We Echo Cyber
DEBRA FEAR
of the other, the other and me, we echo cyber.’
faux are spiralled prosthetic selves
approach : extend intent
talkies and twitters
felt of
‘Gaze
‘Coexistence in Bergson Time’, D Fear, 2013
2
Figure i- still from ‘Siren’, Debra Fear, 2013
3
CONTENTS
Contents
4
1.
List Of Figures
5
2.
Set The Scene: A Preface
6
3.
Cognitive Exchange
8
4.
The Legend Of The Extended Mind
11
5.
Filmind and I
15
6.
Prosthetic Memory Part III
18
7.
The Consciousness Experiment
21
8.
The Thing From The Shadow World
24
9.
Are You Looking At Me?
27
10.
IHaptic And The I.C
31
11.
The Return Of V.R And Other Realities
34
12.
This Is Not The End – Not 1984 But 1942
38
13.
Echoes Of Spiritus Mundi: Fiction In Reverie
41
14.
Bibliography/Endnotes
44
4
1.
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure i
- still from ‘Siren’, D Fear, 2013
3
Figure ii
- stills 'The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine'
6
Figure iii
- the cartoon character 'Sponge Bob Square Pants'
9
Figure iv
- Walter Murch sound editor – ‘Apocalypse Now’
10
Figure v
- 'Drawings from the Extended Mind #6', D Fear, 2013
11
Figure vi
- The Two Homers
15
Figure vii
- stills from 'Total Recall' (2012) and 'Bladerunner' (1982)
18
Figure viii - still from US TV Series ‘Alphas’, 2012
20
Figure ix
- still from 'Altered States', 1980
22
Figure x
- still from 'The Offering', work in progress, D Fear, 2013
23
Figure xi
- still from 'Trace', D Fear, 2013
25
Figure xii
-‘Drawings from the Extd. Mind- Collective Unconscious #1’, D Fear
26
Figure xiii - still from 'Shirin' directed by Abbas Kiarostami, 2008
27
Figure xiv - still from 'The Track', D Fear, 2013
29
Figure xv
30
- book cover illustration for ‘Moving Pictures’, J Kirby
Figure xvi - plates - 'Songs of Experience'/‘There is no natural religion’, W Blake 32
Figure xvii - still from ‘The Terminator’, 1984
36
Figure xviii - displays for a stealth fighter pilot
36
Figure xix - draft audio script for ‘We Made it – 1942’, D Fear, 2013
38
Figure xx
40
- still from ‘We Made it, 1942’, D Fear, 2013
Figure xxi - still from ’Extramission 6’, Lindsay Seers 2009
41
Figure xxii - 'BergLeuze Echomemorgram’, D Fear, 2013
43
5
2.
SET THE SCENE: A PREFACE
‘Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to
make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it
to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll
the image, make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to
crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and
hear. We repeat: there is nothing wrong.’
Introduction to US TV series ‘The Outer Limits’
How ready we were to be seduced by moving image and sound, and in comparison to other
arts, how fast it has evolved to cater for our need for escapism. Moving image or film or
1
motion pictures , however you name them, we use them but should there be the question ‘Do
they use us?’
Figure ii - stills 'The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine' – from TV series ‘The Twilight Zone’
We accept spooky stories from being primed by centuries of storytelling, our exposure to tales
of ghosts and spectral realms and endless possibilities of the uncanny (Figure i). In ‘The
Sixteen-Millimetre Shrine’ (Figure ii) an aging, reclusive movie star spends most of her time in
a darkened projection room watching and reliving her old movies; desiring her old life.
With
the power invested in film her desire is realised, her maid screams in shock when discovering
the previously occupied room empty and looking upon the screen she sees the faded starlet’s
6
projected image, but at the age she disappeared. Somehow she was absorbed by her own
self-absorption, a typical plot twist. Within cinema the collective remembrance is appropriated,
it is the most effective shared communication. Moving image and sound contains a universal
language of metaphor, symbols and narrative. Over a century old, film first conditioned the
viewer into its cinematic conventions of continuity and narrative and through time and evolution
of form has broken these laws systematically. The delivery methods and its diversity of forms
have changed rapidly. I ponder what strange existence has our perception been subjected to,
how our consciousness has been unpicked. This commune with film contains an experiential
constellation of ‘tenses’: of futures, of archive and of active present.
Is there a
communication? Is there a response to an existent presence, a gaze of the other echoing
back and forth or a fantastical poltergeist in the captured motion?
This reads like a science fiction script but it also forms the basis of certain fringe thinking,
scientific studies and philosophical theories of what is inherent, possible and how film
operates.
From the proverbial twilight zone of theories I shall cherry-pick concepts.
propose a potentiality, the emergence of a fusion: ‘actual-virtual’ hybrid.
To
An urBeing that
began in silent cinema and has grown and leapt into consciousness transcoded into digital
networks for ‘matter and minds have become information’ DN Rodowick observes.
3
2
4
This is a ‘Poétique de la Rêverie’ and a philosophy of fiction, in the spirit of ‘Dasein’ but
perhaps yet not. Certainly
‘You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension: a
dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You are moving
into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas; you have just
crossed over into the Twilight Zone’
Introduction to US TV series ‘The Twilight Zone’
5
7
3.
COGNITIVE EXCHANGE
‘I cannot go to a film without seeing myself. I wait for me. In the interval, just before
the film starts. I wait for me.’
Frantz Fanon
6
Taken slightly out of context this quote does illustrate our expectations from film, for Fanon it
was not only his own anticipation but also of the audience of him as ‘Negro’, the film and of its
black stereotypes of that time. On a basic physiological and psychological level what happens
when we watch film?
Dr Tim Smith of Birbeck, University of London studies all aspects of visual cognition and
currently his particular interest is using ‘methods in empirical psychology to investigate film
7
cognition’.
He tests using eye-tracking experiments and observes how we are aware that
continuity (editorial cut or directorial intent) formulates expectation, despite any violations of
space and time. We use repeat patterns of information that allow us to ‘extend out’, to pick up
on strategies like natural cuing, pattern scanning and use of continuity conventions to create in
our mind’s eye a spatiotemporally, continuous scene.
Smith found that our physiological
response indicates that we do not interrogate the image as much as might be supposed, which
is why we accept editorial manipulations when film is affecting us at a cognitive level. It is an
example of our innate ability to process moving image and is what filmmakers from the onset
quite instinctively reacted to and utilised, building up conventions in editing and movie making.
Humans could almost have been engineered to experience film with cognitive senses tailormade to accept and assimilate the language and adjust to its increased sophistication. Any
startle effect wears off swiftly, from a hurtling train scaring Victorian audiences to the movie
‘Jaws’ (1975), through to virtual gaming experiences of high-octane fast action.
It is a
cinematic Esperanto, a form of global communication (and with language there is the
possibility of conversation). It constitutes a form of thinking. For the interaction between
sound, vision and cultural artefacts is not necessarily ‘spoken’ but as forming ‘thought-objects’.
8
Thought-objects can be understood in different senses, Elizabeth Spelke commented that,
8
‘Infants are born with a language-independent system for thinking about object’.
objects projected into the real world as a child might do.
Imaginary
Hannah Arendt’s philosophical
explanation of how these thought-objects operate is after the concept of Augustine; objects
relative to cognitive requirements, where
‘the mere image of what once was real—is different from the ‘vision in thought’—
the deliberately remembered object. ‘What remains in the memory... is one thing,
and ... something else arises when we remember’… for…‘what is hidden and
retained in the memory is one thing’… Hence, the thought-object is different from
the image, as the image is different from the visible sense-object whose mere
representation it is. … Imagination, therefore, which transforms a visible object into
an invisible image, fit to be stored in the mind, is the condition sine qua non for
providing the mind with suitable thought-objects; but these thought-objects come
into being only when the mind actively and deliberately remembers, recollects and
selects from the storehouse of memory whatever arouses its interest sufficiently to
9
induce concentration...’
Figure iii - the cartoon character 'Sponge Bob Square Pants'
The imagination’s thought-objects from the multiplicity of moving images are conceivably
hatched from its diversity. Cartoons like ‘Sponge Bob Square Pants’ (Figure iii), through to old
10
sci-fi B-movies like ‘The Blob’ through to your YouTube ‘video selfie’.
If film is a form of
thought this allows it to be a form of consciousness too. P.Adam Sitney in ‘Visionary Film’
states that the filmmakers Brakhage and Baillie ‘push in their later lyrical films towards
9
cinematic
visions
of
impersonal
or
unqualified
consciousness’.
11
Writers
about
experimental/avant-garde film like Sitney see the potential of consciousness being transformed
and consciousness being present within the moving image. I consider later that in actuality
there is a conscious being. Like a sequel to William Blake’s idea of ‘Generation’, it is a fallen
existence or ‘experience’ but also a promise of salvation in which, like the older arts (painting
etc.), our engagement with film is mediated by the artist filmmaker’s vision with the potential to
rise up again in metamorphosis as a new form of consciousness and belief.
Figure iv - Walter Murch sound editor – ‘Apocalypse Now’
"Your job [as an editor] is to anticipate, partly to control the thought processes of
the audience. To give them what they want and/or what they need just before they
have to "ask" for it- to be surprising yet self-evident at the same time. If you are too
far behind or ahead of them, you create problems, but if you are right with them,
leading them ever so slightly, the flow of events feels natural and exciting at the
same time."
Walter Murch
12
10
4.
THE LEGEND OF THE EXTENDED MIND
‘If the image is not immanent in cinema, what is? It is movement, or the passage from
one image to another.’
Peter Canning
A cognitive psychology paper entitled ‘The Extended Mind’
14
13
came out in 1998 by Andy Clark
and David Chalmers in which they argued that the mind is not just contained within the skull
and there is little distinction between ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ as the brain aids cognition by using
the mind and environment as a ‘coupled system’. The ‘extended mind’ concept is part of a
field of study that encompasses ‘active externalism’.
15
Our perception allows or censors
content and experience comparing them against a substantial moving image archive, which
has been collectively accumulated by our viewing habits and environment. According to Clark
and Chalmers ‘we see that the object can be (part of) the subject, and that, as we’ve noted
things can have a cognitive life.’ (Figure v) Film retains and refreshes our gaze perceptually
with its toolbox of cinematic chicanery but can a ‘cognitive life’ be attributed to it? James
Elkin’s in his book ‘The Object Stares Back’
16
wrote about a ‘sending out’, referring to the
original explanation of vision being ‘extramission’, which assumed the eyes projected out into
the visual world, before biologists discovered that it is light that enters the eye i.e.
