Never-mind-that-spacestuff, let's-be-practical

let's-get-down-to-Earth

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What Is a Robot?

Th question is more complicated than it seems.

“To me, the most important distinction is whether a technology is designed primarily to be autonomous. To really take care of itself without much guidance from anybody else… The second question—of whether this thing,  whatever it is, happens to have legs or eyes or a body—is less important.” Andrew Moore

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The great painters are men who possess a certain vision of things which has or will become the vision of all men.

Bergson

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. . . a brain is required to write a theory of a brain . . .

random thoughts 

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e-flux journal 56th Venice Biennale — SUPERCOMMUNITY – Arsenic Dreams

e-flux journal 56th Venice Biennale — SUPERCOMMUNITY – Arsenic Dreams

Steven Shaviro on speculative extrapolation in science - the shift of the paradigm that was so passionately advocated by Bergson in the beginning of the 20th cent. 

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The 70's - Part I

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My way of getting out of it at that time, was, I really think, to conceive of the history of philosophy as a kind of buggery or, what comes to the same thing, immaculate conception. I imagined myself getting onto the back of an author, and giving him a child, which would be his and which would at the same time be a monster. It is very important that it should be his child, because the author actually had to say everything that I made him say. But it also had to be a monster because it was necessary to go through all kinds of decenterings, slips, break ins, secret emissions, which I really enjoyed. My book on Bergson seems to me a classic case of this.

Deleuze “Lettre a Michel Cressole”

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The City of Memories

She has pulled to the switch smoothly. “Leave it”, he said. Glancing at him with a heavy sigh, Kora stretched her back catlike and pulled a hand away.

When she saw Rico for the first time, it dawned on her that she must be careful with this man. She spotted him at the registration desk and faintly followed his figure through the countless number of customs checkpoints and x-ray cockpits installed at the Berlin airport. This city knew how to guard its integrity: one had no chance to check out of the airport without a special permission, no exceptions for tourists, no transit visitors alowed. An authorized check in to Berlin, which she has snatched at one of the numerous black markets on Islands, took all the money she earned by filming mnemo-records for those who lost their memories. She had no other choice but to stop in the city, because it was the only place where she would have remained conscious without paying for bearing her memories, without risking to forget everything she knew of herself and lose her dreams. In a world like this, one must keep one's memory to stay human. And her memories belonged to Berlin.

She lit up the cigarette, lazily twisted Rico's chest with both arms and asked about his childhood. She knew he was a human, so he had to remember.  

'The dream-city', as people on Islands call it now, the last citadel of what has remained of European culture, was foreign to her. At least, a modern version of it. She grew up in Berlin, she was accustomed to the land and connected to its history, but that was it. Shortly after she moved to Islands, it all started, and she immediately ran into debt paying for these memories. Kora heard many versions of the fall: some of them were the recollections of people who had heard about the event, some were intermingled with legends hovering in the air and ready to fuse with old memories, and some were just forged mnemo-records akin to those she used to film. Somehow she felt that all this was the consequence of a big flop of the belief in the primacy of Western civilization. One day everything had collapsed, but when and how, nobody would have remembered. Time has stretched, shrunk and stopped. No memories of the world, no history, no nations. Everything that remained for her was Berlin – the city of never fulfilled hopes for people who were born there, and the place of eternal mourning for those who came to find their memories.

- I don't have any childhood. - You mean, you don't want to remember? - I can't remember. - Don't say that. Memories make us human. - I am a human. - How come you have no memories? - I ate the pill.

Time was enough. Kora had a strange feeling as if time was slipping away in Berlin, yet it was completely enough for everything. Memories and time were the most precious substances in this world, and one should look for them only in Berlin. She first heard about the pills around 10 years ago, on Islands. A woman took a pill trying to forget the death of her son, but could not stand life without memories. When she attempted to kill herself, her desperate husband came to Kora to buy a few mnemo-records. And only four years later, when the old man stopped by again, this time to grab the records for himself, Kora found out that the plan did not work out, and the poor woman had jumped out of the window. But in Berlin everything was different: there was no need for the pills in the place where memories were preserved and protected, where history was still about the past and not about the present.

