The opening thirty seconds of A Tight Thirteen Minutes made me laugh. It was two brushes with no ink or paint, brushing on a blank white piece of paper in a rhythmic pattern with a narrator describing what was happening. After I quickly pulled myself together I realized that the sixty second film was actually interesting. The narrator talked about how the rhythmic sound and the motion of the brushes produces a landscape that is visible to the eye, and I actually started to see an image appear on the paper. Just by hearing a repetitious sound and seeing a repetitious motion made an image appear in the brain. This was the perfect opening film because it raised my interest for the rest of A Tight Thirteen Minutes and A Commissioned Works.
All the artists’ of the short films tried to manipulate the representation of time in a different way in either a 60 second film or a four minute film. The film that most affected me in representing time in a different way is John Fernie’s four minute Old Fort Piece. The filming takes place inside a single room of an eighteenth century castle. The camera pans around the perimeter of the room and stops at every window, or opening, then zooms out the window to show the outside. The narrator of the film describes how the single room feels like a place of solitude, and while he is in the room time seems to slow down. It makes him feel completely relaxed and all his anxiety goes away. He expresses his experience of time by stating that someone could “marry a turtle” in a room like this. His experience of time inside the room is slower than outside. This is actually strange to me because when he zooms out the windows there are scenes of nature, which makes the walls of the room a barrier between him and the natural world. Usually time slows down for me when I am immersed in nature, not separate from it, but I guess he feels differently about nature.
The film that ended up being the most disappointing was William Wegman’s four minute Dog/Ball. This film featured a dog sitting in the same spot with a cup in front of it. The dog would catch a golf ball and then drop it. Every time the dog dropped the ball a man would move the cup to the spot where the ball hit. For almost the entire film the dog did not drop the ball in the same spot two times in a row. This shows that everything changes in time and that everything is random. I think Bergson would like this dog because it proved that nobody can really predict the future, no matter how hard they tried. Unfortunately, the dog ended up dropping the ball into the cup, showing that there is some chance to predict the future, even though everything is still random. This film actually engaged the audience the most. Whenever the dog dropped the ball near the cup the audience let out a disappointed moan and when the dog finally made it in the cup the audience cheered. The audience made the film feel like a live show and maybe that was the intention of the film, to show that past actions and time can be refreshed again and again. That the past can be experienced as the present.
Some of the other films in Commissioned Works showed different ways to measure time. In John Baldessari’s 4 Minutes of Trying to Tune Two Glasses a kitchen timer is used to represent the time passing. In Robert Watts Snowflakes, time is measured by the layers that thicken as snowflakes fall. In Eleanor Antin’s The Little Ballerina time is measured in the rotation of a wind up ballerina that revolves at a constant rate. In Siah Armajan’s Skylight at Monticello time is measured by the motion of a bar of light that rotates as it moves forward at a constant rate. I thought that using motion to represent time in films was interesting.
Johnny Mendoza
Friday, February 16, 2007
MIDTERM PAPER
Alfred Stieglitz took photographs of clouds from the 1920’s through the 1930’s. He printed hundreds of these, all with the title “Equivalent.” Some of these are currently in the Measure of Time show at BAM. How are they related to the “measure of time”? Is this a kind of chronophotography? It is a serial project but how is it similar or different from the serial photographs of Muybridge; what about from the images of Marey? What is suggested by the titles? What do you make of the fact that Stieglitz made hundreds of these photographs, over at least ten years? How would you describe the temporality of this project? What is interesting about taking ‘portraits’ of clouds? They are certainly not the traditional subject of a portrait but are they even objects? Are they actions? Is Stieglitz photographing things or ideas, spaces or moments? What concepts from Bergson could you use to think about these problems? Choose one of the Stieglitz photos to analyze in depth. What is in the frame; how does the composition work; what does the light and shape suggest? Is Lessing useful in thinking about the image—is this ‘juxtaposition in space’ or a ‘pregnant moment’? What could be the ‘virtual’ dimension of this image? Are these photographs “dynamisms,” do they show the essence of something, or what Bragaglia calls a “physical transcendentalism”? What ideas from the course so far can you use to think about the temporality of one of these images, and what might this image suggest about the temporality of photography?
Because the measure of time exhibit has been unexpectedly closed, you may write your paper on one of the Equivalents photographs available online at (be sure to indicate which you have chosen): http://www.phillipscollection.org/american_art/artwork/Stieglitz-Equivalent_Series1.htm
Your paper should be 4-6 double spaced pages (see Course Policies handout for more details). It does not need to answer every question raised in the prompt or address all of the texts we have read. It does need to engage Bergson and at least one other text from the course, carefully interpreting specific (quoted and cited) passages from these texts in order to build concrete arguments about the images you discuss. These images jump forward in time so you don’t need to consider the historical context but you will need to consider your image in the larger context of the ideas and themes we have discussed, situating your image in the conversation we have had up to this point. But, you will also need to develop your own argument, using the texts we have read as tools to actively think with as you work out your own interpretation. Read your paper as you write it; when you feel finished give it one final read (not just a spell-check) and fine tune the details. Your grade will be based on the following:
-- careful attention to the image, thoughtful and detailed analysis of the image and its context in the project
-- demonstrates strong grasp of themes and problems we’ve discussed related to time and art
-- draws upon relevant ideas, arguments, terms, and specific quoted passages from texts we have read
-- connects specific details with broader arguments and insights, rigorous thinking, genuine ideas
-- clear, communicative, and intelligent prose; standard academic style and tone; well organized and edited
Schedule and Due Dates for Midterm Paper:
2/21 ‘10-on-1’ due: (20 points)
Read chapter 5 of Writing Analytically on analysis and do the ’10-on-1’ exercise on the image
you chose for the midterm. Start rereading these texts and identifying key passages you want to work with in your paper. (If you feel a little lost facing the assignment, read the other materials in the reader up to and through Chapter 5; the earlier chapters have a lot of tips about getting started.)
2/26 Passages due: (30 points)
Select four to six passages from Lessing, Bergson, and/or Bragaglia that help develop your observations or offer interpretive and argumentative frameworks for thinking about the things you noticed. Type these passages out (with correct citations). After each passage briefly paraphrase it in your own words.