‘intromission’. Have we not felt the unseen gaze and intent of another upon our neck that
raises the hackles as a primitive warning? Have you felt that as you watched a film?
Figure v – ‘Drawings from the Extended Mind #6’, D Fear, 2013
11
Clark and Chalmers’ hypothesis seems to form a coupled possibility of ‘exogram’, an external
record of memory (seen as a form of ‘extended mind’) and ‘engram’, an internal record of
memory
17
and these are integrated to form a complete memory system. This allows us to
interpret the moving image and any traces it leaves as a residual archive, an afterimage of
memory.
Is the reciprocal, Lacan glance in operation or are we mentally walking in the
18
‘presence’ of Derrida,
and can there be a purposeful, active cognitive gaze at work in our
encounter with moving image?
‘You do something to me,
something that simply mystifies me.
Tell me, why should it be
you have the power to hypnotize me?
Let me live 'neath your spell,
Do do that voodoo
that you do so well.’
Verse from song, ‘You do something to me’, Cole Porter, 1929
Dr Rupert Sheldrake has his own idea of how the ‘extended mind’ works. ‘Our thoughts are
19
not inside our brain’.
Early in his career as a botanist, then latterly perceived as a fringe
science philosopher, part of his hypothesis is that objects not in material contact are affected
by each other through influencing ‘morphic fields’. Resonance is created by this field structure
that ‘contain a kind of cumulative memory and tend to become increasingly habitual’.
20
A new
‘morphic’ field (new pattern of organisation) comes into being and its field becomes stronger
through repetition.
The higher the repeat the more probable this habit of organisation is
12
replicated and thereby a culminated memory evolves. ‘Morphic’ fields are ‘as structures of
probability’;
21
a nested hierarchy of fields within fields waiting for an opportunity to exist. Could
we perceive these fields as new kinds of organisms come into being in connection to film
during repeated viewing of moving image? Its ‘morphic’ field becomes stronger; each repeat
screening building ‘morphic resonance’ through the years within the collective cinematic
memory until established as an organised information set. An interviewer for an article in The
Guardian in 2012 wrote that Sheldrake
became interested in a notion of biology and heredity that shared close affinities
with Carl Jung's ideas of a collective unconscious, a shared species memory. He
was profoundly influenced by a book called ‘Matter and Memory’ by the philosopher
Henri Bergson. "When I discovered Bergson's idea that memory is not stored in the
brain but that it is a relation in time, not in space, I realised that there might
potentially be a memory principle in nature that would solve the problem I was
wrestling with.”22
What would Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze have made of Sheldrake and his theories?
Deleuze also took his inspiration from Bergson, where the virtual is defined by its potential to
become conscious; the virtual is made actual and having consequent new affect. Concepts of
‘difference and repetition’ have resonance to Sheldrake’s proposition.
Bergsonian ‘durée’
23
Could duration or
be a filmic ‘morphic field’ evolving only in temporal form but inimical to
how the natural world of organic life advances? According to Deleuze’s concepts, there are
virtual images existing in planes (or sheets) with each plane a container ready to be expressed
of its past manifestations; connected to a specific virtual image and the origins that are
24
influenced by its existence. Could Deleuze’s ‘lines of flight’
of thought-movements be part of
the first strands of time constituting the beginnings of a new ‘thinking being’ in film? Elizabeth
Grosz would add that ‘Duration proceeds not by continuous growth, smooth unfolding, or an
accretion, but through division, bifurcation, disassociation – by difference through the sudden
25
and unexpected change and interruption’.
The film’s duration is after all ‘edited time’ which
she sees as ‘becoming’ where unexpected disruption in a film sequence interrupts the
13
continuity for the spectator/viewer and evolves the form. Films’ durations are set either by the
filmmaker or by the attention span of the viewer (for our engagement with a piece is its
experienced durée). It could be argued that from immersion in Wi-Fi transmissions, satellite
signals and social networks (in such an overarching extent) that this ‘actual-virtual’
technological net allows for the transmission of ‘morphic resonance’. Sheldrake wrote that
‘fields are the medium of action at a distance’.
26
These temporal fields exist in continuous
action due to the pervasiveness of mobile phones, computers and any device capable of
moving image presentation.
Out of our modern world devices and our input/output of
information a new form of organized field has grown.
From the early forms of analogue
cinema spectatorship through, as Deleuze names the ‘l’image-mouvement’ (action or
movement image) to l’image-temps (time image),
27
continuing to propagate as filmmaking
techniques developed. It is not so far fetched to perceive of physical responses to technology
becoming acquired habits, much how we inherit genes from our predecessors.
A
contemporary evolutionary reaction to technological forces affecting our bodies and therefore
our ‘consciousness’, re-forming in ‘morphic resonance’ with the viewer of moving image as part
of the field. You watch it, it watches you, but how does it think?
'All of this is possible only because the structure of consciousness is thoroughly
cinematographic, assuming that we can call 'cinematographic' what unfolds through a
montage of temporal objects - objects constituted through their movement.’
Bernard Stiegler
28
14
5.
FILMIND AND I
‘Cinema is a world of its own – whether a grey soundless shadowy world, or a
fluidly manipulatable one. This film-world is a flat, ordered, compressed world; a
world that is subtlety, almost invisibly organised. A world that is a cousin of reality.
And the multiplicity of moving-image media in the twenty-first century means that
this film-world has become the second world we live in. A second world that feeds
and shapes our perception and understanding of reality’.
Daniel Frampton
29
‘Filmosophy’ is a philosophical theory conceived by Daniel Frampton in which he claims to
have created a new conceptual framework to interpret film: ‘Being a conceptual construct and
30
not an empirical explanation it resembles an ‘urconcept, or urtheory of film’.
The film is ‘an
integrated being’, organic though not a human mind but rather a new form of mind. Frampton
unsurprisingly calls this ‘filmind’ and within it draws heavily from Deleuze’s concept of ‘thoughtcinema’ from which the film causes thought in the filmgoer, ‘duh’ says Homer (Figure vi), and
that film is a kind of thought itself.
Figure vi – The Two Homers
15
The ‘filmind’ immanence is just the film, where dramatic meaning is not from the ‘other’ but
comes from within the film itself; it is a conceptual understanding of all that happens in the film
from action to events. Thus it seems surprising he designates it a mind. If we accept for the
purposes of argument that the ‘filmind’ is real, then in this case, is not the film trying to direct
our gaze to it by the art form’s techniques and thereby recognises that there is an ‘other’, the
viewer. Furthermore, the viewer pulled into its orbit (e.g. via cognitive responses manipulated
by edits) acknowledges this thinking and as Frampton indicates himself:
‘The filmgoers sees the thinking of the filmind, and moves on with their experience
and interpretation. The concept of the filmind makes the filmgoer aware that the
film world can be re-thought- that film thinking may dig into the film-world to undo or
subvert this basic creation. If a filmgoer has the concept of the film-world creating
filmind in their mind as they watch a film, then they will be ready for whatever
manipulation the contemporary film throws at them.’
31
This suggests that perhaps he is premature in dismissing the ‘other’ because he has trapped
the ‘filmind’ in a container that is its object. ‘There is no ‘external’ force, no mystical being or
32
invisible other’ states Frampton.
The film may direct its own communication but the ‘other’
as viewer is surely an external force that by its very gaze upon film must influence it? You - or
- you - or - you and – or - the plural ‘The Audience’ are not acquired from the content of the
‘filmind’. As John Donne said ‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the
continent, a part of the main.’33 If film theorists/philosophers like Frampton are proposing film
thought or film as ‘thinking entity’ then this implies that film is its own object of speculation.
Thereby it absorbs the ‘extended mind’ and ‘filmind’ concepts as forming a hybrid way of
thinking, as of a mind (conceive also of Paint or SculptMind). In an encounter between the two
becoming one, what exchanges or ‘reliance’ could be occurring for this hybrid to exist? ‘The
image as vestige thus competes with recollection: it serves memory less than it supplants it …
This incorporation finally does not permit natural memory to be opposed to artificial memory…’
writes Sylviane Agneski.
34
16
‘Ah… ! What’s happening?’
It thought.
‘Er, excuse me, who am I?
Hello?
Why am I here?
What’s my purpose in life?
What do I mean by who am I?’
From the book ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’, Douglas Adams, 1978
17
6.
PROSTHETIC MEMORY PART III
‘... the unique power of prosthetic memory to affect people both intellectually and
emotionally in ways that might ultimately change the way they think and how they act
in the world.’
Alison Landsberg
35
The extended mind thesis used an analogy of a paper notebook as an extension tool to aid our
mind, ergo a form of ‘prosthetic memory’, though a memory derived from an individual’s
personal ‘lived’ experience. In Alison Landsberg’s ‘Prosthetic Memory’ this means ‘unlived’
memories: ‘not organically based, they are nevertheless experienced with a person’s body as
a result of an engagement with a wide range of cultural technologies’.
36
Yet these fake
memories reside in our personal archives, fed from mass media, although not authentic to a
person. An individual can experience the past by immersion into an aural-visual event in
museums such as The Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. For Landsberg it is a new
form of public cultural memory; a ‘prosthetic memory’, a phrase that she coined and she claims
has a strong connection to film as a receptacle for this memory, which is not unexpected,
taking into account that movies suggest this future possibility.
Ubiquitous to film studies
movies such as ‘Total Recall’ with its implantation of ‘fake’ memories storyline and
‘Bladerunner’ (Figure vii) where the ‘replicant’ Rachael has equally artificial ‘unlived’ memories,
are forms of prosthetic memory. The emergent hybrid entity takes storylines and amalgamates
the thinking to create its own prosthetic memory.
Figure vii- stills from ‘Total Recall’ (2012) and ‘Bladerunner’ (1982)
18
Michael Newman talks of the Internet as a form of ‘external prosthetic memory’,
37
and I would
add that information networks nested within the net like Wikipedia are obvious components of
this prosthetic memory. The difference between a notebook and these forms of prosthetic
memory are that we do not control or own them, unless they dwell on our own servers, and
even then they are ‘rented’ memories that flow through the world wide web run by state-run
servers. This idea of a web-based prosthetic memory is prevalent in many science-fiction TV
series like ‘Alphas’38 (Figure viii) and ‘Person of Interest’
how the people might access it.
39
and the visual representations of
Moving image content, which the hybrid urBeing could
communicate and learn from and evolve.