- I don't understand. There, on Islands, people pay huge money for being able to remember and here, in Berlin, you can finally be free. - Yes, I am free. I can't tell you who I am. I have not the slightest idea about myself. I am someone without origin, without history, without land. I am here, and I am free. I can imagine everything, and everything is possible for me.

Kora stood up, went to the kitchen, filled a glass with water and came back.

Rico unfolded his fingers, revealing a small black pill on his palm. She took the pill from the palm, put it in her mouth and sipped the water from the glass.

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Perception

Henri Bergson imagined the material world as an “aggregate of 'images'” – a flow of light. These images at once coexist together without any form, centre or direction acting and reacting upon each other. 

Matter, in our view, is an aggregate of 'images.' And by 'image' we mean a certain existence which is more than that which the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing – an existence placed halfway between the 'thing' and the 'representation.' (Bergson, Key Writings. p. 81)

The world, therefore, is the field of physical forces and non-organic intensities ungraspable in practice but apprehended via a metaphor of pure perception.

Pollock, #1

This pure perception, according to Bergson, is the perception without recollection of the previous perceptual experience and, for this reason, it is capable of giving us hints into the immediate nature of matter. It is freed from any representational associations, actualised in the instantaneous present, and “exists in theory rather than in fact”. 

In contrast, conscious perception is the perception that is mediated by our mind, inflated by image-memories and limited by the actual needs. Due to this limitation, conscious perception cannot encompass the whole of matter and only perceives “by isolation” - that which interests the mind. As Deleuze aptly put:

 … perception is not the object plus something, but the object minus something, minus everything that does not interest us. (Deleuze, Bergsonism, p. 25)

In perceiving the world and its objects, the objects blend with a pure perception, whereas our conscious perception blends with the objects “from which it has abstracted only that which did not interest us”.

The question is can we look beyond the perceptual threshold and surpass our guarding mind in sensing the world as it really is? 

Deleuze described a screen, which limits our senses thereby preventing us from being exposed to a pure perception and devoured by chaos, as a multileveled filter. This filter can be seen as a mediator, through which the sum of all possibilities goes by being sifted via differential relations so as to make the world clear and graspable for conscious perception. Through this process of filtering, as Deleuze explains, “perception that moves into clarity”.

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro'  narrow chinks of his cavern. 

(W. Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Analog video, due to its features to capture electromagnetic waves, gives us the very possibility to get closer with that what lies beyond, and if not lower perceptual threshold, then at least acknowledge this threshold and appreciate the 'imaginary' of the world. 

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We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present. The creation of concepts in itself calls for a future form, for a new earth and a people that does not yet exist.

Deleuze and Guattari. What is Philosophy?, p.108

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Varèse's "Sound as Living Mater"

From "A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia", p. 343

Listen to Poeme-Electronique, 1958

Let us recall Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return as a little ditty, a refrain, but which captures the mute and unthinkable forces of the Cosmos. We thus leave behind the assemblages to enter the age of the Machine, the immense mechanosphere, the plane of cosmicization of forces to be harnessed.

Edgard Varèse

Varese’s procedure, at the dawn of this age, is exemplary: a musical machine of consistency, a sound machine (not a machine for reproducing sounds), which molecularizes and atomizes, ionizes sound matter, and harnesses a cosmic energy. If this machine must have an assemblage, it is the synthesizer. By assembling modules, source elements, and elements for treating sound (oscillators, generators, and transformers), by arranging microintervals, the synthesizer makes audible the sound process itself, the production of that process, and puts us in contact with still other elements beyond sound matter. It unites disparate elements in the material, and transposes the parameters from one formula to another. The synthesizer, with its operation of consistency, has taken the place of the ground in a priori synthetic judgment: its synthesis is of the molecular and the cosmic, material and force, not form and matter, Grund and territory.