2/28 Read Chapters 6-8 of Writing Analytically on structure as you put your paper together
3/5 Midterm paper due (100 points)
3/7-3/21 Read Chapters 10, 11, and 14 of Writing Analytically on style and revise midterm essay
3/21 Revised Midterm paper due (150 points) (*note change, typo had said 200pts)
Because the measure of time exhibit has been unexpectedly closed, you may write your paper on one of the Equivalents photographs available online at (be sure to indicate which you have chosen): http://www.phillipscollection.org/american_art/artwork/Stieglitz-Equivalent_Series1.htm
Your paper should be 4-6 double spaced pages (see Course Policies handout for more details). It does not need to answer every question raised in the prompt or address all of the texts we have read. It does need to engage Bergson and at least one other text from the course, carefully interpreting specific (quoted and cited) passages from these texts in order to build concrete arguments about the images you discuss. These images jump forward in time so you don’t need to consider the historical context but you will need to consider your image in the larger context of the ideas and themes we have discussed, situating your image in the conversation we have had up to this point. But, you will also need to develop your own argument, using the texts we have read as tools to actively think with as you work out your own interpretation. Read your paper as you write it; when you feel finished give it one final read (not just a spell-check) and fine tune the details. Your grade will be based on the following:
-- careful attention to the image, thoughtful and detailed analysis of the image and its context in the project
-- demonstrates strong grasp of themes and problems we’ve discussed related to time and art
-- draws upon relevant ideas, arguments, terms, and specific quoted passages from texts we have read
-- connects specific details with broader arguments and insights, rigorous thinking, genuine ideas
-- clear, communicative, and intelligent prose; standard academic style and tone; well organized and edited
Schedule and Due Dates for Midterm Paper:
2/21 ‘10-on-1’ due: (20 points)
Read chapter 5 of Writing Analytically on analysis and do the ’10-on-1’ exercise on the image
you chose for the midterm. Start rereading these texts and identifying key passages you want to work with in your paper. (If you feel a little lost facing the assignment, read the other materials in the reader up to and through Chapter 5; the earlier chapters have a lot of tips about getting started.)
2/26 Passages due: (30 points)
Select four to six passages from Lessing, Bergson, and/or Bragaglia that help develop your observations or offer interpretive and argumentative frameworks for thinking about the things you noticed. Type these passages out (with correct citations). After each passage briefly paraphrase it in your own words.
2/28 Read Chapters 6-8 of Writing Analytically on structure as you put your paper together
3/5 Midterm paper due (100 points)
3/7-3/21 Read Chapters 10, 11, and 14 of Writing Analytically on style and revise midterm essay
3/21 Revised Midterm paper due (150 points) (*note change, typo had said 200pts)
Thursday, February 15, 2007
PFA Showing 2/14 - "Commissioned Works"
Normally when I experience abstract art, nine times out of ten I won’t understand anything and become easily frustrated by it. But after watching “Commissioned Works,” I think it’s sometimes better not to totally scrutinize and make sense of everything, and rather, just experience the art as a form of entertainment more than anything else. I was continually reminded of Bragaglia’s accusation that if I cannot understand his art, then I’m probably just too stupid. Well if not understanding why a man in a mask danced around naked with his junk tucked between his legs for exactly 4 minutes makes me stupid, then I’d be the first to admit it.
Immediately following the masked nude was another clip much more relaxed and pleasing to the eye, titled “Please Stand By.” A series of quiet landscapes and sceneries were displayed one by one, almost as if with the purpose of helping the viewer to mentally erase the image of the naked dancer. However, neither of the clips were made in reference to another, which suggests that the commissioner of all these short films, James Melchert, had his own artistic touch in the final compilation. Because the films were so diverse and varied, any order in which Melchert put them together could easily have a very different affect on the audience.
Ultimately, my favorite was the clip of William Wegman throwing a ball to his dog over and over. The goal was for the dog to drop the ball and make it into a tin can, which took a series of repeated failures before the dog finally, and unknowingly, made the shot. What I enjoyed most about the clip was that it was easy to relate to considering we’ve all had a pet of some sort that can be a trick in itself to train, but also the film had deep-seated meanings that artists can appreciate on that Bragaglia level. Perhaps the dog resembles ourselves as humans, doing tricks for a goal we’re completely unaware of, such as getting an education when we don’t even have a remote idea of a career in mind. Or maybe the repetition of catching the ball but missing the shot conveys the frustrations of striving for a goal, getting so close, but only missing by a few millimeters. The point is I have no idea because one, Bragaglia thinks I’m stupid and two, there really is no one answer. This compilation of films illustrates that the real meaning of modern art is to make your own interpretation regardless of what the artist originally had in mind. While many of these clips stumped me completely, I like to think there are at least two different interpretations even if I can’t think of one.
Anthony CastanosWednesday, February 14, 2007
PFA 2/14 Screening: Together Again: Collectively Created Compilations
The screening included two separate compilations, A Tight Thirteen Minutes and Commissioned Works, 1976. The first part included 60-second films by various Bay Area artists that included scenes of paint brushes acting as a drums on paper and resonating a sound and ultimately building an image out of “nothing.” All the portions were very different and in each individual way questioned time and what could be done in a short amount of it. The next screening included 15 four minute visual art projects that were made again by Bay Area artists with an assignment of depicting ways time is measured. The intention of this assignment was to see what would happen when similar instructions are given to different artists but obtain different responses from each. What happened was a unique compilation of completely unique short films that at first glance might seem to have nothing to do with time, or how it is measured; however, they each show a different perspective on an eternal question of what signifies a moment in time.
One of the first films was Robert Watts’ Snowflakes which depicted time in layers with snowflakes falling down and layering on top of the camera screen until all we can see is a blurry white image. In his interpretation, time is a continuous process that begins with nothing, builds on top of itself, and ultimately ends in nothing—for us. From another perspective, the snowflakes keep falling and falling with no beginning and no end; however, if we are underneath the snowflakes we can only experience the moment from the time we open our eyes and until the snowflake layer blocks the view from our eyes. David Askevold’s An Excerpt from the Ambit, on the other hand, had no beginning nor end—signifying that time is immeasurable since we can never know when “the clock” started ticking and when it stopped.
Dennis Oppenheim depicted time as being in a circular motion in his short film called Spinning Knives. In his piece, a person is throwing knives at a spinning board and watching it “cut” up the board with its shadow. I believe this knife can represent clocks and how it cuts up time into “random” intervals established by someone outside of nature—just like “someone” is throwing the knife; it does not fly down by itself. Lastly, one more work by Les Levine, The Selling of a Video Artist, reminded me of Bergson’s argument that “time is invention” (115), because the commentator spoke about visual art as the only way of feeling absolute time, compared to TV programming which is just a way of making us buy things. If time is used properly, as these video artists are trying to do—creating something completely new, unique, and significant in their work, then this time is much more than just measured intervals, it is their creativity, and invention.