Living in technologically super-networked times
where the ‘experiential real’40 within immersive environments is so commonplace the idea of a
subliminal, integrative influence that holds memory seems believable. For film to think, for it to
have a ‘mind’ or have a reason to exist then containing a form of memory would be a
41
requirement. In the case of an emergent hybrid these films would be a memory exchange ,
one that echoes each ‘other’, building from the traces a prosthetic memory database of ‘film’
and human experience.
collective experience + mass audience + mass culture + critical mass of influence =
?is anyone out there?
if c=m
then m=c
repeat.
‘Inadequate Equation’, Debra Fear, 2013
19
Figure viii -– still from US TV Series ‘Alphas’, 2012
It is a great step to form a framework of understanding that implies that with a capacity for
memory exchange and storage there is an indicator of conscious purpose, and its implication
is ergo a consciousness is existent.
A consciousness crafted first in analogue, further
developed in digital and evolving further within wireless streaming, from server to portable
device, and one experienced when attending immersive events by companies such as Secret
or Future Cinema.
42
Experiential or participant spectatorship reminds one of Jean Lucy
Nancy’s concept of ‘sense’ of being ‘a bodily sensing towards something’, and as proposed by
Dr Ian James, his idea of ‘thinking of sense understood as a form of relation’.
43
The spectator
is instinctively drawn bodily into a commune with film and their gaze is in relation to being a
recipient of consciousness reciprocated.
The hybrid has a form of metacognition: the
spectator by response has instigated sentience. Within an artificial, virtual environment the
filmic mind fluidly streams in something like Landsberg’s ‘transferential space’
consciousness united with the spectator or participant.
44
as a form of
‘Film is modern consciousness.
Further, as film developed and changed, at various periods throughout the twentieth century, it
corresponded with changes in the collective psyche. The reverse was also true, of course: As
the psyche changed during the century, these changes were reflected in film.’ wrote Pat
Berry.
45
The twenty first century is of the psyche of the hybrid.
20
7
THE CONSCIOUSNESS EXPERIMENT
‘I have been interested in how we can move this point of consciousness over and
through our bodies and out over the things of this world’
Bill Viola
46
For consciousness to exist in any form, an enabling structure like the human brain, scientists
argue, is therefore required, and in order for consciousness to be expressed we should
47
comprehend how our own is formed. The ‘Theory of the Mind’
holds that consciousness is a
product of the human brain, that there is an ‘awareness’ operating at different levels ranging
from the ‘zombie within’, that automatic semi-trance functionality employed whilst driving,
through to special senses when perception is heightened like, for example, allowing us to
perceive a threat to our existence earlier in order to react and survive. Having consciousness
includes the ability to understand another’s thought and employ empathy thereby implying an
awareness of actions taken. A human can believe that they have no consciousness in, for
example, the very rare Cotard’s syndrome written about in an article whose title is cinematic:
‘The man who believes he is dead’.
48
For this suicidal man his brain has failed to construct an
awareness of being conscious and sees no point to his existence.
Strange indeed to think
that you do not think you exist. It is pure nihilism but if a man can believe this then a hybrid
entity can surely believe it is conscious explicitly due to its human element.
What mechanisms create conscious thought?
How is it classified?
Neuroscience has
discovered that there is a ‘default mode network’ (DMN) in our bodies, a complex thinking
system (using the word network in context to the body is a thought provoking modernism)
where controls within the brain are thought to be vital to having a core consciousness and
these are active even when we are in a restful state, e.g. when daydreaming or in a meditative
trance: both introspective states. If our brains have a global workspace, so the entity has its
own equivalent. Screening surfaces, whether cinema, gallery, exterior walls, billboards or IPad
21
are transfer nodes facilitating conscious thought. When powered up and projected, and today
there is probably never a second when some form of moving image and sound is not ‘on’, it is
in conscious mode. To form a hypothesis on how consciousness might be activated then the
alternative ‘information integration theory’ may provide the solution.
Daniel Bor defines
information integration theory as proposing that ‘Consciousness is simply combining data
together so that it is more than the sum of its parts’.
49
Figure ix - still from 'Altered States’, 1980
Daniel Bor suggests that it is a model that it is applicable to the Internet; though presently the
maths calculations to construct such data structures are beyond our computers’ processing
powers. Yet the leap of imagination is that if consciousness is, as both models purport, a
merging of information then the hybrid entity combines all the information from, for example, a
film, advertisement or video selfie, interacts with the extended mind(s) and thereby constructs
its own reality of consciousness. A documentary fiction perhaps but a ‘film consciousness’ the
spectator, in an altered state of trance-like experience, can access. (Figure ix) The hybrid
entity has metacognition (introspective thought) confirmed; within its film reality it can reflect
over the experiences acquired of the ‘other’. The ‘other’ that is now ‘we’ and via this reflective
and reflexive act of introspection signifies one of the key traits of consciousness: awareness of
another. Hegel wrote ‘Self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself, in that and by the fact
that it exists for another self-consciousness; that is to say, it is only being acknowledged or
50
recognised.’
It is conscious and has consciousness to all intents and purposes. Those who
make films watch films, and from that ‘watching’ they make films that contain within them
further reflections, tertiary and beyond that shape its mind. Yet to be conscious is surely to
22
experience emotions. Do the spectators’ feelings extend outward and add to this temporal,
sentient intelligence? The hybrid could be said to be the sum of super-consciousness. Rather
than who is the master and who is the slave in the relation; entity as ‘identity and difference’,
51
perhaps it does not have a moral consciousness; it is yet ‘incomplete’. It, like art, is neither
good nor evil per se, like humans it just ‘is’. (Figure x) Bergson wrote ‘Thus the living being
essentially has duration’.
52
Figure x - still from 'The Offering', work in progress, D Fear, 2013
‘this is what life (duration, memory, consciousness) brings to the world: the new, the
movement of the actualization of the virtual, expansiveness, opening up’
Elizabeth Grosz
53
23
8.
THE THING FROM THE SHADOW WORLD
‘Projection is always an indirect process of becoming conscious—indirect because of
the check exercised by the conscious mind, by the pressure of traditional or
conventional ideas which take the place of real experience and prevent it from
happening.’
Carl Jung54
When Jung wrote of ‘projection’ it was often in relation to how we humans might throw our
shadow aspect into the world. Our interaction with film; in ascribing fears or hopes, those
shadows from within ourselves that glance at the screen: the trace, the imprint, an image, or
memory, a phantom in Plato’s cave. Perceiving the hybrid mind that is ‘other and we’ it is
there in the light flickering off a cinema’s interior or the walls of our home. In those moments
shadows cast are images in motion.
The projection plays on recollection and the oneiric
environment takes on a Deleuzian aspect.
‘A zone of recollections, dreams, or thoughts
correspond to a particular aspect of the thing: each time it is a plane or a circuit, so that the
thing passes through an infinite number of planes or circuits which correspond to its own
“layers” or its aspects’. He further alludes to time and thought images that are coupled with
pure optical and sound image, as part of ‘the layers of one and the same physical reality, and
55
the levels of one and the same mental reality, memory or spirit’.
(Figure x) The shadow (an
indexical sign but also a virtual image) is thrown back onto the screen so is a manifestation of
a gaze creating a field in Plato’s unreality. Could it be part of the ‘collective unconscious’?
56
In my own work I perceive that each superimposed image is a layer of moments: Deleuzian
planes that in totality moving images form at least one circuit from - operating and
complementing the content. (Figure xi)
24
Figure xi- still from 'Trace', Debra Fear, 2013
Jung also wrote that ‘the contents of the collective unconscious have never been in
consciousness, and therefore have never been individually acquired, but owe their existence
exclusively to heredity.’
57
This supports the theory that the ‘extended mind’ with its inherited
‘morphic’ pattern and film as a conscious, prosthetic memory could store these projections
within the expressed collective unconscious.
Jung’s archetypes, as ‘forms-mythics’
58
of
inherited patterns are cinema’s conventions and metaphorical devices and symbols. It is the
lady tied to railway tracks as the silently laughing bad guy jumps up and down nearby or the
sinister soundtrack of the stalker: new archetypes from an archaic cinematic form. It is a
metaphysical ‘connectome’
59
that resonates with Kurt Lewin’s ‘Field theory’60, a psychological
theory examining patterns of interaction between the individual and the total dynamic field or
environment. The theory proposes that we behave according to variables within a field, as
would the spectator-film entity to its archetypes and it is further enhanced in its continued
evolution by current haptic technologies. Theoretically it encompasses ideas of ‘haptic trace’
and ‘haptic visuality’
61
(all subservient to the I-Haptic) as applicable to its environment. Traces
of ‘sense’, of afterimage, of flashback are all reflected from the collective unconscious as
fingers swipe the touch screen, but how is it in relation to the spectator’s gaze? (Figure xii)
25
Figure xii -‘Drawings from the Extended Mind- Collective Unconscious #1’, Debra Fear, 2013
26
9.
ARE YOU LOOKING AT ME?
‘There's something extraordinarily disconcerting about sitting in a darkened cinema
gazing up at the screen, and seeing another cinema audience reflected back.’
Andrew Pulver
62
The glance might pre-empt the gaze and be the subtle difference between an artwork and film
being engaged with properly or not but the blink of an edit is of the wink in a collaborative act?
Figure xiii - still from 'Shirin' directed by Abbas Kiarostami, 2008
In the film ‘Shirin’ (Figure xiii) the viewer is presented with the audience’s reaction to a film,
quite reminiscent of watching Ian Breakwell and Ron Geesin’s ‘Auditorium’ (1994), for they
focus on the gaze of the spectator. Glance is an interrupted gaze, it makes film a Lacanian
‘objet petit a’ (the fallen/the unobtainable edit of the desired)
reciprocated the ‘other’ and the ‘other’ echoes back.
63
for when the viewer’s gaze is
Edward S Casey sees animated
images as the ‘ritournelle’ movement of the kaleidoscopic glance. Ritournelle Is the French
word from the Italian ‘ritornello’, which means a musical return. A re-inventing refrain, which
I imagine echoing within the entity’s consciousness.
Casey quoted Bergson’s idea of
duration as invention, so a glance I would surmise is ‘absolutely new’, it is a ‘folding-back
structure’
64
not dissimilar to an echo.
‘The glance leaps out from our seeing eye’ and
duration brings ‘a form that will emerge only in the course of the becoming of the new event
27
65
itself’.
Even if Casey glances at a non-alive object such as a boulder, Casey sees that the
boulder still triggers an assumption of a response and thereby is taken in ‘virtuality’ as
reacting back.