Listen to Poeme-Electronique, 1958

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Analog and Digital

from Gilles Deleuze "Francis Bacon: the Logic of Sensation"

"For if geometry is not a part of painting, there are nonetheless properly pictorial uses of geometry. We called one of these uses "digital", not in direct reference to the hand, but in reference to the basic units of a code. Once again, these basic units or elementary visual forms are indeed aesthetic and not mathematic, inasmuch as they have completely internalized the manual movement that produces them. They still form a code of painting, however, and turn painting into a code. It is in this sense, close to abstract painting, that we must understand Serusier's saying:

 "Synthesis consists in reducing all forms to the smallest number of forms of which we are capable of thinking - straight lines, some angles, arcs of the circle and the ellipse." p. 112

... we could say that Cezanne creates an analogical use of geometry, and not a digital use. The diagram or motif would be analogical, whereas the code is digital. p. 113

"Analogical language," it is said, belongs to the right hemisphere of the brain or, better, to the nervous system, whereas "digital language" belongs to the left hemisphere. Analogical language would be a language of relations, which consists of expressive movements, paralinguistic signs, breaths and screams, and so on. One can question whether or not this is a language properly speaking. But there is no doubt, for example, that Artaud's theater elevated scream-breaths to the state of language. More generally, painting elevates colors and lines to the state of language, and it is an analogical language. 

One might even wonder if painting has not always been the analogical language par excellence. When we speak of analogical language in animals, we do not consider their possible songs, which belong to a different domain; rather we are essentially concerned with cries, variable colors, and lines (attitudes, postures). pp. 113-114

... we cannot be content with saying that analogical language proceeds by resemblance, whereas the digital operates through code, convention, and combinations of conventional units. p.114

For one can do at least three things with a code. One can make an intrinsic combination of abstract elements. One can also make a combination which will yield a "message" or a "narrative", that is, which will have an isomorphic relation to a referential set. Finally, one can code the extrinsic elements in such a way that they would be reproduced in an autonomous manner by the intrinsic elements of the code (in portraits produced by a computer, for instance, and in every instance where one could speak of "making a shorthand of figuration").  p.114

It seems, then, that a digital code covers certain forms of similitude or analogy: analogy by isomorphism, or analogy by produced resemblance.  p.114

Theophrastos Triantafyllidis, Flea Market, 1943

Resemblance is the producer when the relations between the elements of one thing pass directly into the elements of another thing, which then becomes the image of the first - for example, the photograph,which captures relations of light. The fact that these relations play within a margin of error great enough for the image to present significant differences from the original object does not negate the fact that these differences are attained by a loose resemblance, sometimes decomposed in its operation, sometimes transformed in its result. In this case, analogy is figurative, and resemblance remains primary in principle. The photograph can rarely escape this limit, despite all its ambitions. p.115

On the contrary, one says that resemblance is the product when it appears abruptly as the result of relations that are completely different from those it is supposed to reproduce: resemblance then emerges as the brutal product of non-resembling means. We have already seen an instance of this in one of the analogies of the code, in which the code reconstituted a resemblance as a function of its own internal elements. But in that case, it was only because the relations to be reproduced had themselves already been coded, whereas now, in the absence of any code, the relations to be reproduced are instead produced directly by completely different relations, creating a resemblance through non resembling means. In this last type of analogy, a sensible resemblance is produced, but instead of being produced symbolically, through the detour of the code, it is produced "sensually," through sensation. The name "aesthetic Analogy" must be reserved for this last eminent type, in which there is neither primary resemblance nor prior code, and which is both nonfigurative and noncodified. p.116

from "Calligrams" by Vasulkas 

Analogical synthesizers are "modular": they establish an immediate connection between heterogeneous elements, they introduce a literally unlimited possibility of connection between these elements, on a field of presence or finite plane whose moments are all actual and sensible. p.116

Digital synthesizers, however, are "integral": their operation passes through a codification, through a homogenization and binarization of the data, which is produced on a separate plane, infinite in principle, and whose sound will only be produced as the result of a conversion-translation. p. 116

... digital filters proceed by an additive synthesis of elementary codified formants, whereas the analogical filter usually acts through the subtraction of frequencies ("high-pass," "low-pass" . . . ) . What is added from one filter to the next are intensive subtractions, and it is thus an addition of subtractions that constitutes modulation and sensible movement as a fall. In short, it is perhaps the notion of modulation in general (and not similitude) that will enable us to understand the nature of analogical language or the diagram. pp. 116-117