Alina Goldenberg
One of the first films was Robert Watts’ Snowflakes which depicted time in layers with snowflakes falling down and layering on top of the camera screen until all we can see is a blurry white image. In his interpretation, time is a continuous process that begins with nothing, builds on top of itself, and ultimately ends in nothing—for us. From another perspective, the snowflakes keep falling and falling with no beginning and no end; however, if we are underneath the snowflakes we can only experience the moment from the time we open our eyes and until the snowflake layer blocks the view from our eyes. David Askevold’s An Excerpt from the Ambit, on the other hand, had no beginning nor end—signifying that time is immeasurable since we can never know when “the clock” started ticking and when it stopped.
Dennis Oppenheim depicted time as being in a circular motion in his short film called Spinning Knives. In his piece, a person is throwing knives at a spinning board and watching it “cut” up the board with its shadow. I believe this knife can represent clocks and how it cuts up time into “random” intervals established by someone outside of nature—just like “someone” is throwing the knife; it does not fly down by itself. Lastly, one more work by Les Levine, The Selling of a Video Artist, reminded me of Bergson’s argument that “time is invention” (115), because the commentator spoke about visual art as the only way of feeling absolute time, compared to TV programming which is just a way of making us buy things. If time is used properly, as these video artists are trying to do—creating something completely new, unique, and significant in their work, then this time is much more than just measured intervals, it is their creativity, and invention.
Alina Goldenberg
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Futurist Photodynamism - Laura Wood
1. According to the article photodynamism “analyses and synthesizes movement.” However, there is never really a clear definition given for “photodynamism” in the reading; since it is the title and the main focus of the article I thought beginning with a more concrete definition would be helpful. I will attempt to create one here. “Photo” sometimes means the reproduction of an event in time and “dynamism” (according to dictionary.com) is “the activeness of an energetic personality.” Thus, photodynamism can be considered the active and energetic reproduction of an event in time. It seems from the article that it is more a combination of philosophy or perception of photography and a distorted visual image of movement. This may seem very similar to art forms such as photography, chronophotography, cinematography, however, photodynamism appears to try to stay separate from the different forms of are that attempt to reproduce motion. This is because photodynamism “despise[s] the precise, mechanical, glacial reproduction of reality.
2. In an analogy using a clock it is stated that one sees little with chronophotography (only the “quarter hours”), a little more can be viewed with cinematography (the “minutes”), but with photodynamism you can see all the “intermovemental fractions… between seconds.” They are basically stating that Photodynamism is the most in depth way of viewing and thinking about motion. The strange part about using this analogy is that everything about a clock is mechanical which seems to be what photodynamism is trying to stay away from. In addition, a clock is an attempt to represent time, which can be considered something in constant motion or continuously changing. To me this analogy just seems contradictory to the ideals of photodynamism.
3. “For photodynamism, it is desirable and correct to record the images in a distorted state, since images themselves are inevitably transformed in movement… we prefer to see everything in motion, since as things are dematerialized in motion they become idealized, while still retaining, deep down, a strong skeleton of truth.” With these types of images it would be difficult to see what is/was actually there; however, if this is truly the best way of viewing things (as photodynamism argues) than maybe our minds are tricking us into believing that we see things still when we don’t. This type of argument reminds me a lot of Bergson in that photodynamism wants us to take a deeper look into the idea of motion and both (photodynamism and Bergson) are critical of film and different art forms of representation. Does this mean that photodynamism can be considered more accurate than our eyes? Since we can’t see the blur or “transformation in movement” maybe our eye work too slowly, or maybe this is intentional so we can make sense of the images that appear ‘clear’ to us since they “retain… a skeleton of truth.” Similar to what Bergson said, if everything were moving and we thought too much about motion we would probably go insane.
4. Throughout the style of writing appears to follow a pattern: most paragraphs begin by criticizing what one form of representation lacks (i.e. photography only allows the viewer to “move abruptly from on state to another”) and then does one of two things 1) describes how photodynamism does it better or 2) shows how photodynamism avoids doing the same thing (i.e. with photodynamism you can see the “intermovemental fractions… between seconds.”). By doing so, photodynamism proves how desperately they do not want to be grouped with the other art forms. However, aren’t they still creating a representation of movement even if it is not in a “precise [and] mechanical” way? Aren’t they just trying to understand motion better in order to create better representations of motion? “Now a knowledge of the paths traced by bodies in action and of their transformation in motion will be indispensable for the painter of movement.”
5. Another thing that I thought about was that Zeno would disagree with the entire paper simply by stating that motion does not exist.
2. In an analogy using a clock it is stated that one sees little with chronophotography (only the “quarter hours”), a little more can be viewed with cinematography (the “minutes”), but with photodynamism you can see all the “intermovemental fractions… between seconds.” They are basically stating that Photodynamism is the most in depth way of viewing and thinking about motion. The strange part about using this analogy is that everything about a clock is mechanical which seems to be what photodynamism is trying to stay away from. In addition, a clock is an attempt to represent time, which can be considered something in constant motion or continuously changing. To me this analogy just seems contradictory to the ideals of photodynamism.
3. “For photodynamism, it is desirable and correct to record the images in a distorted state, since images themselves are inevitably transformed in movement… we prefer to see everything in motion, since as things are dematerialized in motion they become idealized, while still retaining, deep down, a strong skeleton of truth.” With these types of images it would be difficult to see what is/was actually there; however, if this is truly the best way of viewing things (as photodynamism argues) than maybe our minds are tricking us into believing that we see things still when we don’t. This type of argument reminds me a lot of Bergson in that photodynamism wants us to take a deeper look into the idea of motion and both (photodynamism and Bergson) are critical of film and different art forms of representation. Does this mean that photodynamism can be considered more accurate than our eyes? Since we can’t see the blur or “transformation in movement” maybe our eye work too slowly, or maybe this is intentional so we can make sense of the images that appear ‘clear’ to us since they “retain… a skeleton of truth.” Similar to what Bergson said, if everything were moving and we thought too much about motion we would probably go insane.
4. Throughout the style of writing appears to follow a pattern: most paragraphs begin by criticizing what one form of representation lacks (i.e. photography only allows the viewer to “move abruptly from on state to another”) and then does one of two things 1) describes how photodynamism does it better or 2) shows how photodynamism avoids doing the same thing (i.e. with photodynamism you can see the “intermovemental fractions… between seconds.”). By doing so, photodynamism proves how desperately they do not want to be grouped with the other art forms. However, aren’t they still creating a representation of movement even if it is not in a “precise [and] mechanical” way? Aren’t they just trying to understand motion better in order to create better representations of motion? “Now a knowledge of the paths traced by bodies in action and of their transformation in motion will be indispensable for the painter of movement.”
5. Another thing that I thought about was that Zeno would disagree with the entire paper simply by stating that motion does not exist.