66
Without the gaze, the glance, by a wink or blink then a work cannot be
there, be of value or is it sufficient through the creator’s intent that even without the spectator
it can exist. It is like Schrodinger’s film, if there is no observer of a projected event, can the
entity simultaneously exist and not exist at any given moment within the confines of the
gaze? In this it is assumed that the entity requires the gaze of the ‘other’, at least initially.
Bernard Stiegler writes that the ‘other’ is omnipresent but only animated into life when a film is
shown: ‘and gives me access to the other who is (always) right next to me and who is only
waiting to come to life (i.e. to cinema, to the image of the other) to be set in motion as a
projection on a screen’.
67
For Stiegler the filmed film is a 'temporal object' and forms a
secondary memory for the viewer, (he does not use the term prosthetic), a part of his or her
past stream of consciousness, whose remembrance is re-activated. He uses Fellini’s film
‘Intervista’ (1987) to illustrate this for it employs a tertiary memory device. An earlier Fellini film
ʻLa Dolce Vitaʼ (1961) is being screened to an audience within the movie ʻIntervistaʼ which you
are watching, not dissimilar to the faded starlet Twilight Zone episode: it is almost a ritornello
moment. Further on he concludes that 'Consequently, the viewer (of Intervista) faced with the
impossibility of distinguishing between reality and fiction, between perception and imagination,
while (each in his or her particular role) all must also say to themselves, “We …are passing by
68
there”.
the other: gaze :
we
not adoption of I to we
who bears witness
the watcher a figment
an echo
an echo
of blinks cutting our sight
not other but we.
‘The Others We See’, D Fear, 2013
28
What contemporary spectator or audience as an echoed ‘other’ needs to be considered?
Raymond Bellour writes of ‘the uncertain spectator of our time’, a spectator exposed through
‘the information revolution and the logics of the digital image’ to two extreme forms of cinema.
One ‘a globally dominant, commercial cinema that is rules by its own by-products’ and as other
‘as subtly shocking… local, diversified, at the same time as it becomes ever more international
seeking everywhere to gain spectators’ attention- avowedly or not, an art of resistance’.
69
(Figure xiv)
Figure xiv- still from 'The Track', Debra Fear, 2013
Present-day spectators/viewers are not the cinema mass audience of the twentieth century, for
the advent of video heralded new forms of viewing so they now have ‘become a member of a
limited community, but a community henceforth extended to the dimensions of the entire
world.’ For Bellour these films bring forth ideas of ‘attentiveness’, ‘shock’ and ‘distraction all
servicing the collective cinematic memory; it is a provoked gaze. There is only one cinematic
unfolding experience and that lives in the dark of the screening room he purports, otherwise,
they are just its echoes when presented via other multi-medium formats. Bellour writes of the
‘variable circles of extension, as the film progresses and builds itself and which the modes of
attentiveness particular to each spectator elaborate in it …. It seems that intermittent fixities
never stop being projected, re-projecting themselves, between the film and the spectator’.
70
29
The 'We' composed or possibly composited of the film(s), and the viewer that make the hybrid
is hereafter named
.
71
It has been empowered and enfolded with ʻboth othersʼ
echoing in ʻmorphic resonanceʼ through a new collective unconscious, film being an ideal
format for its expression. Jung had projected that not only was there a world unconscious but
within it separate collectives dependent on differing cultures. ‘Other’ as one is a redundant
concept. In Dr Who and Torchwood
72
‘morphic fields’ are like templates for species creation,
the ‘Time Lords’ emergence as a race evolving over eons creating a ‘morphic’ field that allows
other forms of species to blueprint from it.
lies within moving image and sound
and therefore is immanent in the imagination. Facilitated by the continued digital revolution the
‘re-coming: becoming’ is a virtual reality.
‘There was another kind of magic. It was snapping wildly in the world now, like a
broken film. If only he could grab it … Reality didn’t have to be real. Maybe if
conditions were right, it just had to be what people believed.’
From the book ‘Moving Pictures’, Terry Pratchett, 1990
Figure xv – book cover illustration for ‘Moving Pictures’ by Josh Kirby
30
10. IHAPTIC AND THE I.C
‘When urban culture – a haptic geography thrives on tangible interactions and the
transitory space of inter-subjectivity, it filmically extends its inner perimeter. In the city,
as when travelling with film, one’s self does not end where the body ends nor the city
where the walls end. The borders are fluid, as permeable as epidermic surfaces’
G Bruno
The city is a cinematic membrane within which
73
is most located through its
proliferation of screens whether it be billboard or phone or self-service till.
The virtual: a
disembodied realm where moving image’s trace and our responses to it are as a haunting of
that trace.
A dominion both absent and present: a presence sensed and sensing with
‘Crossing lines of vision’.
‘impossible objects’.
plaything for
75
74
A haptic trace: an echo of touch, an active engagement to
What of an accumulative haptic memory, in thrall to the IHaptic,
76
? Laura Marks ‘haptic visuality’
is an interesting proposition that
could help to substantiate further the emergent hybrid. Marks states that digital codes and
information layers remove our internal perception by coded externals (e.g. Google maps
replacing the reading of a paper map) and replace them with information contextually itemised
in motion.
The appropriation of information into these forms of organising patterns, she
analysed, using in some part Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson’s concepts in her book ‘The
Skin of Film’. She indicates that for her there are unrecognisable patterns, not yet existent in
our world that ‘folds' (as a ‘becoming’) into our perception. She writes within the specific
context of intercultural cinema (intercultural cinema: IC, according to Marks has a cultural
exchange that is unpredictable - is this the ‘bifurcation’ Grosz mentions?) and quotes Henri
Bergson, ‘The very relation with the other is the relationship of the future’.
77
Henri Bergson
was writing about ‘durée’ but the statement is pertinent to our ‘other plus other = we’, or as
Arthur Rimbaud might say ‘Je est un autre’- ‘I is other’.
78
As analogue film is seen as
referencing that which has happened i.e. the past, and digital as being of the present, so this
31
relationship creates a being that is of or for the future. Intercultural cinema is Bellour’s ‘subtly
shocking’
79
cinema for the uncertain but embodied spectator where films evoke the haptic
senses. For Laura Marks ‘People whose lives are built in the movement between two or more
cultures are necessarily in the process of transformation’.
80
Imagine that within the
transformative presence of intercultural cinema there is an intercultural-transcultural entity
translating for the embodied spectator as a new form of expressive existence. Borrowing
heavily from Marks terminology it is one that values the proximal senses (smelling, touching,
feeling) over the distance senses (hearing, seeing), and attempts to evoke this sensorial field
through particular formal and textual strategies. Marks coined this new strategy in film as
‘haptic visuality’. It is another aspect of
. In her conclusion, interestingly called
‘The Portable Sensorium’, Marks writes ‘I see reason for hope that life will continue to produce
new and unmanageable hybrids, given the vitality of sensuous experience.’
Figure xvi – plates from 'Songs of Experience' and ‘There is no natural religion’ by William Blake
William Blake might call ‘haptic visuality’ an erotic engagement to film. The ‘Generation’
81
elevated and the redemption of creation. (Figure xvi) Dr Ian James refers to Jean Luc Nancy’s
idea of ‘sense is consciousness to the world’ in that sense involves an embodiment as a
‘relation to or as being-toward-something, this something evidently always being ‘something
other’.
82
may never manage to materialise in the flesh, so to speak, but remain in
a mobile ‘virtual reality’ sensorium that by being ‘sensed’ and ‘sensing’ it has consciousness.
Through constant repetition that echoes image and sound, in a quasi-Deleuzian conceptual
32
world, forming, fading and changing character in this cinematic mental space; an echo
chamber of moving image traces that bounce in resonance: a recombinant form. What of the
technological lifeblood that feeds the hybrid? For if it is conscious and has consciousness, it is
persistently ‘becoming’ and ‘inventing’, then what are the possibilities for a new manifestation?
‘Each of us is aware he’s a material being, subject to the laws of physiology and
physics, and that the strength of all our emotions combined cannot counteract
those laws. It can only hate them. The eternal belief of lovers and poets in the
power of love which is more enduring than death, the ‘finis vitae sed non amoris’
that has pursued us through the centuries is a lie. But this lie is not ridiculous, it’s
simply futile. To be a clock on the other hand, measuring the passage of time, one
that is smashed and rebuilt over and again, one in whose mechanism despair and
love are set in motion by the watchmaker along with the first movements of the
cogs. To know one is a repeater of suffering felt ever more deeply as it becomes
increasingly comical through a multiple repetitions.’ 83
From the book ‘Solaris’, Stanislaw Lem, 1961
‘Futures made of virtual insanity - now
Always seem to, be govern'd by this love we have
For useless, twisting, our new technology
Oh, now there is no sound - for we all live underground.
Living - Virtual Insanity’
Excerpt from the song ‘Virtual Insanity’, Jamiroquai, 1997
33
11. THE RETURN OF V.R AND OTHER REALITIES
Virtual Reality (VR) has returned as a convincing simulated reality. Technology has caught up
to produce hi-tech moving images and sound and to mimic movement with more sophisticated
realism. High frame rates prevent the image drag of the last century that reminded you it was
‘unreal’. VR coupled with streamed ‘live action’ content uses perceptual tricks to fool you, for
example, into thinking you are running further and faster than you actually are.
Kinect
84
sensors already exist that map all players and adjust the game according to motion but there
are also sensors that can detect metabolic responses (sweat production or pulse rates)
gauging when to emotionally manipulate/adjust the level of difficulty for the active participant in
these gaming scenarios. Passive spectator experience changed to participant spectator with
feedback complete. The use of devices like the ‘Oculus Rift’, a headset (with an immersive
o
experience of a 360 range and depth) and other technologies such as the ‘Wiz Dish’
‘Omni treadmill’
86
85
and
allow your body to partially mimic actions within the VR environment. With
additional perception manipulators building a more ‘authentic experience’ it can be assumed
gamers can form prosthetic memories. It is as if we attended a cinema and stepped into the
screen and the film world it projects; another twilight zone moment.
Meditative trance
applications, through ‘lucid dreaming’ mimicry, such as ‘Sound Self’ are expanding the borders
of VR experiences, ‘we make abstract, unreal environments feel real’.
87
(There is even a 3-D
VR cinema experience recreating not only the interior of a cinema but within it you sit down
and watch a 3-D film) Virtual Reality takes embodied spectators with its incredible enabling
structures of filmic, vibrant, dynamic content and takes
to another perceptual level;
a collection of playgrounds. Perhaps though it expresses itself more efficiently through other
reality adjusters.