The diagram, the agent of analogical language, does not act as a code, but as a modulator. The diagram and its involuntary manual order will have been used to break all the figurative coordinates; but it is through this very action (when it is operative) that it defines possibilities of fact, by liberating lines for the armature and colors for modulation. p. 120

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Maurizio Lazzarato "Videophilosophie"

The excerpts from the book Videophilosophie: Zeitwahrnehmung im Postfordismus

As Lazzarato states in the preface, he attempts to write an ontology of video and wants to shed light on "the nature of the video image and video technology". By doing so, he employs the concepts of Henry Bergson and Gilles Deleuze and analyses video as a medium capable to present a pure duration to us. 

Unlike photography and film which on the one hand crystallise and capture time (photography) and on the other, make "the still image run" producing the "illusion of movement"(film), video is able to apprehend the movement as such. The reason for this, as Lazzarato tells us, is two-fold.

First, the essence of video is in the modulation of the flows, and so in the movement of light. This is why with video we can see not "something moving in space, but the ‘pure oscillations’ of light".

Nam June Paik "Sketch for Modulation in Sync"

Second, video technology presents to us the "time-matter’ from which the images are made (the electromagnetic waves)". It is thus a key ontological point of distinction between video on the one side and photography and film on the other. Here Lazzarato evokes the famous expression of Nam June Paik "video is time" and the statement of Bill Viola about the video as "a dynamic, living system, a field of energy". For Lazzarato, therefore the process of making video means tuning in with the flow of universal energy:

When making a video production, one intervenes, connects to the continual process of universal change that already existed before one ever intended to use it. One ensconces oneself in the flow. (Lazzarato, p. 3)

He calls this new mode of duration a ‘real time’ duration. However, as Lazzarato points shortly after, this feature of video was quickly appropriated by television that after all made the world look like a processed image.

Bergsonian concept of pure perception, Lazzarato continues, is defined as image-matter that is unseen by the human eye. These "flows of light" or "unlimited oscillations" make the image-matter perceptible to us through the process of fixation. This fixation or construction of the image is the product of our mind which tries to reconcile our perceptual limit and pure unlimited flow of time. Similarly to the filtered image of our perception, the video image is "created from ‘visual dust’", from the precognitive image, as an abstraction of "pure perception beyond the image". 

Nam June Paik's Synthesiser

Drawing further on Deleuze, Lazzarato speaks of the filters that limit our senses and suggests that the electromagnetic filter of video is less hampered than our natural perception and therefore video gives us a glance into pure perception. 

According to Bergson, memory functions like Nam June Paik’s synthesiser –namely as a capacity to reconstruct a continuity between what is dilated and what is not, quality and quantity. A new matter is thereby constituted, a new force of metamorphosis and creation (Lazzarato, p. 4)

The image, according to Bergson, is the contraction of synthesised and condensed flows of pure vibrations. As Lazzararo comments:

In one moment we condense an extremely long ‘history’ that takes place in the outside world (p. 4)

Memory therefore transforms pure duration into "a human duration" that is related to movements in space and not to movements in time. Due to the limits of our senses, the perception as an affinity of temporalities is inaccessible to us. But video, as Lazzarato concludes in his reading of Bergson, is more capable of grasping reality because "video is closer to reality than natural perception". 

Existing as a modulation in the flow, video, by imitating the relationship between flows of matter and our consciousness, translates this modulation into perceptible signals. More precisely, video does so with the help of our brain and our memory, when "the asignificant flows" captured by video are being transformed into significant - a video image. 

Nam June Paik Becoming Robot

However, Lazzarato, warns that if seen from this prospective, technology, therefore, may only enhance the work of our mind. He explains it drawing on Bergson's understanding of montage in film. For Bergson, montage is a process of transformation of one movement into another, which allows us to "imitate the ‘free’ work of memory".

But the video camera and image processing already provides us with the simulation of how the mind works. Video establishes the timeframe and therefore lodges in memory its own amplitude of ‘freedom’. While a video camera itself has a relatively fixed 'freedom' - "it produces input and output time that is tuned in to the flow of light", the true freedom of memory is deployed with image processing, when "certain fragments of the input time can be purposely dilated or contracted in the output time". 