Monday, February 12, 2007
Futurist Photodynamism
by anton giulio bragaglia 1st july 1913
http://www.391.org/manifestos/antongiuliobragaglia_futuristphotodynamism.htm
(***This is the reading for Wed. Please print it out, mark it up, and bring it with you to class.)
To begin with, Photodynamism cannot be interpreted as an innovation applicable to photography in the way that chronophotography was. Photodynamism is a creation that aims to achieve ideals that are quite contrary to the objectives of all the representational means of today. If it can be associated at all with photography, cinematography and chronophotography, this is only by virtue of the fact that, like them, it has its origins in the wide field of photographic science, the technical means forming common ground. All are based on the physical properties of the camera.
We are certainly not concerned with the aims and characteristics of cinematography and chronophotography. We are not interested in the precise reconstruction of movement, which has already been broken up and analysed. We are involved only in the area of movement which produces sensation, the memory of which still palpitates in our awareness.
We despise the precise, mechanical, glacial reproduction of reality, and take the utmost care to avoid it. For us this is a harmful and negative element, whereas for cinematography and chronophotography it is the very essence. They in their turn overlook the trajectory, which for us is the essential value.
The question of cinematography in relation to us is absolutely idiotic, and can only be raised by a superficial and imbecilic mentality motivated by the most crass ignorance of our argument.
Cinematography does not trace the shape of movement. It subdivides it, without rules, with mechanical arbitrariness, disintegrating and shattering it without any kind of aesthetic concern for rhythm. It is not within its coldly mechanical power to satisfy such concerns.
Besides which, cinematography never analyses movement. It shatters it in the frames of the film strip, quite unlike the action of Photodynamism, which analyses movement precisely in its details. And cinematography never synthesises movement, either. It merely reconstructs fragments of reality, already coldly broken up, in the same way as the hand of a chronometer deals with time even though this flows in a continuous and constant stream.
Photography too is a quite distinct area; useful in the perfect anatomical reproduction of reality; necessary and precious therefore for aims that are absolutely contrary to ours, which are artistic in themselves, scientific in their researches, but nevertheless always directed towards art.
And so both photography and Photodynamism possess their own singular qualities, clearly divided, and are very different in their importance, their usefulness and their aims.
Marey's chronophotography, too, being a form of cinematography carried out on a single plate or on a continuous strip of film, even if it does not use frames to divide movement which is already scanned and broken up into instantaneous shots, still shatters the action. The instantaneous images are even further apart, fewer and more autonomous than those of cinematography, so that this too cannot be called analysis.
In actual fact, Marey's system is used, for example, in the teaching of gymnastics. And out of the hundred images that trace a man's jump the few that are registered are just sufficient to describe and to teach to the young the principal stages of a jump.
But although this may be all very well for the old Marey system, for gymnastics and other such applications, it is not enough for us. With about five extremely rigid instantaneous shots we cannot obtain even the reconstruction of movement, let alone the sensation. Given that chronophotography certainly does not reconstruct movement, or give the sensation of it, any further discussion of the subject would be idle, except that the point is worth stressing, as there are those who, with a certain degree of elegant malice, would identify Photodynamism with chronophotography, just as others insisted on confusing it with cinematography.
Marey's system, then, seizes and freezes the action in its principal stages, those which best serve its purpose. It thus describes a theory that could be equally deduced from a series of instantaneous photographs. They could similarly be said to belong to different subjects, since, if a fraction of a stage is removed, no link unites and unifies the various images. They are photographic, contemporaneous, and appear to belong to more than one subject. To put it crudely, chronophotography could be compared with a clock on the face of which only the quarter-hours are marked, cinematography to one on which the minutes too are indicated, and Photodynamism to a third on which are marked not only the seconds, but also the intermovemental fractions existing in the passages between seconds. This becomes an almost infinitesimal calculation of movement.
In fact it is only through our researches that it is possible to obtain a vision that is proportionate, in terms of the strength of the images, to the very tempo of their existence, and to the speed with which they have lived in a space and in us.
The greater the speed of an action, the less intense and broad will be its trace when registered with Photodynamism. It follows that the slower it moves, the less it will be dematerialised and distorted. The more the image is distorted, the less real it will be. It will be more ideal and lyrical, further extracted from its personality and closer to type, with the same evolutionary effect of distortion as was followed by the Greeks in their search for their type of beauty.
There is an obvious difference between the photographic mechanicality of chronophotography -embryonic and rudimentary cinematography - and the tendency of Photodynamism to move away from that mechanicality, following its own ideal, and completely opposed to the aims of all that went before (although we do propose to undertake our own scientific researches into movement).
Photodynamism, then, analyses and synthesises movement at will, and to great effect. This is because it does not have to resort to disintegration for observation, but possesses the power to record the continuity of an action in space, to trace in a face, for instance, not only the expression of passing states of mind, as photography and cinematography have never been able to, but also the immediate shifting of volumes that results in the immediate transformation of expression.
A shout, a tragical pause, a gesture of terror, the entire scene, the complete external unfolding of the intimate drama, can be expressed in one single work. And this applies not only to the point of departure or that of arrival - nor merely to the intermediary stage, as in chronophotography - but continuously, from beginning to end, because in this way, as we have already said, the intermovemental stages of a movement can also be invoked.
In fact, where scientific research into the evolution and modelling of movement are concerned, we declare Photodynamism to be exhaustive and essential, given that no precise means of analysing a movement exists (we have already partly examined the rudimentary work of chronophotography).
And so - just as the study of anatomy has always been essential for an artist - now a knowledge of the paths traced by bodies in action and of their transformation in motion will be indispensable for the painter of movement.
In the composition of a painting, the optical effects observed by the artist are not enough. A precise analytical knowledge of the essential properties of the effect, and of its causes, are essential. The artist may know how to synthesise such analyses, but within such a synthesis the skeleton, the precise and almost invisible analytical elements, must exist. These can only be rendered visible by the scientific aspects of Photodynamism.
In fact, every vibration is the rhythm of infinite minor vibrations, since every rhythm is built up of an infinite quantity of vibrations. In so far as human knowledge has hitherto conceived and considered movement in its general rhythm, it has fabricated, so to speak, an algebra of movement. This has been considered simple and finite (cf. Spencer: First Principles - The Rhythm of Motion). But Photodynamism has revealed and represented it as complex, raising it to the level of an infinitesimal calculation of movement (see our latest works, e.g. The Carpenter, The Bow, Changing Positions).
