Parallax

The creation of sensuous places has recently assumed a full-bodied experience that drawing, photography or video cannot quite capture. This paper analyzes one such place, the interior of the Jewett Art Center at Wellesley College (1955-1958) by Paul Rudolph. Noted for its ornamental exterior screen, the interior has almost entirely been forgotten. Unmistakably indebted to the picturesque sequences of Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, the Jewett Art Center includes a memorable stair and gallery that structures an unfolding sequence whereby vision and movement are fused into a tactile experience.

The deceptively simple plan of the art gallery can be explained as a set of procedures that enrich the act of following an attenuated route: constrict a path; alter the speed of ascent and descent; disassemble the exterior wall and double its component parts; screen views to the exterior; and insert an insistent occluding plane. The effect is that movement reinforces sight through parallax and peripheral vision. As foreground and background rotate about the visitor at varying speeds, a heightened sense of depth is created. In addition, alternatively occluded and disclosed views add clarity to the immersive experience. A visitor consistently returns to view the same feature from a new vantage point. The effect is an uncanny and disarming deception; the space is continually new but familiar. By returning on itself, each sequence grows beyond its enclosure. A participant also begins to notice other things. The material restraint, for example, directs attention to subtleties of light. Here, meaning is experiential and participatory rather than symbolic and interpretive. Rather than contemplate meaning, we are called to action; the display of art is fused into a meandering visual field holding the promise of a continuously unfolding and sensuous experience.

The use of a smartphone, with both still and video capabilities, to develop the concepts surrounding stellar parallax is described. The hands-on activities generate useful discussion amongst high school students. Reactions of both students and teachers are presented.

The book aims at the challenge of how to understand redemption or the state of original sin today. Here, grace renders as the theological theme of facing God in the interpersonal encounter of everyday life as well as in liturgy. Subsequently, becoming oneself as a felicitous being depends in a heteronomous way on living in community. Aesthetics, irony, eroticism, and narcissism display in this analysis the categories for rereading original sin by prioritizing the salvation work of Christ.

In the process of reaching the absolute truth, the subject’s knowledge is always manipulated by subjective presupposition which he considers true. In fact, this understanding is always distorted by a particular ideological framework when the subject interprets reality. Parallax, a change of view about something caused by different perspectives, makes the Real inconsistent. In this study, Orhan Pamuk’s novel My Name is Red is chosen to prove the position of that parallax.

This study is conducted by answering these problems: (1) How does parallax have implications for the emergence of ideological fantasy in My Name is Red novel?; (2) How does parallax have implications for the existence of authentic subject in My Name is Red novel? To answer those questions, the theories applied in this study are ideological fantasy and authentic subject in parallax schemes offered by Slavoj Žižek. While the method used is by analyzing the novel textually and objectively.

The results of this study prove that first, parallax has implications for the ideological fantasy of the subject. The miniaturists of Ottoman Empire who fantasize fundamentalism in their paintings desire the attainment of afterlife happiness. Conversely, Franks painters who fantasize secularism desire freedom. Although these perspectives can never meet in one synthesis, they both have similarity in the practice of capitalism. Second, parallax also has implications for the existence of the subject because of the shift of standpoint in its circuit. Olive, one of the characters, acts radically by killing his miniaturist colleague. Yet, he returns to the Symbolic because the doctrine of Islam makes him a subject that cannot be free. Ironically, Pamuk as the author is also trapped in the shackles of capitalism, so that the dream of becoming an independent subject is only an impossibility.