The work of the body and the brain is an automatic work, in which memory has no freedom. It is completely absorbed in the fulfilment of the goal-oriented action, the memory contracts and dilates time, but it is a repetitive ‘habit’. Memory cannot ‘freely’ produce images, and it is only ‘intellectual work’ from the moment it is separated from the necessity of goal-oriented action. It can then introduce uncertainty, the unforeseen in the process of perception. The magnetoscope and the perfected techniques of image processing create a greater freedom in the contraction-dilation of the flows in the same manner. (p. 9)

Bill Viola

In this framework, the transition from video to digital can be seen as an advancement of the interplay between perception and memory:

After the first video camera (together with its recorder) gave us an eye combined with a primitive form of non-selective memory, we have now entered the next stage of development: the age of perception and the intelligent – though artificial – structures of thought. (Bill Viola)

What is important to keep in mind though is the political aspect of the video and the digital. Video image, according to Lazzarato, is the combination of "intensities, forces, fields, taking place in the flow" (electromagnetic, optical, algorithmic). This flow cannot be expressed within our traditional paradigm of representation because it consist of an endless modulation, of "non-signifying signs", "point-signs" with "several dimensions" and therefore does not "pass through human subjectivity" but through" other processes of subjectification".

The object of contemporary economy is linked to the question of how memory can be constructed; how one’s attention can be steered towards the ability to be able to characterise one’s wishes, beliefs and sensations or to perceive their effects by dissolving flows and reassembling new ones. The public is the true customer of this economy. How to resist and create new worlds with a camera that is integrated in the flows (of cyberspace)? (p. 7)

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International symposium: Art of memory, 4th of Sep 2013

Part 1 - Dan Karlholm, Professor Art History Södertörn University Pay attention to the past! Recalling Contemporary Art

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Signaletic, haptic and real-time material

In her article Signaletic, Haptic and Real-Time Material, Bodil Marie S. Thomsen, an Associate Professor at The Department of Aesthetics and Communication of Aarhus University (Denmark), approaches 'signal' as "a theoretical and analytical category to inspect a conceptual shift from the dominant mode of linguistic 'sign' to the flexible and omnipresent modality of 'signal'.

Departing from McLuhan's idea that "all media are spatial extensions of human senses", she argues that digital interfaces with new mechanisms of real time control have changed our perception of time and space:

The linguistic sign prioritized linearity, the ability to differentiate between past, present, and future time, as well as cause and effect relationships. The prevalence of the electronic signal and the ability of digital technology to synthesize waves by codes and to create interfacial relations between (in Anna Munster’s phrase) ‘‘being in the body and representing/mapping the body from the outside’’ can hardly be understood within the parameters of classical time and space. (Thomsen, p. 2)

According to Thomsen, the transition from the sign to the signal became evident in the 1960s, when television and video became one of the first agents of a new regime, grounded on electronic signal and digital code. Within the art scene, the electronic live signal of video played an important role and was appropriated both by the the avant-garde movement and popular culture. With the recent advance of technology, "the operations of the signal has become ubiquitous in all art- and media-genres", and therefore the contemporary study of the signaletic media reaches the new level of importance. 

Similarly to Italian philosopher and sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato, Thomsen advocates for the unique capacity of video to make time visible. In turn, synthetic images and digital programming deprived of the indexical impression of light, have created the illusion of "duration as a spatial phenomenon". All together, this made the interaction between the user and the interface direct and immediate, and eventually resulted in "the new kinds of affective involvements between bodies and bodies and machines".

How can real-time interfaces produce affective connections and encounters between actual spaces, sites and bodies and signaletic renderings of these?

In her further analysis, Thomsen turns to G. Deleuze and his books on cinema. Deleuze suggested that the sense of conversion in cinema is achieved via movement image and time image. While the former can be understood as a "movement of images with represented space", the latter is expressed by "signifiers of 'pure time', no longer related to the cause-effect chain of narration nor to the representation of space and movement". Using Deleuze's definition of 'signaletic material' and relying on his disagreement with the postulates of narration and semiology, which they employ to understand cinema, Thomsen labels Deleuze’s research of the cinematic 'signaletic material' as "succeeding Walter Benjamin’s interest in the automatic movement of film". 