Indeed, we represent the movement of a pendulum, for example, by relating its speed and its tempo to two orthogonal axes. We will obtain a continuous and infinite sinusoidal curve. But this applies to a theoretical pendulum, an immaterial one. The representation we will obtain from a material pendulum will differ from the theoretical one in that, after a longer or shorter (but always finite) period, it will stop. It should be clear that in both cases the lines representing such movement are continuous, and do not portray the reality of the phenomenon. In reality, these lines should be composed of an infinite number of minor vibrations, introduced by the resistance of the point of union. This does not move with smooth continuity but in a jerky way caused by infinite coefficients. Now, a synthetic representation is more effective, even when its essence envelops an analytically divisionist value, than a synthetic impressionist one (meaning divisionism and impressionism in the philosophical sense). In the same way the representation of realistic movement will be much more effective in synthesis - containing in its essence an analytical divisionist value (e.g. The Carpenter, The Bow, etc.), than in analysis of a superficial nature, that is, when it is not minutely interstatic but expresses itself only in successive static states (e.g. The Typist).
Therefore, just as in Seurat's painting the essential question of chromatic divisionism (synthesis of effect and analysis of means) had been suggested by the scientific enquiries of Rood, so today the need for movemental divisionism, that is, synthesis of effect and analysis of means in the painting of movement, is indicated by Photodynamism. But - and this should be carefully noted - this analysis is infinite, profound and sensitive, rather than immediately perceptible.
This question has already been raised by demonstrating that, just as anatomy is essential in static reproduction, so the anatomy of an action - intimate analysis - is indispensable in the representation of movement. This will not resort to thirty images of the same object to represent an object in movement, but will render it infinitely multiplied and extended, whilst the figure present will appear diminished.
Photodynamism, then, can establish results from positive data in the construction of moving reality, just as photography obtains its own positive results in the sphere of static reality.
The artist, in search of the forms and combinations that characterise whatever state of reality interests him, can, by means of Photodynamism, establish a foundation of experience that will facilitate his researches and his intuition when it comes to the dynamic representation of reality. After all, the steady and essential relationships which link the development of any real action with artistic conception are indisputable, and are affirmed independently of formal analogies with reality.
Once this essential affinity has been established, not only between artistic conception and the representation of reality, but also between artistic conception and application, it is easy to realise how much information dynamic representation can offer to the artist who is engaged in a profound search for it.
In this way light and movement in general, light acting as movement, and hence the movement of light, are revealed in Photodynamism. Given the transcendental nature of the phenomenon of movement, it is only by means of Photodynamism that the painter can know what happens in the intermovemental states, and become acquainted with the volumes of individual motions. He will be able to analyse these in minute detail, and will come to know the increase in aesthetic value of a flying figure, or its diminution, relative to light and to the dematerialization consequent upon motion. Only with Photodynamism can the artist be in possession of the elements necessary for the construction of a work of art embodying the desired-for synthesis.
With reference to this the sculptor Roberto Melli wrote to me explaining that, in his opinion, Photodynamism 'must, in the course of these new researches into movement which are beginning to make a lively impression on the artist's consciousness, take the place which has until now been occupied by drawing, a physical and mechanical phenomenon very different from the physical transcendentalism of Photodynamism. Photodynamism is to drawing what the new aesthetic currents are to the art of the past.' . . .
Now, with cinematography and Marey's equivalent system the viewer moves abruptly from one state to another, and thus is limited to the states that compose the movement, without concern for the intermovemental states of the action; and with photography he sees only one state. But with Photodynamism, remembering what took place between one stage and another, a work is presented that transcends the human condition, becoming a transcendental photograph of movement. For this end we have also envisaged a machine which will render actions visible, more effectively than is now today possible with actions traced from one point, but at the same time keeping them related to the time in which they were made. They will remain idealised by the distortion and by the destruction imposed by the motion and light which translate themselves into trajectories.
So it follows that when you tell us that the images contained in our Photodynamic works are unsure and difficult to distinguish, you are merely noting a pure characteristic of Photodynamism. For Photodynamism, it is desirable and correct to record the images in a distorted state, since images themselves are inevitably transformed in movement. Besides this, our aim is to make a determined move away from reality, since cinematography, photography and chronophotography already exist to deal with mechanically precise and cold reproduction.
We seek the interior essence of things: pure movement; and we prefer to see everything in motion, since as things are dematerialised in motion they become idealised, while still retaining, deep down, a strong skeleton of truth.
This is our aim, and it is by these means that we are attempting to raise photography to the heights which today it strives impotently to attain, being deprived of the elements essential for such an elevation because of the criteria of order that make it conform with the precise reproduction of reality. And then, of course, it is also dominated by that ridiculous and brutal negative element, the instantaneous exposure, which has been presented as a great scientific strength when in fact it is a laughable absurdity.
But where the scientific analysis of movement is concerned - that is, in the multiplication of reality for the study of its deformation in motion - we possess not merely one but a whole scale of values applied to an action. We repeat the idea, we insist, we impose and return to it without hesitation and untiringly, until we can affirm it absolutely with the obsessive demonstration of exterior and internal quality which is essential for us.
And it is beyond doubt that by way of such multiplication of entities we will achieve a multiplication of values, capable of enriching any fact with a more imposing personality.
In this way, if we repeat the principal states of the action, the figure of a dancer - moving a foot, in mid-air, pirouetting - will even when not possessing its own trajectory or offering a dynamic sensation, be much more like a dancer, and much more like dancing, than would a single figure frozen in just one of the states that build up a movement.
The picture therefore can be invaded and pervaded by the essence of the subject. It can be obsessed by the subject to the extent that it energetically invades and obsesses the public with its own values. It will not exist as a passive object over which an unconcerned public can take control for its own enjoyment. It will be an active thing that imposes its own extremely free essence on the public, though this will not be graspable with the insipid facility common to all images that are too faithful to ordinary reality.
To further this study of reality multiplied in its volumes, and the multiplication of the lyrical plastic sensation of these, we have conceived a method of research, highly original in its mechanical means, which we have already made known to some of our friends.
But in any case, at the moment we are studying the trajectory, the synthesis of action, that which exerts a fascination over our senses, the vertiginous lyrical expression of life, the lively invoker of the magnificent dynamic feeling with which the universe incessantly vibrates.
We will endeavour to extract not only the aesthetic expression of the motives, but also the inner, sensorial, cerebral and psychic emotions that we feel when an action leaves its superb, unbroken trace.
This is in order to offer to others the necessary factors for the reproduction of the desired feeling. And it is on our current researches into the interior of an action that all the emotive artistic values existing in Photodynamism are based.
To those who believe that there is no need for such researches to be conducted with photographic means, given that painting exists, we would point out that, although avoiding competing with painting, and working in totally different fields, the means of photographic science are so swift, so fertile, and so powerful in asserting themselves as much more forward looking and much more in sympathy with the evolution of life than all other old means of representation.
http://www.391.org/manifestos/antongiuliobragaglia_futuristphotodynamism.htm
(***This is the reading for Wed. Please print it out, mark it up, and bring it with you to class.)