Paralaks izleyicinin konumundaki değişikliğe bağlı olarak gerçekleşen, gözlemlenen nesnedeki yer değiştirmedir. Bireyin içinde yaşadığı, dönüştürdüğü ve dönüştüğü kent yaşantısına dair çoğulluğu ve çeşitliliği vurgulayan yeni bir anlayış önerme niyetinde olan çalışma, bu niyeti paralaks bakışın çoklu karakterinden esinlenerek çoklu deneyler aracılığıyla ortaya koymaya çalışır. Benzerliklerden ziyade farklıların altını çizmek amacıyla, bu çalışma, kent-birey ilişkisini çoklu deneyler aracılığıyla çoklu durumları ve çeşitliliği vurgulayarak açıklamaya çalışır. Bu deneylerlerin çokluluğu üç farklı aşamayla oluşturulmuştur: - Gerçek zamanlı deney belirlenmiş rotanın kentsel deneyim boyunca bir kamera aracılığıyla kaydedilmesi ve bu bilginin deşifre edilmesinden oluşur. - Katılımlı blog deneyi katmansız, tanımlı bir harita üzerine belirlenmiş rotaya dair deneyimlerin izlerinin işlenmesi talep edilerek sanal ve gerçek yaşam arasında bir etkileşim kurar. Farklı kullanıcıların deneyimleri birikir. - Anlatı deneyi Orhan Pamuk’un romanlarındaki hatıralarıyla farklı bir katman sağlar. Çoğalan deneyimle elde edilen çok katmanlı bilgi ile düzlemsel bakışla elde edilmiş indirgenmiş bilgi arasında paralaktik bir kayma yaşanır. Var olan temsiller ile indirgenmiş bilgi, mutlak ve eksiksiz bilgiye ulaşma amacıyla yola çıkılarak elde edilmiştir. Oysa paralaks bakışla çoğalan deneyim bunun aksini ortaya koyar. Böylelikle mutlak ve eksiksiz bilgiye sahip olma yanılsaması yerini gerçeklikle karşılaşmaya bırakır. Mutlak, eksiksiz, tek, doğru bilgiye ulaşma anlayışı günümüz düşünüşüne, günümüz gerçekliğine ve yaşantısına ters düşmektedir. Bu anlayış yerini, çoklu durumların karşılaşmalarına, farklı konumlardan izlenen farklı gerçekliklere, yanılsamalara ve göreceliklere bırakmıştır. Böyle bir dinamizme aynı noktadan bakmak imkânsız hale gelmiştir. Çoğalan durumlar gibi bakışı da çoğaltmak kaçınılmazdır. Bu bağlamda, bu çalışma çağdaş kenti kavrayışta ve varolan yaklaşım ve temsillerin yeniden ele alınışında kılavuz gibi davranmayı amaçlar. Bu bakış açısıyla, çalışma dört ana bölümden oluşur: Bunlar, giriş, kavramlar, deney ve sonuç bölümleridir. Çalışmanın birinci bölümünde, kavramsal çerçevesini oluşturacak temel kavramlardan ve bunları besleyen alt kavramlardan bahsedilmiş; çalışmanın amacı, kapsamı ve yöntemi ortaya konmuştur. İkinci bölümde, çalışmanın kavramsal çerçevesini oluşturan metropol, birey ve paralaks kavramları açıklanmış; buna ek olarak zaman faktöründen bahsedilmiştir. Her bir kavram öncelikle, başkalarınca ele alınmış ve yakın bulunan bakış açıları ortaya konarak incelenmiş; daha sonra diğer kavramlarla ilişkileri araştırılmıştır. Üçüncü bölümde, önceki bölümde ele alınan temel kavramlar doğrultusunda gerçekleşecek olan paralel deneyler ve çok katmanlı okumalar açıklanmış, bu deneyler süreçleri, verileri ve sonuçlarıyla değerlendirilmiştir. Son bölüm ise, tez kapsamında tartışılan konular ve tezin amaçlarının ortaya konmasına, sonuç ve değerlendirmeye ayrılmıştır.

What should we do about defunct or ‘aging new media’ artworks by a now deceased artist when there is no specific manual or artist’s statement to consult? Taking Nam June Paik’s dysfunctional multi-media artwork <The More, the Better>(1988) as an ‘exemplary symptom,’ this paper seeks to offer an answer.

Focusing on the relationship between ‘Time’, ‘Nature’ and ‘Technology’ in Paik’s oeuvre in terms of ‘entropy,’ we will see how they serve to illuminate contemporary discussions of preservation and conservation of so-called ‘time-based media’ as ‘performance.’ To that end, we will critically engage with the humanist take on Paik’s artworks as well as confusion about seemingly interchangeable concepts such as ‘entropy,’ ‘indeterminacy,’ and ‘chance.’

By re-reading Paik’s crucial statements, writings, artworks including performances such as “Norbert Wiener and Marshall McLuhan,” <Confused Rain>, and his 1997 performance in a wheelchair at the Walker Art Center, we will see how <The More, the Better> as an ‘obsolete new media’ showcases what I call ‘parallax contemporaneity.’