[Signaletic material] includes all kinds of modulation features, sensory (visual and sound), kinetic, intensive, affective, rhythmic, tonal, and even verbal (oral and written). [. . .] But, even with its verbal elements, this is neither a language system nor a language. It is a plastic mass, an a-signifying and a-syntaxic material, a material not formed linguistically even though it is not amorphous, and is formed semiotically, aesthetically, and pragmatically. It is a condition, anterior by right to what it conditions. It is not an enunciation, and these are not utterances. It is an utterable. 

(Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, p. 29 )

Through an assemblage of relevant quotes from Benjamin, Deleuze, Manovich, Lazzarato and Munster, Thomsen builds an argument that "the signaletic material" has eventually supplanted "the image as sign". This process resulted in time is being materialised into the live signal on the one hand, and in time as "the dominant vector of digital variation", on the other. The term 'haptic' surfaces as it is described by Alois Riegl, Deleuze, Guattari, and Laura U. Marks, for this and other reasons, transcended the "inscription of the materiality of the grid" and became "a movement space for time as such". 

This transformation of sign into signal brought forth social and cultural changes ranging from the birth of performativity and digital capitalism to Deleuze's 'dividuals'. This is why Thomsen strives to establish a distinction between sign (and object) and signal (and interface), "where the latter refers to the real-time transmission of electronic and new media in particular, since manipulation, feedback operations, and control are integrated parts of both the electronic signal and the digital code". 

This diversity of the thinking 'haptic' finds its evidence in the juxtaposition of two approaches: Laura U. Marks's on the one hand, and Deleuze's and Guattari's on the other. 

For Marks, she attaches to the 'haptic' a meaning of "an almost physical encounter with the screen surface as body". In this understanding, the 'haptic' means to experience a sort of 'visual touch', when by looking at the screen we can virtually experience the physical features of represented objects. 

One of the illustrative examples that Thomsen provides us on this account is Nam June Paik’s installation Point of Light (1963), which transmitted a signal of a radio into an electronic signal of light. Most of the real-time installations and performances alike present time as 'event' inside the signal and give the sense of a real-time experience of time here and now. 

For Deleuze and Guattari, the 'haptic' is a potential feedback on versatility of spaces (physical and artistic), when "lines are active between dots and points, and do not create conjunctions and connect one point to another". 

A haptic line has no beginning and no end, and its law is variation. It has expression, but no form, and it creates repetition and rhythm without symmetry. Relating this to the haptic surfaces of new media, the electronic transmission has become inseparable from the salt-and-pepper dots or digital pixels that obstruct illusionary depth. 

(Thomsen, p. 7)

This suggests a broad consensus that the 'haptic' surfaces can have a multiplicity of meanings and, in turn, as Thomsen writes, transposes the analysis of signal into a broader context of affect. 

In order to engage the affect theory in the discussion, she makes a transition from the 'haptic' surfaces of new media to the interfaces between humans and machines. She defines the latter via Anna Munster's writings as the interspace in which the affective experience becomes "a folded experience". 

According to Thomsen, Munster therefore adheres to Benjamin and Deleuze in the acknowledgement that the technological subjectivity traverses the affective sensations. 

To support this statement, Thomsen chooses Peter Campus’ installation Interface (1972), in which he creates a short circuit connection between a body, a mirror and a camera so as to evoke an affective interspace between "an actual body (experienced from the inside) and a virtual body (experienced from the outside)".

Affect arises relationally and is produced out of the difference between being in the body and representing/mapping the body from the outside. Affect sustains the singularity of sensing and of representing as a differential experience of embodiment, one in which alterity has a place. And in any interface between bodies and technology we will always encounter this difference. Informatic affect is a process of subjective bodily recomposition that occurs in relation to the alterity that pattern and code renderings open up for us. 