To begin with, Photodynamism cannot be interpreted as an innovation applicable to photography in the way that chronophotography was. Photodynamism is a creation that aims to achieve ideals that are quite contrary to the objectives of all the representational means of today. If it can be associated at all with photography, cinematography and chronophotography, this is only by virtue of the fact that, like them, it has its origins in the wide field of photographic science, the technical means forming common ground. All are based on the physical properties of the camera.
We are certainly not concerned with the aims and characteristics of cinematography and chronophotography. We are not interested in the precise reconstruction of movement, which has already been broken up and analysed. We are involved only in the area of movement which produces sensation, the memory of which still palpitates in our awareness.
We despise the precise, mechanical, glacial reproduction of reality, and take the utmost care to avoid it. For us this is a harmful and negative element, whereas for cinematography and chronophotography it is the very essence. They in their turn overlook the trajectory, which for us is the essential value.
The question of cinematography in relation to us is absolutely idiotic, and can only be raised by a superficial and imbecilic mentality motivated by the most crass ignorance of our argument.
Cinematography does not trace the shape of movement. It subdivides it, without rules, with mechanical arbitrariness, disintegrating and shattering it without any kind of aesthetic concern for rhythm. It is not within its coldly mechanical power to satisfy such concerns.
Besides which, cinematography never analyses movement. It shatters it in the frames of the film strip, quite unlike the action of Photodynamism, which analyses movement precisely in its details. And cinematography never synthesises movement, either. It merely reconstructs fragments of reality, already coldly broken up, in the same way as the hand of a chronometer deals with time even though this flows in a continuous and constant stream.
Photography too is a quite distinct area; useful in the perfect anatomical reproduction of reality; necessary and precious therefore for aims that are absolutely contrary to ours, which are artistic in themselves, scientific in their researches, but nevertheless always directed towards art.
And so both photography and Photodynamism possess their own singular qualities, clearly divided, and are very different in their importance, their usefulness and their aims.
Marey's chronophotography, too, being a form of cinematography carried out on a single plate or on a continuous strip of film, even if it does not use frames to divide movement which is already scanned and broken up into instantaneous shots, still shatters the action. The instantaneous images are even further apart, fewer and more autonomous than those of cinematography, so that this too cannot be called analysis.
In actual fact, Marey's system is used, for example, in the teaching of gymnastics. And out of the hundred images that trace a man's jump the few that are registered are just sufficient to describe and to teach to the young the principal stages of a jump.
But although this may be all very well for the old Marey system, for gymnastics and other such applications, it is not enough for us. With about five extremely rigid instantaneous shots we cannot obtain even the reconstruction of movement, let alone the sensation. Given that chronophotography certainly does not reconstruct movement, or give the sensation of it, any further discussion of the subject would be idle, except that the point is worth stressing, as there are those who, with a certain degree of elegant malice, would identify Photodynamism with chronophotography, just as others insisted on confusing it with cinematography.
Marey's system, then, seizes and freezes the action in its principal stages, those which best serve its purpose. It thus describes a theory that could be equally deduced from a series of instantaneous photographs. They could similarly be said to belong to different subjects, since, if a fraction of a stage is removed, no link unites and unifies the various images. They are photographic, contemporaneous, and appear to belong to more than one subject. To put it crudely, chronophotography could be compared with a clock on the face of which only the quarter-hours are marked, cinematography to one on which the minutes too are indicated, and Photodynamism to a third on which are marked not only the seconds, but also the intermovemental fractions existing in the passages between seconds. This becomes an almost infinitesimal calculation of movement.
In fact it is only through our researches that it is possible to obtain a vision that is proportionate, in terms of the strength of the images, to the very tempo of their existence, and to the speed with which they have lived in a space and in us.
The greater the speed of an action, the less intense and broad will be its trace when registered with Photodynamism. It follows that the slower it moves, the less it will be dematerialised and distorted. The more the image is distorted, the less real it will be. It will be more ideal and lyrical, further extracted from its personality and closer to type, with the same evolutionary effect of distortion as was followed by the Greeks in their search for their type of beauty.
There is an obvious difference between the photographic mechanicality of chronophotography -embryonic and rudimentary cinematography - and the tendency of Photodynamism to move away from that mechanicality, following its own ideal, and completely opposed to the aims of all that went before (although we do propose to undertake our own scientific researches into movement).
Photodynamism, then, analyses and synthesises movement at will, and to great effect. This is because it does not have to resort to disintegration for observation, but possesses the power to record the continuity of an action in space, to trace in a face, for instance, not only the expression of passing states of mind, as photography and cinematography have never been able to, but also the immediate shifting of volumes that results in the immediate transformation of expression.
A shout, a tragical pause, a gesture of terror, the entire scene, the complete external unfolding of the intimate drama, can be expressed in one single work. And this applies not only to the point of departure or that of arrival - nor merely to the intermediary stage, as in chronophotography - but continuously, from beginning to end, because in this way, as we have already said, the intermovemental stages of a movement can also be invoked.
In fact, where scientific research into the evolution and modelling of movement are concerned, we declare Photodynamism to be exhaustive and essential, given that no precise means of analysing a movement exists (we have already partly examined the rudimentary work of chronophotography).
And so - just as the study of anatomy has always been essential for an artist - now a knowledge of the paths traced by bodies in action and of their transformation in motion will be indispensable for the painter of movement.
In the composition of a painting, the optical effects observed by the artist are not enough. A precise analytical knowledge of the essential properties of the effect, and of its causes, are essential. The artist may know how to synthesise such analyses, but within such a synthesis the skeleton, the precise and almost invisible analytical elements, must exist. These can only be rendered visible by the scientific aspects of Photodynamism.
In fact, every vibration is the rhythm of infinite minor vibrations, since every rhythm is built up of an infinite quantity of vibrations. In so far as human knowledge has hitherto conceived and considered movement in its general rhythm, it has fabricated, so to speak, an algebra of movement. This has been considered simple and finite (cf. Spencer: First Principles - The Rhythm of Motion). But Photodynamism has revealed and represented it as complex, raising it to the level of an infinitesimal calculation of movement (see our latest works, e.g. The Carpenter, The Bow, Changing Positions).