In so doing, we will provide a necessary, if not exhaustive corrective to the extant scholarship on Nam June Paik’s art, and by extension, suggestive stimulants to contemporary reflections on new media, post-medium/media, and media archeology.

Parallax, or the change in the position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight and more precisely, the assumption that this adjustment is not only due to a change of focus, but a change in that object's ontological status has been a key philosophical concept throughout history.

Building upon Slavoj Žižek's The Parallax View, this volume shows how parallax is used as a figure of thought that proves how the incompatibility between the physical and the theoretical touches not only upon the ontological, but also politics and aesthetics. With articles written by internationally renowned philosophers such as Frank Ruda, Graham Harman, Paul Livingston and Zizek himself, this book shows how modes of parallax remain in numerous modern theoretical disciplines, such as the Marxian parallax in the critique of political economy and politics; and the Hegelian parallax in the concept of the work of art, while also being important to debates surrounding speculative realism and dialectical materialism. Spanning philosophy, parallax is then a rich and fruitful concept that can illuminate the studies of those working in epistemology, ontology, German Idealism, political philosophy and critical theory.

Editorial Reviews:

“Parallax brings together a remarkable group of philosophers around the problem of conceptualizing the identity and difference of mind and world. It represents, in a way, the “continental” response to the canonical “analytic” formulation of the problem put forth in McDowell's Mind and World (along with the vast literature it generated). Under the heading of “parallax,” a notion introduced into philosophy by Slavoj Zizek, the present volume takes a step further; it makes it possible to include in our thinking about the core problem the very split and antagonism between these two traditions of thinking the problem. The essays are challenging and not for the faint at heart; given the stakes at issue one could hardly imagine it any other way.” ―Eric L. Santner, The Philip and Ida Romberg Distinguished Service Professor of Modern Germanic Studies, The University of Chicago, USA

“The notion of parallax, as discussed in the contributions of this volume, offers a radical, surprising as well as disturbing perspective on the inextricable gap between mind and world: provoking a new and productive approach to the understanding of our - epistemic, scientific, aesthetic, ethical, and political - realities.” ―Joseph Vogl, Professor of Modern German Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin, and Princeton University, Germany and USA

This essay traces two different instances of Pythagorean influence in Joyce’s writing. First, the experiences of listening to the song The Lass of Aughrim in “The Dead” will be discussed as an ‘audible parallax’ by utilizing the inherently Pythagorean term acousmatic. Then, the ‘musemathematical’ calculations in the “Sirens” chapter of Ulysses will be read anew based on the ancient mathematician’s acousmas. Both analyses are ‘parallactically’ linked to “Pythagorean lore” (Senn, “Met” 111) by using the term acousmatic as a vantage point.

This article addresses a South African music genre: maskanda, often marketed as “Zulu blues.” It describes the various ways maskanda is musically analyzed and interpreted by musicians, audiences, producers, and scholars, including myself. By treating music analysis as a form of participant observation (and indigenizing my own analytical conventions) the article aims, foremostly, to foster a cross-cultural dialogue about musical experiences (hearings) and the practices of finding words for these experiences (conceptualizations). Music analysis as participant observation also sheds light on local historiographies, critiques, and structural analyses of maskanda, and it bridges the artificial academic dichotomy of object-related observation (music analysis) and discourse related theorization (cultural analysis) that still impairs much music research.

This paper will explore the significance of Slavoj Žižek to the field of film-philosophy. Cinema is of course central to Žižek’s thought; my aim is, correlatively, to assert the centrality of Žižek to the project of thinking philosophy and film together. While, for reasons to do with the history of film theory, Žižek is rarely discussed explicitly in the context of film-philosophy, it is my contention that Žižek’s work both embodies a film-philosophical discourse – in the sense delineated by Robert Sinnerbrink as constituting a “mutually transformative encounter” between film and philosophy (2010: ix) – and further gives rise to possibilities for developing such an encounter in our own research.
This I intend to demonstrate by proposing a new way of conceptualising the relation between theory and the moving image: as a Žižekian “film-philosophy parallax”, whereby the seemingly incommensurable perspectives of screen media and abstract thought are understood as speculatively identical (as in the two apparent “sides” of a Möbius strip, which nonetheless form a single loop). Engaging with Žižek thus requires a dialectical understanding of the relation between film and philosophy, where an idea must pass through the filmic example in order to be thought, and various films – having passed through the idea – can be considered “philosophical”. I will explore this in relation to a number of Möbius-like films – such as La Jetée (Marker, 1962) and Lost Highway (Lynch, 1997) – in order to consider “another case of parallax where the two elements can never meet precisely because they are one and the same element in two different spaces” (Žižek 2006: 159). In sum, where Žižek famously claimed in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (Fiennes, 2006) that, “In order to understand today’s world, we need cinema, literally”, I equally claim that, in order to understand film-philosophy today, we need Žižek.