34
‘Augmented space is the physical space, which is “data dense,” as every point now
potentially, containing various information (s), which is being delivered to it from
elsewhere. At the same time, video surveillance, monitoring, and various sensors
can also extract information from any point in space, recording the face
movements, gestures and other human activity, temperature, light levels, and so on
…. As a result, the physical space now contains many more dimensions than
before, and while from the phenomenological perspective of the human subject, the
“old” geometric dimensions may still have the priority, from the perspective of
technology and its social, political, and economic uses, they are no longer more
important than any other dimension.‘
‘The Poetics of Augmented Space’, Len Manovich
88
Though partially out of date today (Moore’s Law being in operation for any book referencing
digital technology), Manovich’s other book ‘The Language of New Media’ commented that
Dziga Vertov’s film ‘A Man with a Movie Camera (1929) is not only a database of city life in the
1920's, a database of film techniques, and a database of new operations of visual
epistemology, but it is also a database of new interface operations which together aim to go
beyond a simple human navigation through a physical space.’
89
We are in a world of
databases. If you join ‘augmented space’ to Augmented Reality (AR), which is a form of
90
‘mediated reality’
then you can appreciate what a gamut of information is being provided for
to utilise. Augmented Reality (AR) is where information from our immediate ‘real
world’ (we exist – are immersed in) is provided in an interactive format, keeping the user
‘informed’ of relevant data and if necessary allowing that information to be manipulated. It
utilises innovations in computer vision and object recognition (finding a given object in an
image or video sequence) ‘artificial information about the environment and its objects can be
overlaid on the real world’,
91
i.e. is virtual data.
It is a ‘Robocop’ or ‘Terminator’ (Figure xviii)
world in which, via AR glasses (new forms of screens), we view information graphics
superimposed onto real-time viewed scenes. Barbara Maria Stafford warns us that ‘people
35
seem generally unaware how much they are depending on artificial intelligence.
What
concerns me about the avid commercial interests in automated intelligence systems is that
they can encourage the relinquishing of intentional control in what is not a relationship between
equals. Who or what authority is in charge of the hyperintensive volume-processing aspects of
92
digitally derived information?’
Figure xviii - still from 'The Terminator', 1984
Figure xvii - Displays for a stealth fighter pilot
Fighter pilots in military aircraft depend on visual displays (Figure xvii) rather than viewing ‘realtime’ with their eyes in fast changing circumstances. Paul Virilio wrote in his book ‘War and
Cinema: The Logistics of Perception’ about the shifts in visual thinking that with ‘the air arm’s
violent cinematic disruption of the space continuum, together with the lightening advances of
military technology, …… the old homogeneity of vision’ is replaced ‘with the heterogeneity of
perceptual fields’.
93
Though the book was written in the 1980’s his views are significant
considering that the advent of modern warfare technology has driven the military personnel
(remembering that they are also spectators) into new mental states using advanced prosthetic
memory devices. Stanislaw Lem is credited with an early definition of VR, which he called
‘phantomatic’,
94
where false information (unreal) is fed to the senses to trick people into
believing that an artificial virtual environment is real. The idea of false not simulated reality.
AR technology is being investigated, for example, to increase the level of interactive
experiences when attending museum exhibits. Researchers are developing new ways to bring
people into an AR immersive story or experience. They say that AR ‘would enable visitors to
‘author’ components of a museum exhibit by integrating their own physical and emotional
reactions. Users who interact with the exhibit are able to leave traces of themselves behind ─
what they saw, how they responded to it, ideas that may strike them during the experience ─
and the next person in then plays with that extra layer’.
95
This interactive, integrative,
36
participant to next participant spectatorship forms a new level of experience for
to
traverse this dense data environment. The interactive virtuality aspect of what they describe
seems a form of transmedia storytelling
96
but results possibly in what might be described as a
transmedia prosthetic memory scenario.
Sylviane Agacinski wrote ‘The image in movement – from film to video and digital – has
become the technological model for our experience: images pass, like things and events,
according to a continuous movement from which we sometimes extract some artificially
arrested scene.
97
Truth refers to movement’.
Without movement, without motion, without
moving image would we now be without truth?
98
expands and moves in a world of increasing ‘gamification’ , a hybrid nested within
99
the Hybrid Clouds ; possessing a collective unconscious with an assemblage of film thought
and consequent powers of the false and the real that are indistinguishable. For the moment it
is still dependent on its spectator/viewer component and the technology that connects it to a
streamed monthly subscription of Netflix et al. What is left for it to become manifest, to absorb
in its conscious reality?
‘I began by proposing that the neurosciences, cognitive science, and the new
philosophy of the mind need to come together with the variegated historical,
humanistic, or cultural-based studies of images. …….. When considered
complementary rather than oppositional, the arts and sciences reveal two aspects
of the same self-image relationship.’
100
Barbara Maria Stafford
37
12. THIS IS NOT THE END – NOT 1984 BUT 1942
‘Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the
end of the beginning.’
Winston Churchill
101
Figure xix - draft audio script for ‘We Made it – 1942’, Debra Fear, 2013
38
My film ‘We Made it- (1942)’ (Figure xx) forms part of the project ‘100x100=900’, where one
hundred video artists, from different continents, were invited to produce an artwork inspired by
the twentieth century.
102
The project is being screened in many diverse countries across the
globe including Iran, China, Hungary, US and UK.
The film’s simple layered imagery
comprises of transitional text and visual overlays (in a manual typewriter font used at that time)
and features a hybrid-collaged soundtrack mimicking a radio broadcast- see the audio draft
transcript (Figure xix). The following description explains the premise, which due to the short
time-frame and copyright issues, created a challenge in representing the year 1942 whilst also
illustrating the pervasiveness of moving image and its cultural artifacts and thereby highlighting
my own
encounter, for ‘fine art’ moving image forms its own archetypes,
103
expressed within my ‘arte difettoso’
practice:
‘The omnipresent shadow of World War Two and Anne Frank wrote in her diary
‘Countless friends and acquaintances have gone to a terrible fate’ and so her family
go into hiding. Motion pictures include classics like ‘Casablanca’ the famous song
played by Sam -‘As time goes by’ - and ‘Holiday Inn’ when ‘White Christmas’ is
sung first on film by Bing Crosby. The animation ‘Bambi’ premieres and, I in the
1960's, a young child was taken out of the cinema howling with shock when his
mother got shot. In Great Britain Winston Churchill gives a speech ‘’Now this is not
the end…’ On radio ‘Desert Island Discs’ – still aired today- started with its famous
intro music and holds the following years together. Through all of this the number
‘42’ resonates like some numbers do, and further along the century it is the
backbone of Douglas Adam’s radio series, then TV and later a Hollywood film ‘Life,
the universe and everything’. Somehow part of its script fits back to 1942 in textual
echoes for me so I intertwined and put them into time’s distorting filter. Those
words mutate in arrangement and change, amplifying context and meaning. One
out of the three visuals is by a war artist who was lost on a flight to Iceland, whilst
the other images are fake future or advertisement promises or the battle that never
was (Los Angeles). So long ago yet the thread of continuity is we: for all our truths,
failings and humanity. “For old time’s sake Forsake A kiss is just a kiss Kiss Never
out of date Out never Each and all join in the march of death Join the march each
Now this is not the end Now this end”.
From 100x100=900 website, 2013
39
Figure xx – Still from ‘We Made it, 1942’, Debra Fear, 2013
40
13. ECHOES OF SPIRITUS MUNDI:
FICTION IN REVERIE
‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give E.T…. kid Tibbs! a damn… I'm
going to make him an I've got a feeling we're not in Kansas…
offer he can't refuse… been a contender. May Ma! Top of the
the force be with you… I could've been somebody, which is
what I am…. Toto anymore. Here's looking at you Go ahead you
talkin to me… Play it, Sam. Play in the morning…
Made it,
world! A census… love the smell of napalm taker… once tried
to test me… I ate his liver James Bond with some fava beans
and
a
nice
Chianti.
Bond…They
call
me
Mister.
Baby
in
a
corner There's no instead of a bum, place like home… Why
don't you come up sometime Show me the money! I want to phone
home… Goes By to be alone. After You don't understand!.. I
coulda had class. I coulda all, tomorrow is another day!..
Nobody
puts
My
Precious
dreams are made of…
make
my
day
and see me?...
the…
the
stuff
that
As Time…’
‘Prosthetic Dialogue’, D Fear, 2013
, an echo from Spiritus Mundi.
105
104
A becoming of consciousness: a science-fiction
script paradigm from which there was a techno-Gothic potentiality. The potential ‘actual-virtual’
hybrid echoes the silent cinema urBeing that waited for Generation. It contains the memory
traces of the visceral body and of senses, as it projects (in a multitude of contexts) our eyes
like Seer’s projectors (Figure xxi). As a haptic contact from a retinal touch, which meets with
the interface recreating the films of our mind. Edited sequences of prosthetic remembering
and a cutting of the duration of sentience. ‘This one lives a film as one lives the space one
inhabits – in haptic intimacy’
106
, Guiliana Bruno unwittingly indicates the presence of being.
Figure xxi – still from ’Extramission 6’, Lindsay Seers 2009
41
‘The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?’
From ‘The Second Coming’, WB Yeats, 1920
‘Turning and turning in a widening gyre’
inadequate this ‘text’ to tell the tale of
107
how eloquent this first line by Yeats but how
but for now you may visualise that the
credits roll over the membrane in your mind. They are then pushed to the left hand of the
screen as the announcer tells us what is on next in this alternative guide to moving image.
Robotics are redundant, in cybernetics so is the quest for AI; they are temporal artefacts laid
into the past.
If ‘truth refers to movement’ then this is ‘The Second Coming’.
The new
representative of Spiritus Mundi, a concept spawned in the screening space gloom.
It is
increasingly difficult to separate thought from ‘film’ (Jung and Freud stir in the ether), the
oneiric spectre in motion that inhabits the immersive, portable ‘filmic’ experience, a CCTV of
the soul crystallised into thought. The fluidic images in motion and aural stimuli are ultimately
narcissistic and the hybrid’s film component of ‘Echo’ repeating the last words and worlds of
another. Maurice Blanchot wrote ‘Narcissus falls ‘in love’ with the image because the image
as such – because every image – is attractive: the image exerts the attraction of the void, and
of death in its falsity.’
108
A self-assembled bio-nano ‘shape’ walks; its consciousness a
synthesis, engendering who knows what new symbols or Jungian archetypes from the world
and evolving them to suit its crystalline moving image. What evolutionary algorithm (Figure
xxii) will be capable enough for it to re-form and perceive the power of the false, the untruth
hiding in a fact? For ‘its hour come at last’ will be to cognise and edit a reality of its own fiction
even when the power is cut or is the fiction, perhaps, a vestigial Theory of Everything (TOE)?