Indeed, we represent the movement of a pendulum, for example, by relating its speed and its tempo to two orthogonal axes. We will obtain a continuous and infinite sinusoidal curve. But this applies to a theoretical pendulum, an immaterial one. The representation we will obtain from a material pendulum will differ from the theoretical one in that, after a longer or shorter (but always finite) period, it will stop. It should be clear that in both cases the lines representing such movement are continuous, and do not portray the reality of the phenomenon. In reality, these lines should be composed of an infinite number of minor vibrations, introduced by the resistance of the point of union. This does not move with smooth continuity but in a jerky way caused by infinite coefficients. Now, a synthetic representation is more effective, even when its essence envelops an analytically divisionist value, than a synthetic impressionist one (meaning divisionism and impressionism in the philosophical sense). In the same way the representation of realistic movement will be much more effective in synthesis - containing in its essence an analytical divisionist value (e.g. The Carpenter, The Bow, etc.), than in analysis of a superficial nature, that is, when it is not minutely interstatic but expresses itself only in successive static states (e.g. The Typist).
Therefore, just as in Seurat's painting the essential question of chromatic divisionism (synthesis of effect and analysis of means) had been suggested by the scientific enquiries of Rood, so today the need for movemental divisionism, that is, synthesis of effect and analysis of means in the painting of movement, is indicated by Photodynamism. But - and this should be carefully noted - this analysis is infinite, profound and sensitive, rather than immediately perceptible.
This question has already been raised by demonstrating that, just as anatomy is essential in static reproduction, so the anatomy of an action - intimate analysis - is indispensable in the representation of movement. This will not resort to thirty images of the same object to represent an object in movement, but will render it infinitely multiplied and extended, whilst the figure present will appear diminished.
Photodynamism, then, can establish results from positive data in the construction of moving reality, just as photography obtains its own positive results in the sphere of static reality.
The artist, in search of the forms and combinations that characterise whatever state of reality interests him, can, by means of Photodynamism, establish a foundation of experience that will facilitate his researches and his intuition when it comes to the dynamic representation of reality. After all, the steady and essential relationships which link the development of any real action with artistic conception are indisputable, and are affirmed independently of formal analogies with reality.
Once this essential affinity has been established, not only between artistic conception and the representation of reality, but also between artistic conception and application, it is easy to realise how much information dynamic representation can offer to the artist who is engaged in a profound search for it.
In this way light and movement in general, light acting as movement, and hence the movement of light, are revealed in Photodynamism. Given the transcendental nature of the phenomenon of movement, it is only by means of Photodynamism that the painter can know what happens in the intermovemental states, and become acquainted with the volumes of individual motions. He will be able to analyse these in minute detail, and will come to know the increase in aesthetic value of a flying figure, or its diminution, relative to light and to the dematerialization consequent upon motion. Only with Photodynamism can the artist be in possession of the elements necessary for the construction of a work of art embodying the desired-for synthesis.
With reference to this the sculptor Roberto Melli wrote to me explaining that, in his opinion, Photodynamism 'must, in the course of these new researches into movement which are beginning to make a lively impression on the artist's consciousness, take the place which has until now been occupied by drawing, a physical and mechanical phenomenon very different from the physical transcendentalism of Photodynamism. Photodynamism is to drawing what the new aesthetic currents are to the art of the past.' . . .
Now, with cinematography and Marey's equivalent system the viewer moves abruptly from one state to another, and thus is limited to the states that compose the movement, without concern for the intermovemental states of the action; and with photography he sees only one state. But with Photodynamism, remembering what took place between one stage and another, a work is presented that transcends the human condition, becoming a transcendental photograph of movement. For this end we have also envisaged a machine which will render actions visible, more effectively than is now today possible with actions traced from one point, but at the same time keeping them related to the time in which they were made. They will remain idealised by the distortion and by the destruction imposed by the motion and light which translate themselves into trajectories.
So it follows that when you tell us that the images contained in our Photodynamic works are unsure and difficult to distinguish, you are merely noting a pure characteristic of Photodynamism. For Photodynamism, it is desirable and correct to record the images in a distorted state, since images themselves are inevitably transformed in movement. Besides this, our aim is to make a determined move away from reality, since cinematography, photography and chronophotography already exist to deal with mechanically precise and cold reproduction.
We seek the interior essence of things: pure movement; and we prefer to see everything in motion, since as things are dematerialised in motion they become idealised, while still retaining, deep down, a strong skeleton of truth.
This is our aim, and it is by these means that we are attempting to raise photography to the heights which today it strives impotently to attain, being deprived of the elements essential for such an elevation because of the criteria of order that make it conform with the precise reproduction of reality. And then, of course, it is also dominated by that ridiculous and brutal negative element, the instantaneous exposure, which has been presented as a great scientific strength when in fact it is a laughable absurdity.
But where the scientific analysis of movement is concerned - that is, in the multiplication of reality for the study of its deformation in motion - we possess not merely one but a whole scale of values applied to an action. We repeat the idea, we insist, we impose and return to it without hesitation and untiringly, until we can affirm it absolutely with the obsessive demonstration of exterior and internal quality which is essential for us.
And it is beyond doubt that by way of such multiplication of entities we will achieve a multiplication of values, capable of enriching any fact with a more imposing personality.
In this way, if we repeat the principal states of the action, the figure of a dancer - moving a foot, in mid-air, pirouetting - will even when not possessing its own trajectory or offering a dynamic sensation, be much more like a dancer, and much more like dancing, than would a single figure frozen in just one of the states that build up a movement.
The picture therefore can be invaded and pervaded by the essence of the subject. It can be obsessed by the subject to the extent that it energetically invades and obsesses the public with its own values. It will not exist as a passive object over which an unconcerned public can take control for its own enjoyment. It will be an active thing that imposes its own extremely free essence on the public, though this will not be graspable with the insipid facility common to all images that are too faithful to ordinary reality.
To further this study of reality multiplied in its volumes, and the multiplication of the lyrical plastic sensation of these, we have conceived a method of research, highly original in its mechanical means, which we have already made known to some of our friends.
But in any case, at the moment we are studying the trajectory, the synthesis of action, that which exerts a fascination over our senses, the vertiginous lyrical expression of life, the lively invoker of the magnificent dynamic feeling with which the universe incessantly vibrates.
We will endeavour to extract not only the aesthetic expression of the motives, but also the inner, sensorial, cerebral and psychic emotions that we feel when an action leaves its superb, unbroken trace.
This is in order to offer to others the necessary factors for the reproduction of the desired feeling. And it is on our current researches into the interior of an action that all the emotive artistic values existing in Photodynamism are based.
To those who believe that there is no need for such researches to be conducted with photographic means, given that painting exists, we would point out that, although avoiding competing with painting, and working in totally different fields, the means of photographic science are so swift, so fertile, and so powerful in asserting themselves as much more forward looking and much more in sympathy with the evolution of life than all other old means of representation.