(Munster, Materializing New Media, p. 142)

For Thomsen it is clear that Munster relies on Brian Massumi's theorising of affect, and therefore, as Thomsen suggests, it is important not to overlook the reversal side of the affective encounters generated by new media. Given that for Massumi affect can arise from a huge variety of spaces (and not only from new media interfaces), Thomsen warns that these interfaces have "the potential to create affective encounters of many kinds", including those that are meant to control us. 

In her understanding of digital electronic media, Thomsen deviates from McLuhan's canonic expression 'the medium is the message' and leans toward Lazzarato's understanding of electronic and new media images as 

transformations and combinations (compositions) of intensities,energies and fields that are played out in the flow of power. Electro-magnetic power in the case of video, optic power in the case of the telematic algorithmic flow of the computer.

(Lazzarato, Videophilosophie, p 87) 

It is not the message but the (electronic) signal that affects us. 

The signal is not just that by which messages are sent or fictions created. Nor is the viewer/reader/listener inserted in the waves of the signal. We should rather understand the ‘‘signaletic interface’’ as the creation of situations in which the flow of information infinitely could generate actions and thus creative time. (Thomsen, p. 5)

Drawing conclusions, Thomsen highlights the importance of a further research into the nature of electronic signals, its haptical surface and the real-time sensations they give to us. 

In contemporary culture narration as a forthcoming, historical production of memory according to the operations of the sign has gradually been superseded by rhizomatic grids of modulating haptic surfaces. This has to be analyzed in relation to the a-syntactic transmissions of the electronic signal. The perspective of Western thinking based on a topologically centralized eye and corresponding gaze from the outside has to be reflected in relation to the new interfaces in which the image-screen has been replaced by affective folding between inside and outside. (Thomsen, p. 9)

http://www.aestheticsandculture.net/index.php/jac/article/view/18148

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Henri Bergson and Cinema

In the article Time, Bergson, and the Cinematographical Mechanism (2001), Donato Totaro, a professor in Film Studies at Concordia University, highlights the importance of Bergson's theorising of cinema and its relevance for contemporary film theory and aesthetics.

Referring to Bergson as "the first to give philosophical expression to the ‘idea’ of cinema: moving images", Totaro goes deeper into the interplay of movement, fragmentation, and time aiming to shed light on the "contextual meanings Bergson gave to cinema". 

According to Totaro, in Creative Evolution, Bergson draws the analogy to the mechanism of cinema in order to provide an illustration of how the intellect, one of the two components of Bergson's epistemological dualism, makes sense (or interprets) of reality. 

The intellect, Totaro continues, is a spatializing mechanism, and this is why "it employs concepts, symbols, abstraction, analysis, and fragmentation" to obtain knowledge. For Bergson therefore, the intellect can only express movement in static terms. And this is where the analogy to the cinematic apparatus comes to the fore. As Totaro interprets this analogy,

The camera begins with a real movement, breaks it down mechanically into a series of static single frames and then returns the movement through the projecting apparatus. The movement that we see is a reconstituted illusion. 

To support his statement, he brings up the quote from Bergson's Creative Evolution:

Such is the contrivance of the cinematograph. And such is also that of our knowledge. Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially. We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality….We may therefore sum up…that the mechanism of our ordinary knowledge is of a cinematographical kind (Creative Evolution, 332).

Epistemological dualism or indirect, 'representational' realism: our conscious experience is not of the real world itself but of an internal representation, a miniature virtual-reality replica of the world; we do not and cannot perceive the external world as it really is but know only our ideas and interpretations of the way the world is.

For Totaro, the intellect in Bergson’s epistemological system is most valuable for the understanding of "inert objects, immobility and being", whereas intuition for the understanding "movement, change, and becoming (duration)". 

Intuition is the process used to understand the flux of reality, while the intellect gives us a necessary, pragmatic grasp of reality. 

Comparing Bergson's writing on art with his ideas on cinema, Totaro concludes that for Bergson film cannot be human to such an extend so as "to give its audience a privileged view of reality". Painting, in turn, "can communicate a more direct vision of reality" due to its connection to intuition and ability to thicken "the veil between reality and consciousness".

To summarise, film therefore is more close to the intellect, while art is directly linked to intuition. But, according to Totaro's analysis, there is a difference between Bergson's critique of cinema and all the other criticisms of cinematic objectivity and artistic values of film. 