This paper is meant to develop conceptual tools for reading Zizek, especially his book, The Parallax View. He draws heavily on Hegel, Marx, and Lacan to develop his notion of human subjectivity, understood as the self-awareness of human as an active being. Hence the title of this paper.

Through examining the BBC television series, Black and British: A Forgotten History, written and presented by the historian David Olusoga, and in extending Paul Gilroy’s assertion that the everyday, banality of living with difference is now an ordinary part of British life, this article considers how Olusoga’s historicization of the black British experience reflects a convivial rendering of UK multiculture. In particular, when used alongside Žižek’s notion of parallax, it is argued that understandings of convivial culture can be supported by a historical importance that deliberately ‘shocks’ and, subsequently dislodges, popular interpretations of the UK’s ‘white past’. Notably, it is parallax which puts antagonism, strangeness and ambivalence at the heart of contemporary depictions of convivial Britain, with the UK’s cultural differences located in the ‘gaps’ and tensions which characterize both its past and present. These differences should not be feared but, as a characteristic part of our convivial culture, should be supplemented with historical analyses that highlight but, also, undermine, the significance of cultural differences in the present. Consequently, it is suggested that if the spontaneity of conviviality is to encourage openness, then, understandings of multiculturalism need to go beyond reification in order to challenge our understandings of the past. Here, examples of ‘alterity’ are neither ‘new’ nor ‘contemporary’ but, instead, constitute a fundamental part of the nation’s history: of the ‘gap’ made visible in transiting past and present.

Le « Parallax Scrolling », en tant que mode de web design, est analysé dans ce travail de recherche sous l’angle des imaginaires mobilisés, des choix techniques et esthétiques opérés par les concepteurs d’objets numériques et des effets de ces choix sur la perception et l’efficience du récit médiatique, en suivant notamment le questionnement suivant : dans quelle mesure, le web design, à travers la promotion d’un format de niche désigné sous l’expression « Parallax Scrolling » repose-t-il sur l’idée que la performance du récit se fonde à la fois sur le geste et sur la forme ?

Notre analyse de cette forme de web design porte également sur les acteurs et sur les formes qui contribuent au processus d’énonciation éditoriale, puis les confronte aux discours d’escorte et aux imaginaires dont ils sont imprégnés : l’hybridation, l’interactivité, le rapport à la matérialité, etc. Enfin, notre analyse questionne plus globalement les effets d’un mode de web design comme le « Parallax Scrolling » sur les postures adoptées par le lecteur-utilisateur et sur sa perception des médias informatisés.

The instrumentalisation of life is taking novel and radical forms with the developments in the life sciences and its applied technologies. And so are the ways in which we, humans, deal with these lives culturally, philosophically and ethically. Mediation and fragmentation are used to ‘distance’ and abstract life to the extent that it becomes a ‘thing’ or a ‘matter’ that can ‘be shaped and altered’ and ‘commoditified’ for human centred purposes.

For decades, as a means to protect themselves from being incorporated into cabaret, prostitution or pornography by the media, people self-identifying as transsexual have forbidden themselves any form of sexuality. As for people who recognize themselves as transgender, they only experienced media coverage, confessional [confidentielle] and contentious, later. If transsexuals seem to have succeeded in shedding their sexuality, transgender people saw themselves dispossessed of their gender and loaded with sexuality; something which seems to have partially rendered invisible their critiques of the gender order, of binaries and of sexism. Media paradigms have had an impact in the field, creating confusion, division and competition.

