow. So far, it's been through diffusion.

Provisional sketch of new image (parts a & b)

a) The accident reveals the substance
b) Follow the accident
1) Conceive of the accident as a sign
2) Model the accident as object onto a pop-narrative
3) Put yourself in the shoes of the accident-as-a-commodity

a) E-Waste tells us something about the computer and our relationship to it (its technics). Its fundamental mystery (we have yet to tangibly experience it or its results) is that E-Waste has nothing to do with our experience of the computer-as-machine. As a machine, it provides us with a virtual interface, an interface represented by (at least) a double negation.
First, our interfacing with the machine presents us with iconographic registers that are instantaneous with our interaction and manipulation of them. Its essential work, of course, takes place at the level of code. Second, this code itself remains a virtual network, entirely supported by a purely symbolic system of notation having no relationship with the referent. But this code itself only works as a result of the various tangible parts of the machine, parts that produce certain chemical reactions to fire electronic messages in and through lines.
E-Waste reverses the order, stopping short before the first negation can be reached. Unwired and cut off from our normal relationship, we see the obscenity of the machine, smashed into bits, and this is where the machine has its revenge. It allows us to see its insides but only at the price of ecological and biological damage, conveniently displaced from first world consumers to third world scrap-metallers.

b) So what we're left with is another kind of displacement or negation. The machine is used, used until it quits (or until we quit it). We tell the machine, "I got what I wanted, baby, hit the bricks!" And it does, moving on to new users but eventually being pressed to other areas who can employ its physical material, themselves having value on a virtual level (so, a kilo of copper might fetch some $$$). We're there seeing the more virtual than virtual, of course lapsing into its reverse state: the real, or reality. From these compounded virtual relationships, real consequences develop...for some. This may not be just the limit for the particular object but may be considered the limit for a larger virtuality, the ones of exchange (reaping all sorts of ecological havoc) and of interfacing (disconnecting us further from the real). But let's see how much further it can go.

Provisional Image(s)

Image 1

Image 2

Okay, so here are a couple reachings at figuring out this image.

Working from these images:

HD image of forest

E-Waste 1

E-Waste 2

Still from Videodrome

Binary Code created on Word

I then put them into my digital camcorder (I like the scan lines) and then put them into Final Cut. Using dissolves, I produced crosses between Forest and Waste, Waste and Videodrome, and Videodrome and the binary. Then, in Photoshop, I layered the images, adjusting opacity and isolating a layer on the right for the hand and binary on the screen.

I then did another version with the E-waste stuff in the foreground and adjusted a bit to allow it more visibility.

Not sure which I prefer. The first one looks better, but the second one has more going on. I'd like to redo this using my own images. I obviously can't produce my own E-waste images, but the forest, a Videodrome-esque shot, and the binary can all be done very easily. So I guess let's consider this a prototype

In Rethinking...

In rethinking my image, I've been thinking about how Dr. Ulmer characterized modernist painting last week. He said it has to do with kinds of fundamental motions. I'll take a stab at expanding that and say that it depends on the motion of the world. One of the things I find remarkable about cinema is how it can show us the play of the world on bodies. So, the majesty of Chaplin in The Pawn Shop is seeing a man absolutely master gravity (see, especially, the bit with him on the ladder, a moment emblematic of the cinema itself).

Anyway, what I'm trying to do with the image is to represent the natural world, its destruction via e-waste, and the simultaneous existence of memory in digital interfaces, themselves underlain by what seems like senseless computation.

I've come upon the idea of diffusion.

When I think of E-waste, I think of the burning of these material products and of the diffusion of their being into the air and finally into the lungs of nearby workers and flora/fauna.

When I think of the transition to electracy, I think of a subtle diffusion from one state to another (not a catastrophe but a slow but sure change...I think my generational positioning is rather unique because we got our first computer when I was an adolescent, so I have the memories of a computer-free childhood and kind of grew up into computing, I guess).

When I think of the process of these products being distributed to developing countries, I think of a diffusion of information. We catch mists of this insanity but only briefly feel it on our face, like a soft wind that, as it comes at us with thousands of winds, often feels like a maelstrom.

Oh God, I'm waxing poetic. Time to wrap this one up.

So: Elements: Nature, Waste, Wind, GUI, code. Logic: Diffusion. Means: Dissolves.

Coming soon.

Not even a provisional image, but a provision of a provisional image

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.