For the latter, a camera apparatus is a mechanical reproducer of reality, and therefore film can not be equated to art. For Bergson, film functions "similar to the way the intellect takes “snapshots of reality” and therefore fails to represent real time and duration of reality. It follows, Totaro concludes, that film can not affect an audience "on the same level as a painter or composer" can.

Trying to reclaim Bergson's approach to cinema and adjust it to the contemporary criticism, Totaro starts from the close analysis of Bergson's understanding of the mechanism of cinema and quotes the entire passage in which Bergson refers to film as a metaphor for the spatialized movement:

For that is what our habitual representations of movement and change hinders us from seeing. If movement is a series of positions and change a series of states, time is made up of distinct parts immediately adjacent to one another. No doubt we still say that they follow one another, but in that case this succession is similar to that of the images on a cinematographic film: the film could be run off ten, a hundred, even a thousand times faster without the slightest modification in what was being shown; if its speed were increased to infinity, if the unrolling (this time, away from the apparatus) became instantaneous, the pictures would still be the same. Succession thus understood, therefore, adds nothing; on the contrary, it takes something away; it marks a deficit; it reveals a weakness in our perception, which is forced by this weakness to divide up the film image by image instead of grasping it in the aggregate (The Creative Mind, 17-18).

In his analysis of this passage, Totaro discerns three key points of Bergson's criticism of cinematic apparatus that are quoted below:

A film, once made, is already given, therefore time does not play a “creative” role. Film is similar to the mechanistic conception of reality, like the picture puzzle or the calculability of pool balls on a billiard table.

The cinematographic process is like the intellect in that it takes “snapshots” of a passing reality. The movement is only an illusion generated by the projector. Movement does not exist in the images but is thrown back into them. Film is a spatialization of time/reality.

Duration, the essence of reality, does not play a part in the cinematographic process because the process involves a “succession” and not “interpenetration” of static images.

Totaro's argument, however, is that Bergson's criticism was primarily directed towards the intellect, while cinema in his theorising plays only an analogical role so as to provide an illustrative example. As a result, Bergson disregards "the creative process involved in filmmaking" and "the incompatibility of using the picture puzzle and cinematographic method as interchangeable analogies". 

A mathematically spatialized movement, Totaro suggests, can not be theorised in the same fashion as a movement reflected in the film, which is running in the projector. A claim for spatialization can only be made "if a film is stopped, slowed down or accelerated beyond its original order".

Drawing the line between memory, consciousness, duration and time on the one plain and the frames of a film on the other, Totaro proposes that the "accumulation" of duration is an indispensable part of cinema. This is why, as he writes, similarly to memories that are "not forgotten, only stored and subject to the whims of perception and recall", the frames of a film "remain stored after they are seen and there is no absolute present in any one frame". 

In Time and Free Will (1889) Bergson defines duration as “the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former state” (100). 

Overall, Totaro concludes, the entire Bergsonian critique (of the intellect, cinema and spatialized movement) stems from his strong resistance to the deterministic philosophies of mechanism and finalism and rests on Bergson's distrust of technological progress. Film as an innovative and progressive art form was subjected to his criticism that eventually has "blinded him to the artistic potential of film". 

http://offscreen.com/view/bergson1

[nevermindthatspacestuff-blog]

It is one of the signs of Deleuze's greatness that, in spite of his success, he was unable to be incorporated into the major blocs of opinion that organize the petty parliamentary life of the profession. Undoubtedly, between 1969 and 1975, he was the mentor of that fraction of leftism for which all that mattered was desiring machines and nomadism, the sexual and the festive, free flux and the freedom of expression, the so-called free radio stations along with all the other spaces of freedom, the rainbow of minuscule differences, and the molecular protestation fascinated by the powerful molar configurations of Capital. We have already said enough for any and all to understand that this transitory jurisdiction was based on a crucial misunderstanding. That Deleuze never did anything of an explicit nature to dissipate this is linked to that weakness rife among philosophers -in fact, none of us escape it regarding the equivocal role of disciples.

A. Badiou

[nevermindthatspacestuff-blog]