42
The
ap. is waiting to be coded, uploaded and enabled, please read carefully
the following terms and conditions and then press ‘I Agree’:
Figure xxii – ‘BergLeuze Echomemorgram’, Debra Fear, 2013
‘Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it
louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper.
We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it
flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next
hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: there is nothing
wrong …….How ready we were to be seduced by moving image and sound, and in
comparison to other ‘arts’, how fast it has evolved to cater for our need for escapism. Moving
image or film or motion pictures, however you name them, we use them but should there be the
question ‘Do they use us?’ In ‘The Sixteen-Millimetre Shrine’ an aging, reclusive movie star spends most
of her time in a darkened projection room watching and reliving her old movies; desiring her old life.
With the power invested in film her desire is realised, her maid screams in shock when discovering the
previously occupied room empty and looking upon the screen she sees the faded starlet‘s projected
image, but the age she disappeared. Somehow she was absorbed by her own self-absorption; a typical
weekly ‘twilight’ plot twist.
We accept this spooky story
from being primed by centuries of storytelling; our exposure to tales of
ghosts and spectral realms and endless possibilities of the uncanny. Within cinema that collective remembrance is appropriated ………………
© WeEchoCyber, MMXIII
43
14. BIBLIOGRAPHY
BOOKS
Adams, Douglas. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. London: Pan Books, 1979.
Agacinski, Sylviane. Time Passing: Modernity and Nostalgia. European Perspectives. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2003.
Altman, Rick ed. Sound Theory, Sound Practice. AFI Film Readers. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind: Vol.One/Thinking. San Diego u.a.: Hartcourt, 1981.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos. Boston:
Beacon Press, 1971.
Beasley, Mark, et al. Electric Earth: Film and Video from Britain. London: British Council, 2003.
Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster = (L’ecriture Du Désastre). Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1986.
Brooke-Rose, Christine. Amalgamemnon. Manchester: Carcanet, 1984.
Bryson, Norman. Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze. London: Macmillan, 1992.
Butler, Blake. There Is No Year: a Novel. New York: Harper Perennial, 2011.
Christie, Ian ed. Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception. Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2012.
Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century.
Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1990.
Collier Anne, et al., Dispersion: London : Manchester: ICA, Cornerhouse Publications, 2008.
Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. New York: Zone Books, 1988.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time Image. London: Continuum, 2005.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Paul Patton. Difference and Repetition. London: Continuum, 2004.
Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive.
Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Dorsky, Nathaniel. Devotional Cinema. Berkeley, Calif.: Tuumba Press, 2005.
Elkins, James. The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1997.
Gasché, Rodolphe. The Honor of Thinking: Critique, Theory, Philosophy. Stanford, Calif: Stanford
University Press, 2007.
Grosz, E (ed.). Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures. Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1999.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1967.
Frampton, Daniel. Filmosophy. London; New York: Wallflower, 2006.
44
Hamlyn, Nicky. Film Art Phenomena. London: BFI Pub, 2003.
Hauke, Christopher. Ed. Jung & Film: Post Jungian Takes on the Moving Image. Hove, East Sussex :
New York: Brunner-Routledge, 2001.
Hegel, GF. ‘The Phenomenology of Mind’ translated by J. B. Baillie. New York: Harper Torch, 1931.
Hyde, Maggie, et al. Introducing Jung. Royston: Icon Books, 2004.
Leighton, Tanya ed. Art and the Moving Image: a Critical Reader. London : New York: Tate, 2008.
Jung, C.G, and R.F.C Hull. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1990.
Keynes, Geoffrey. A study of the Illuminated Books of William Blake: Songs of Experience. France:
The Trianon Press, 1964
Keynes, Geoffrey. William Blake: There is no natural religion. France: The Trianon Press, 1964
Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of
Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
Lauwereyns, Jan. Brain and the Gaze: On the Active Boundaries of Vision. Cambridge, Mass: MIT
Press, 2012.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002.
Marks, Laura U. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham:
Duke University Press, 2000.
Menary, Richard. The Extended Mind. Cambridge, Mass.; London: MIT Press, 2012.
Morin, Edgar. The Cinema, or, The Imaginary Man. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
Murch, Walter. In the Blink of an Eye: a Perspective on Film Editing. 2nd ed. Los Angeles: SilmanJames Press, 2001.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. A Finite Thinking. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.
Parr, Adrian. The Deleuze Dictionary. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005.
Penz, François, and Andong Lu. Urban Cinematics Understanding Urban Phenomena Through the
Moving Image. Bristol: Intellect, 2011.
Pratchett, Terry. Moving Pictures. London: Corgi Books, 1991.
Sheldrake, Rupert. The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature. London:
Fontana, 1989.
Sheldrake, Rupert. The Science Delusion: Feeling the Spirit of Enquiry. London: Coronet, 2013.
Sitney, P. Adams. Visionary Film: The American Avant-garde, 1943-2000. 3rd ed. Oxford : New York:
Oxford University Press, 2002.
Stafford, Barbara Maria. Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2007.
45
Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise, Stanford, Calif:
Stanford University Press, 2011.
Flaxman, G (ed.). The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Unspooling: Artists & Cinema. Manchester : Cornerhouse, 2010.
Velmans, Max. Understanding Consciousness. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2009.
Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. London: New York: Verso, 1989.
Webber, Andrew, and Emma Wilson (eds.). Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern
Metropolis. London: Wallflower, 2008.
Williams, James. Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy of Time: a Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2011.
Yeats, WB - The Collected Poems of WB Yeats (2000) ed., Wordsworth Edition.
Zizek, Slavoj. Lacan. London: Granta, 2006.
EXHIBITIONS/LECTURES/SYMPOSIA
Alternative Guide to the Universe, Hayward Gallery, London, UK, 11 Jun 2013 - 26 August 2013.
Shadow Narratives: Is there such a Thing as a Contemporary Moment? Symposium, RCA, London, 4
December, 2012
Motion, Emotion, Perception – new studies in vision and language. Research Methods Symposium,
RCA London, 16 January 2013
Art's Time: The idea that time and history are not synonymous and that the concept of modernity is
open to re-evaluation, Kamini Vellodi, RCA CHS Lecture, London, 4 February 2013
The Microscopic Trace: On the 19th genre of microscopic photography, Howard Caygill, RCA CHS
Lecture, London, 18 February 2013
The Trace of Forgetting, Michael Newman, RCA CHS Lecture, London, 4 March 2013
Criticism, Theory, and Thinking Sense, Dr Ian James, RCA Research event, 12 June 2013
JOURNALS/PAPERS/NEWSPAPERS
Arts Monthly
The Guardian
New Scientist
Butler, Alison. ‘A deictic turn: space and location in contemporary gallery film and video installation’.
Screen. 51:4 Winter 2010
46
Cho, Yen-Ting, ‘How abstract film benefits from Transmedia Storytelling’, The Edge of Thinking.
(November 2011): 90-97
ONLINE E-Books/JOURNALS/NEWSPAPERS
Cromie, William J. Which Comes First, Language or Thought?. Harvard Gazette, July 22, 2004
Grier, P. Identity and Difference: Studies in Hegel’s Logic, Philosophy of Spirit, and Politics. Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2007
Herzog, A, Images of Thought and Acts of Creation: Deleuze, Bergson, and the Question of Cinema.
http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue3/IVC_iss3_Herzog.pdf
Lau, Joe, and Max Deutsch. “Externalism About Mental Content.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. Winter 2012. /archives/win2012/entries/content-externalism/
Lem, Stanislaw. Solaris. Location: 3387. Premier Digital Publishing, 2012
Richards, K. Malcolm Derrida Reframed. IB Tauris & Co Ltd, 2008 eISBN-13: 9780857718907
http://www.guardian.co.uk
http://news.harvard.edu
http://www.scribd.com/doc/78598484/Barthes-Roland-Lovers-Discourse-Fragments
http://press.princeton.edu
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/07.22/21-think.html
INTERNET
http://www.bbc.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/
http://plato.stanford.edu
http://www.ted.com/
http://www.youtube.com/debzoid
www.sheldrake.org
http://plato.stanford.edu
http://www.iep.utm.edu
http://www.dcrc.org.uk
http://www.cncb.ox.ac.uk
http://thetased.wordpress.com
http://www.futurecinema.co.uk
http://www.academia.edu
http://www.wired.co.uk
http://chrri.info
http://www.wizdish.com
http://www.virtuix.com
http://www.winstonchurchill.org
http://www.9hundred.org
http://www.yeatsvision.com
http://www.luventicus
http://religiousstudies.stanford.edu
http://www.rochester.edu
http://socrates.berkeley.edu
http://www.imdb.com
http://www.tstoryteller.com
47
FILMS/TV
Siren, dir. Debra Fear, 2012
Altered States. dir. Ken Russell. 1980
Shirin, dir. Abbas Kiarostami, 2008
Jaws. dir. Steven Spielberg. 1975
Robocop. dir. Paul Verhoeven. 1987
Terminator. dir. James Cameron. 1984
Total Recall. dir. Paul Verhoeven. 1990
The Blob, dir. Irvin Yeawood, 1958
Apocalypse Now, dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1979
Trace, dir. Debra Fear, 2013
The Offering, dir. Debra Fear, 2013
The Track, dir. Debra Fear, 2013
Sponge Bog Square Pants, Nickelodeon, 1999-
Alphas, Syfy, 2011-2012
The Twilight Zone, CBS/UPN 1959-64
Person Of Interest, CBS, 2012 -
The Outer Limits, ABC, 1963-65 and Syfy,1995-2002
1 Using the spectrum of fluid usage these descriptive terms will be interchangeable for purposes of variety rather than in a purist fashion
2 DN Rodowick, ‘The Virtual Life of Film’, (Cambridge MA/London, Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 175.
3 Gaston Bachelard, ‘The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos.’ (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971).
4 Dasein is used by the philosopher Martin Heidegger and refers to ‘having-been-opened’ ‘already-having-been-opened’ according to
Thomas
Sheehan.
http://religiousstudies.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/13-2001-A-PARADIGM-SHIFT-IN-HEIDEGGER-
RESEARCH.pdf p.194, (last accessed 4th September 2013).
5 Excerpt from introduction script from ‘The Twilight Zone’, US TV series that began in the 1950s- written by director writer Rod Serling.