In this essay I propose to bring Christopher Smalls’s notion of musicking into the Twenty-First Century. The very notion of what might constitute “taking part, in any capacity, in a musical performance,” appears to have greatly expanded or at least significantly shifted in recent years. Drawing on insight from software design and the culinary arts, I will offer a multidimensional framework for situating and understanding musicking, an approach intended to expand on Small’s visionary idea while at the same time giving it a bit more analytical bite. In offering this framework I hope to circumvent the petty battles that frequently arise in and out of the academy over issues of musical style and to provide a more responsive and responsible way of discussing contemporary musical creativity, one that can avoid imposing conventional categories such as “composer,” “interpreter,” “improviser,” “organizer,” or even “listener” in ways that often hinder how we perform, experience, and ultimately understand music.

One cannot take a potential manifestation of energy away from the univers... Nothing new is ever created, because everything that can existe already does.
It's fantastic isn't it ? time I mean. Allowing us to be the victims of our own creation so that we can enjoy the subjective experience.

The USB I put in my computer existed before I inserted it ...  (shht ! be quiet, the computer doesn't know that).
You see what i mean ? PARALLAX.  Fix your eyes on an object before you and close your left eye, then your right, then your left. You'll notice that the object seems to wobble back and forth.
There are an  infinite  different ways of looking at the same thing. How to get the full PICTURE  when we are all, trapped in our own mind, stuck with our own point of view.
It seems that the only way you can get a sense of a thing is by constantly moving from one perspective to the next.  EVOLUTION. Makes sense :
Caterpillar; Chrysalis ; Butterfly

Due to the recent unexpected publication of 'Parallax: The Dialectics of Mind and World' anthology edited by Dominik Finkelde, Slavoj Žižek & Christoph Menke, I have decided to share a snippet of my own understanding of the origins of the key philosophical term of parallax, which I've developed about a week ago as an introduction to another paper, before the mentioned anthology publication itself appeared online on 15th July 2021.

This article approaches the COVID-19 pandemic as an inherently antagonistic phenomenon. To do so, it carries forward the philosophical contentions (“revolution”) that Žižek outlines in his Pandemic! COVID-19 Shakes the World, as well as his wider work. With reference to the parallax Real and McGowan’s Hegelian contradiction, it is demonstrated that Žižek’s philosophical premises hold a unique importance in politically confronting COVID-19. Indeed, by drawing specific attention to the various ways in which our confrontations with the Real expose the limitations of our socio-ideological orders, it is argued that it is in these very limitations (which now structure, manage and curtail our social interactions) that the limits of the Real are transposed through the various “fictions” we employ to fight and perceive it. In outlining this confrontation, a focused discussion on the Real as “impossible” – a “characteristic” that affords an important political significance for the present context and its ongoing limitations – is provided. In conclusion, if the COVID-19 pandemic demands a new “commons” (as argued by Žižek), and if our response to the crisis should be one where the desires of the nation-state are regulated and controlled, then, it may not simply be enough that we “demand the impossible”. Instead, it is today that the impossible demands a new “us”.

To support our argument by comparison with the revolutionary State, which ought to be a State that is a ‘non-State’ – that is, a State tending to its own dissolution, to be replaced by forms of free association – one might equally say that the philosophy which obsessed Marx, Lenin and Gramsci ought to be a ‘non-philosophy’ – that is, one which ceases to be produced in the form of a philosophy, whose function of theoretical hegemony will disappear in order to make way for new forms of philosophical existence.

The concept parallax refers to the apparent displacement in the position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight. Yet, more precisely, it includes the assumption to understand the observable change not simply as a subjective change of focus on the part of the subject, but also as a change of the object (characterized by an internal antagonism) on the level of its ontological status. In this case, a shift in the epistemic standpoint of the subject implies an ontological change in the object as well.
Parallax can be detected in Kant's antinomies, as well as in the incommensurability of various debates between eliminative scientistic and historically dialectical materialists, and it can be identified in the struggles for the sovereignty of a scientific worldview over, for example, life forms of religions. At the conference, internationally outstanding philosophers devote themselves to the concept of parallax within German Idealism and contemporary ontology in order to present it as an illuminating figure of thought and explanation, especially in theoretical philosophy.
As multifaceted as this figure of thought is, it contradicts both a naive epistemological realism, widespread in the academic world of today, and an eliminative scientism, namely in rejecting the belief in one basic structure of reality in which subject and object can harmoniously be put to rest. Parallax stands in opposition to this belief.

Key Lecture: Slavoj Žižek

Time: Nov. 30 (9 am) - Dec. 1 (2 pm), 2018
Location: Munich School of Philosophy