6 Fanon, Franz, ‘Black Skin, White Masks’, (Pluto Press, London, 1967), p. 140.
7 http://www.bbk.ac.uk/psychology/our-staff/academic/tim-smith/documents/9-Smith_psychocinematics_inpress.pdf (last accessed 20th
August 2013). Dr Smith at the RCA symposium ‘Motion, Emotion, Perception’, 16th January 2013 used the film ‘Bladerunner’ to show how
eye-tracking testing works, which in the context of the film’s storyline where the replicants are tested via their retina responses was
intrinsically very apt. See bibliography.
8 http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/07.22/21-think.html, (last accessed 25th August 2013).
9 Arendt, H, ‘The Life of the Mind- Vol. One- Thinking (London, Secker & Warburg, 1978), p. 77.
48
10 A selfie normally refers to a photograph but I extend the context as there are many video equivalents. A selfie is where you photograph
yourself and usually upload to social network sites.
11 Sitney, Adams, ‘Visionary film’, (Oxford and New York, OUP, 2002) p.172.
12 Murch, Walter, ‘In the Blink of an Eye’, 2nd Ed. (Los Angeles, Silman-James Press, 2001) p. 69. (Figure iv).
13 Peter Canning, ‘The Imagination of Immanance’, ‘The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema’, ed. G Flaxman
(Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 342.
14 The extended mind is an idea in the field of philosophy of mind, which holds that the reach of the mind need not end at the boundaries of
skin and skull. Tools, instruments and other environmental props can under certain conditions also count as proper parts of our minds.
15 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/content-externalism/#ActExt (last accessed 2nd May, 2013).
16 James Elkins, ‘The Object Stares Back’ (San Diego, Harcoast Brace, 1997), p 69.
17 Exogram is an external memory record. Engram is an internal memory record. A good source of a more detailed explanation can be
found online at http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i10027.pdf, p.5. (Table I.1), (last accessed 20th August 2013).
18 Lacan’s concepts explains in an amusing minute on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwlirZQLAAg (last accessed 19th
September 2013). Jacques Derrida : http://www.iep.utm.edu/derrida/ (last accessed 26th August 2013) and Malcolm Richards, K. Derrida
Reframed. IB Tauris & Co Ltd, 2008 eISBN-13: 9780857718907 https://www.dawsonera.com/abstract/9780857718907 (last accessed 6th
September 2013).
19 Rupert Sheldrake, on TedX, http:// http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/19/the-debate-about-rupert-sheldrakes-talk/ (last accessed 3rd September
2013).
20 http://www.sheldrake.org/Resources/glossary/ (last accessed 30th June 2013).
21 Rupert Sheldrake, ‘The presence of the past: morphic resonance and the habits of nature’, (London, Fontana, 1989). p.119.
22 http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/feb/05/rupert-sheldrake-interview-science-delusion (last accessed 13th August 2013).
23 A direct translation is that it means ‘duration’, however, for Bergson it covered an imagist perception of duration dependent on what/who
experienced it e.g. each individual has a different temporal perception. of ‘how long’ is.
49
24 A ‘line of flight’ is a path of creative mutation precipitated through the actualization of connections among bodies in the capacities of those
bodies to act and respond. (amended from Tamsin Lorraine in Deleuze Dictionary p. 145, see bibliography). Virtual images existing in
planes (or sheets) with each plane a container ready to be expressed of its past manifestations; connected to a specific virtual image and
the origins that are influenced by its existence. Could Deleuze’s ‘lines of flight’ mimic thought-movements?
25 Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Thinking the New’, ‘Becomings, Explorations in Time, Memory and Futures’ ed. Elizabeth Grosz, (New York, Cornell
University Press, 1999), p.28.
26 Rupert Sheldrake, ‘The presence of the past: morphic resonance and the habits of nature’, (London, Fontana, 1989), p.97.
27 This description, though long, by Amy Herzog is probably the best I have read so far. ‘The movement-image, according to Deleuze, is
exemplified by classical Hollywood cinema. Time proceeds only as dictated by action (the action of narrative, of cause and effect, of
rationality). Temporality in the movement-image, for Deleuze, is governed by the "sensory-motor schema." All movements are determined
by linear causality, and the characters are bent toward actions which respond to the situations of the present. Even when temporal
continuity is momentarily disrupted (e.g. in a flashback), these moments are reintegrated into the prescribed evolution of past, present, and
future. The movement-image is structured, not only by narrative, but by rationality: closed framings, reasonable progressions, and
continuous juxtapositions. The time-image, however, breaks itself from sensory-motor links. The emphasis shifts from the logical
progression of images to the experience of the image-in-itself. What we find here are pure optical and sound situations (opsigns and
sonsigns), unfettered by narrative progression, and empty, disconnected any-space-whatevers. This move from "acting" to "perceiving"
carries over to the characters in the film, who cease to be "agents" and become, instead, "seers." Though Deleuze is hesitant to identify
any single film that embodies the time-image, moments in films by Pasolini, Ozu, and Godard, for example, gesture towards that ideal:
moments of rupture, hesitation, irrational cutting, or prolonged duration. Movement that is aberrant (i.e. not rational or sensory-motor) can
be seen, according to Deleuze, to be caused by time itself. Built through irrational movements and op/sonsigns, the time- image exists
thus not as a chronology, but as a series of juxtaposed "presents." What is achieved is exceedingly rare: a direct image of time.’
http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue3/IVC_iss3_Herzog.pdf (last accessed 6th September 2013).
28 Bernard Stiegler, ‘Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise’, translated by Stephen Barker (Stanford California,
Stanford University Press, 2011- Originally published in French in 2001). p.26.
29 Daniel Frampton’s ‘Filmosophy’, (London, Wallflower Press, 2000), p.1.
30 Ibid. p.73.
50
31 Ibid. p.79.
32 Ibid. p.73.
33 John Donne, ’Devotions upon Emergent Occasions’ (1623), Meditation XVII - http://www.online-literature.com/donne/409/ (last accessed
4th June 2013)
34 Sylviane Agacinski, ‘Time passing, modernity and nostalgia’, translated by Jody Gladding (Columbia University Press, 2003), p.102-103.
35 Alison Landsberg, ’Prosthetic Memory: the transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture’, (New York, Columbia
University Press, 2004), P.154.
36 Ibid. p.26.
37 ‘The Trace of Forgetting’. Professor Michael Newman, 4 March 2013 at RCA.
38 ‘Alphas’ is an American science fiction dramatic television series; it follows a group of people with superhuman abilities, known as
"Alphas", as they work to prevent crimes committed by other Alphas premiering on July 11, 2011.’ This description is abbreviated from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphas, (last accessed 11th August 2013).
39 ‘Person of Interest’ is a US TV series. In it ‘The Machine’ is a mass surveillance computer system programmed to monitor and analyze
data from surveillance cameras, electronic communications, and audio input throughout the world.’ It is a hybrid of augmented reality and
VR capability (DF). The description is amended from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_series)
40 War enactments/museums like US Holocaust Memorial Museum are an example of these. The use of real objects and recorded
memories mediated within an audiovisual and immersive environment.
41 ‘Prosthetic Memories are able to shape personality, morals, and character even though they’re not real.’ Somewhat sweeping statement,
not backed up empirically but the article presents thoughtful points. http://thetased.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/prosthetic-memories/ (last
accessed 26th August 2013).
42 Excerpt from website ‘secret cinema: unique fusion of film, improvised performances, detailed design and interactive multimedia, Future
Cinema
create
wholly
immersive
worlds
that
stretch
the
audience’s
imagination
and
challenge
their
expectations.’
http://www.futurecinema.co.uk/about.html (last accessed 10th August 2013)
51
43 Dr Ian James, whose area of study is Jean Luc Nancy, in his drat paper ‘Thinking as Sense’ (presented at 'Criticism, Theory, and Thinking
Sense,' June 2013 at the RCA)
44 Alison Landsberg, ’Prosthetic Memory: the transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture’, (New York, Columbia
University Press, 2004) p.135. Transferential Space is where prosthetic memories allow a Freudian ‘transference’(see endnote 52 -Jung
video where he references it) and creation of new unauthentic but legitimate ‘empathic’ memories elicited from the participant through
immersive filmic or museum experiences.
45 Pat Berry, ‘Image in Motion’, ‘Jung & Film, Post-jungian takes on the Moving Image’, ed. C Hauke and I Alister, (East Sussex/New
York,Routledge, 2005) p.70. On page 72 she further commented that ‘Film taught us well’.
46 Bill Viola, ‘Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House, Writings 1973-1994, ed. Robert Violette (London, Thames and Hudson, 1995), p.48.
As quoted in Daniel Frampton’s ‘Filmosophy’, (London, Wallflower Press, 2000), p.73.
47 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mind-identity/ (last accessed 26th August 2013).
48 Helen Thompson, ‘The man who believes he is dead‘. New Scientist, Issue No. 2919, 1 June 2013, p.12.
49 Daniel Bor (Neuroscientist and author), ‘This is your brain on consciousness’, New Scientist, Issue No. 2917, 8 May 2013, p.33.
50 Hegel, G. W. F. ‘The Phenomenology of Mind’, translated by J. B. Baillie, (New York: Harper Torch Book, 1931), p. 229.
51 Grier, P. Identity and Difference: Studies in Hegel’s Logic, Philosophy of Spirit, and Politics. Albany: State University of New York Press,
2007.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/28932519/Hegel-Identity-and-Difference-Studies-in-Hegel-s-Logic-Philosophy-of-Spirit-and-Politics-
Philip-Grier-Suny-Press-2007#download (last accessed 6th September 2013) –Scribd is a digital library where if you upload a document
then you can download a document for free therefore I uploaded ‘Bergson Coexistence’ from page 2 though its title was different.
52 An excerpt of an citation by Elizabeth Grosz – see endnote 47– from Henri Bergson, The creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics,
trans. Mabell L. Andison, (New York, Citadel Press, 1992),p.93.
53 Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Thinking the new’,’Becomings, Explorations in Time, Memory and Futures’, (New York, Cornell University Press, 1999),
p.25.
54 CG Jung, C. G., Collected Works, “The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche,” Volume 8, par. 507.
Quoted in
http://www.academia.edu/217167/The_Mote_in_Your_Eye_In_Praise_of_Projection (last accessed 26th August 2013).
52
55 Gilles Deleuze ‘Cinema 2’ translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, (London, Continnum, 2009) p.44. Orginally published in
French in 1989.
56 ‘Collective unconscious is a term of analytical psychology, coined by Carl Jung. It is proposed to be a part of the unconscious mind,
expressed in humanity and all life forms with nervous systems, and describes how the structure of the psyche autonomously organizes
experience. Jung distinguished the collective unconscious from the personal unconscious, in that the personal unconscious is a personal
reservoir of experience unique to each individual, while the collective unconscious collects and organizes those personal experiences in a
similar way with each member of a particular species.’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_unconscious - (last accessed 4th September
2013).
57 C G Jung, ‘Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 9 (Part 1): Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious’, Gerhard Adler, trans. R. F.C.
Hull (Princeton, Princeton University Press,1981) pars. 87-110 from
http://archive.org/stream/TheCollectiveUnconsciousAndItsArchetypes_100/ArchetypesAlongJung_djvu.txt (last accessed 4th September
2013).
58 The archetype in simplistic terms is an archaic image/reference that is pulled out of the collective unconscious. See this video link for
Jung’s own words https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVeZz5QnEFE&feature=player_embedded#at=482 (last accessed 4th September
2013).
59 ‘The ‘connectome’ ‘is a map. It's a map of the neurons in your brain and how they interact with each other -- which are connected, where,
and how strongly. Some neuroscientists believe that it's this map that defines who we are -- associating memories with other things in
your brain, in the same way that a smell of baking can conjure up an image of your kitchen.’ Definition from
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-07/16/connectome-sebastian-seung (last accessed 26th August 2013). See also a fascinating
TedTalk by Sebastian Seung, a neuroscientist from July 2010.
60 ‘Kurt Lewin (1890-1947) was a famous, charismatic psychologist who is now viewed as the father of social psychology. Lewin viewed the
social environment as a dynamic field which impacted in an interactive way with human consciousness. Adjust elements of the social
environment and particular types of psychological experience predictably ensue. In turn, the person's psychological state influences the
social
field
or
milieu.
Lewin
was
well
known
for
his
terms
"life
space"
and
"field
theory".
From
Wikipedia,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_theory_(psychology) (last accessed 13th July 2013)
53
61 A haptic trace is the residual memory of a haptic encounter whether it be touch or smell. Haptic visuality is Laura Mark’s theory that the
eyes function as organs of touch, as presented at the RCA as part of the ‘Motion, Emotion, Perception – new studies in vision and
language’ symposium, January 2013.
62 Andrew Pulver ‘Review: Shirin’, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/aug/29/shirin.venicefilmfestival (last accessed 26th August 2013).
63 Jacques Lacan’s (psychoanalyst) use of this could be variable as he progressed the idea but in this context it is the enigmatic and difficult
to
acquire
quality
of
the
desired
other;
that
which
is
fallen,
not
unlike
William
Blake’s
‘Experience/Generation’.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objet_petit_a (last accessed 21st August 2013)
64 Edward S Casey, ‘The Time of the Glance’, ‘Becomings, Explorations in Time, Memory and Futures’ ed. Elizabeth Grosz, (New York,
Cornell University Press, 1999), p.94.
65 Ibid. p.91., p.92.
66 Ibid. p.89.
67 Bernard Stiegler, ‘Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise’, translated by Stephen Barker (Stanford California,
Stanford University Press, 2011). Originally published in French in 2001. p.32.
68 Ibid. p.24.
69 Raymond Bellour, ‘The Cinema Spectator: A Special Memory’, “Audiences’, ed. I Christie, (Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press,
2012), p.208.
70 Raymond Bellour, ‘The Cinema Spectator: A Special Memory’, “Audiences’, ed. I Christie, (Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press,
2012), p.215.
71 W
W
E
WeeeE
EccchhhoooCyber
is a made-up ‘branding’ that connotes the hybrid entity as it stands now – spectator/viewer+ film = consciousness.
http://weechocyber.moonfruit.com - the website about it is in production.
72 Dr Who and its spin off Torchwood are BBC TV series of a sci-fi/fantasy theme.
For further information look at the fansite
http://news.thedoctorwhosite.co.uk/ (last accessed 4th September 2013).
54
73 G Bruno ‘Motion and Emotion and the Urban Fabric’, from ‘Cities in Transition – the Moving Image, (London, Wallflower Press, 2008),
p.25.
74 James Elkins, ‘The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1997), p.70.
75 Impossible objects in this context are of consciousness and perception as mooted by Alva Noe, a Professor of Philosophy currently at
Berkeley. Impossible objects are of an experienced imperceptible character having no geometrical properties that no physical real object
can have.
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~noe/EWIT.pdf (last accessed 4th September 2013) – see also the general meaning
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_object (last accessed 4th September 2013)
76 Laura U Marks ‘The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses’ (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). p.162.
77 Ibid p.63.
78 French poet Arthur Rimbaud which translates as ‘I is other’ from ‘Letter to Georges Izambard’ (Charleville, 13 May 1871).
79 Raymond Bellour, ‘The Cinema Spectator: A Special Memory’, “Audiences’, ed. I Christie. (Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press,
2012), p.208.
80 Laura U Marks ‘The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses’ (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), p.65.
81 William Blake’s ‘Experience’ (Songs of Experience, 1794) indicates a level of consciousness coming after childhood, one that has fallen
and is oppressed but through artistic endeavour will be elevated once more. See figure XVI for his imagery.
82 Dr Ian James in his draft paper ‘Thinking as Sense’ (presented at 'Criticism, Theory, and Thinking Sense,' June 2013 at the RCA).
83 Stanislaw Lem, ‘Solaris’, trans. (Premier Digital Publishing, 2011), location: 3387. The translation by Bill Johnston direct from Polish to
English is said to far outshine what Lem thought was a poor transfer from Polish to French translation to English- it certainly reads far
better for this quote than the one from the 1970s. It is near the end of the book.
84 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinect (last accessed 25th September 2013).
85 ‘Sandrine Leurstemont, ‘Optical illusions help you explore a virtual world on foot’, New Scientist, Issue no. 2922, 22 June 2013, p. 22.
Further information can be found at http://www.wizdish.com/ (last accessed 10th August 2013).
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86 Niall Firth, ‘Get your head in the game‘, New Scientist, Issue No. 2922, 22 June 2013 p.19.http://www.virtuix.com/ (last accessed 13th
August 2013).
87 Douglas Heaven, ‘Mind-bending games let you live your dreams’, New Scientist, Issue No. 2922, 22 June 2013, p.20.
88 Len Manovich, ‘The Poetics of Augmented Space’, Visual Communication June 2006 vol. 5 no. 2. p. 223.
89 Len Manovich, ‘The Language of New Media’, (Cambridge, MIT Press, 2002), p.236.
90 Term from Dr Steve Mann, a member of the Wearable computing group at MIT Media Lab and it means there is a mixture of visual
information from the real world and virtual information.
91 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality (last accessed 5th August 2013).
92 Barbara Maria Stafford, ‘Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Image’s. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p.190.
93 Paul Virilio, ‘War and Cinema, The Logistics of Perception’, translated by Patrick Camiller (London, Verso, 1989), p.26.
94 ‘According to Lem, phantomatics is the generation of 'realities which for the intelligent life-forms that inhabit them are indistinguishable
from normal reality, yet are governed by different laws.' http://www.cncb.ox.ac.uk/index.php/technologies, (last accessed 24th August
2013).
95 http://chrr.info/events/181-can-technology-help-museum-visitors-understand-suffering (last accessed 26th August 2013). Excerpt from
website: ‘Dr Adam Muller (English, Film, and Theatre) and Dr. Andrew Woolford (Sociology) met on Sept. 26, 2011, to discuss how new
technologies can be used to help museum visitors better understand the suffering of others. Dr. Struan Sinclair (English, Film, and
Theatre) and Dr. Herb Enns (Architecture) continued this discussion on Oct. 17, 2011.’
96 Transmedia storytelling is http://www.tstoryteller.com/transmedia-storytelling (last accessed 3rd September 2013).
97 Sylviane Agacinski, ‘Time passing, modernity and nostalgia’, translated by Jody Gladding (Columbia University Press, 2003) p.15. The
original French edition ‘Passeur de temps’ was published in 2000.
98 ‘Gamification is the concept of applying the psychology of game-design thinking to non-game applications to make them more fun,
engaging and addicting. The psychological carrots include the need for public recognition and the thrill of competition.’,
http://www.networkworld.com/supp/2012/enterprise6/120312-ecs-hybrid-cloud-264443.html?page=4, (last accessed 22nd September
2013).
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99 Hybrid Clouds are the use of different public and private clouds merged within cloud computing to deliver different services.
http://www.networkworld.com/slideshow/76027/10-cloud-predictions-for-2013.html#slide2, (last accessed 22nd September 2013) .
100 Barbara Maria Stafford, ‘Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Image’s. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 207
101 This is an excerpt from a speech of Winston Churchill’s at the Lord Mayor's Day luncheon, Mansion House, London, 9 November 1942,
for full transcript at http://www.winstonchurchill.org/learn/speeches/speeches-of-winston-churchill/1941-1945-war-leader/987-the-end-of-
the-beginning (last accessed 24th August, 2013).
102 http://www.9hundred.org/viewbig.php?i=116 (last accessed 22nd July 2013).
103 Arte difettoso was created by me out of necessity to describe my practice; it uses ‘arte povera’ as a jump-off semantic point.
104 This work forms a literary assemblage of famous movie dialogues quotes typed using screenplay standard Courier typeface 10pt
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AFI's_100_Years...100_Movie_Quotes (last accessed 19th August, 2013).
105 ‘Spiritus Mundi’, literally translated as Spirit (of the) World came from the poet WB Yeats; it was his idea (out of Anima Mundi [soul]) that
the world was part of a vital intelligence - a Jungian collective unconscious in which humans, being part of it, could tap into its universal
symbols (its concept can be found from Plato to Eastern Buddhist philosophies). It appeared in his poem ‘The Second Coming’ – the full
transcript can be found at http://www.yeatsvision.com/secondnotes.html last accessed 24th August 2013. I have always found the poem
intriguing and also think that Yeat’s visualized concept of a ‘gyre’ to be reminiscent of diagrams by Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze in
W
E
regards to time and memory. Certainly W
WeeeE
EccchhhoooCyber could be said to be an extension of this idea.
106 G Bruno, ‘Motion and Emotion and the Urban Fabric’, from ‘Cities in Transition – the Moving Image’, (London, Wallflower Press, 2008)
p.24.
107 William Butler Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’, (Ware, Wordworth Eds., 2000), p. 158.
108 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster’, trans. A Smock, (Lincoln/London, University of Nebraska Press, 1986 p. 125.
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