Thursday, February 8, 2007
Bergson - Part 2 : Olivia Hatalsky
1. This second section of Bergson's "Modern Science" is concerned with the evolution of scientific though between ancient and modern methods. The primary example used here is the emergence of taxonomies. From as early as the first paragraph strong ties were made to a Foucauldian way of thinking. Bergson stated “signs substitute for the objects themselves”(329) which relates, in my mind, to Foucault’s theory that with out current modes of seeing, the word and “sign”, as Bergson referred to it, have come to be more valuable than the actual three-dimensional objects they represent. The way in which our mind simplifies and categorizes, what Bergson calls “laws of genera” (330), referring the scientific toxonimization of our world has caused both scientists and humans alike to overlook to gaps between both different objects as well as the relationship between symbols and the objects that they represent. Yes Bergson emphasizes that cinematographical vision is wrong, but why are the “intervals between moments” that are overlooked with this type of vision so valuable to him? In a sense, modern man has tried to conquer time through science by breaking it into smaller pieces dissecting each moment for more study, but what Bergson seems to comprehend is that man’s current mode of seeing does replicated the real it only distorts it. Although the title of the piece is “Creative Evolution”, which seems to condone new attempts at understanding and representing time, Platonic and Aristotelian Ideas are lacking, while to current modes do too much and alter the real.
2. It is easy to think that Bergson is just a senile old man who doesn’t like the technological changes caused by film occurring around him. But is there something more? Is it more that just a pure invalidation of technological advances? I actually believe that he has taking a page from the works of Walter Benjamin who believed that with capturing a moment through any reproductive mean detracts from the original “aura”. Yet Bergson takes this argument a step further. Even the discussion of a moment through language detracts from the “total definition or description of a period.” (110) This occurs because instead of describing one single fact, several distinguishable phases are noted. With the sentence “none of them has the right to set itself as a moment that represents or dominates the others” Bergson virtually invalidates the idea of the pregnant moment. This is almost to say that the sum of all of the cinematographically created moments do not add up to the actual real period. In essence, the sum is greater than the whole of its parts. And although the view from a camera is far more precise than that of an eye, this still doesn’t seem to compensate for the intervals of time missed between moments recorded.
3. There are two types of knowledge that Bergson introduces. The first is cinematographical and the second states that “we should no longer be asking where a moving body will be, what shape a system will take… it is the very flux of the real that we should be trying to follow.”(342) This second kind of knowledge which displaces cinematographical vision almost calls humans to appreciate the current moment—smell the flowers. But this isn’t a fortune cookie instructing its reader to focus on today and deal with tomorrow when it comes. Furthermore Bergson describes this second knowledge as “practically useless”(343) because it will not extend mans domain over the real. So why is it here? It only exposes that the first type of knowledge (cinematographical), which allows people to foresee the future, is again, a fraud. This vision is just a representation of the real which is actually going on currently. Bergson seemingly want to have his cake and eat it too. He want to pure vision of reality, but at the same time he craves a “empire over nature”(343). How is this possible? Man is still a slave to time no matter that he can break a day into 24 hours or re-watch a moment that happened in the past. Scientific knowledge has tried to give man a greater understanding of time and nature by forming hierarchies and taxonomies of information. This mosaic of information is incomplete, as Bergson discusses. Yes, like the lapses of time missed by cinematographical time, scientific knowledge is not a real portrayal of the world, but it is an attempt for further understanding. Vision through this mode is incomplete, but does Bergson have a better suggestion for understanding the world?
-Olivia Hatalsky
2. It is easy to think that Bergson is just a senile old man who doesn’t like the technological changes caused by film occurring around him. But is there something more? Is it more that just a pure invalidation of technological advances? I actually believe that he has taking a page from the works of Walter Benjamin who believed that with capturing a moment through any reproductive mean detracts from the original “aura”. Yet Bergson takes this argument a step further. Even the discussion of a moment through language detracts from the “total definition or description of a period.” (110) This occurs because instead of describing one single fact, several distinguishable phases are noted. With the sentence “none of them has the right to set itself as a moment that represents or dominates the others” Bergson virtually invalidates the idea of the pregnant moment. This is almost to say that the sum of all of the cinematographically created moments do not add up to the actual real period. In essence, the sum is greater than the whole of its parts. And although the view from a camera is far more precise than that of an eye, this still doesn’t seem to compensate for the intervals of time missed between moments recorded.
3. There are two types of knowledge that Bergson introduces. The first is cinematographical and the second states that “we should no longer be asking where a moving body will be, what shape a system will take… it is the very flux of the real that we should be trying to follow.”(342) This second kind of knowledge which displaces cinematographical vision almost calls humans to appreciate the current moment—smell the flowers. But this isn’t a fortune cookie instructing its reader to focus on today and deal with tomorrow when it comes. Furthermore Bergson describes this second knowledge as “practically useless”(343) because it will not extend mans domain over the real. So why is it here? It only exposes that the first type of knowledge (cinematographical), which allows people to foresee the future, is again, a fraud. This vision is just a representation of the real which is actually going on currently. Bergson seemingly want to have his cake and eat it too. He want to pure vision of reality, but at the same time he craves a “empire over nature”(343). How is this possible? Man is still a slave to time no matter that he can break a day into 24 hours or re-watch a moment that happened in the past. Scientific knowledge has tried to give man a greater understanding of time and nature by forming hierarchies and taxonomies of information. This mosaic of information is incomplete, as Bergson discusses. Yes, like the lapses of time missed by cinematographical time, scientific knowledge is not a real portrayal of the world, but it is an attempt for further understanding. Vision through this mode is incomplete, but does Bergson have a better suggestion for understanding the world?
-Olivia Hatalsky
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
Bergson's Creative Evolution Pt. 2 - Jamal Hunt
1. In the “Modern Science” section of the reading, Bergson first compares the goals of ancient and modern science. Ancient science was essentially concerned with the pregnant moment: the “ideas of Plato or of Aristotle correspond to privileged or salient moments. They…characterize a period of which they express the quintessence” (110). Modern science, on the other hand, strives to describe something at every possible point in time. That is to say, it tries to break up time into an infinite number of pieces and be able to describe each one through empirical laws. Bergson relates this shift in scientific thought to the invention of photography and film. Instead of painting a horse galloping as our eye sees it, we photograph it many times and treat all instances as equal. Instead of thinking about the falling of an object, scientists ignore any specific fall and try to develop an equation to predict the position of any falling object at any time (110). Modern science works toward a functional end, and to do so it depends completely on discrete units of time on which to calculate. This first section is almost entirely intuitive and does not challenge our normal view of time. Bergson takes a relatively long while to prove something we all know: science is interested in quantitative results and it relies on strict calculation to get those results. By doing so, he lays the groundwork for his real argument that follows.
2. Objections to Bergson’s case for time being an indivisible flow are almost all related to science somehow. Any non-scientific objection can easily be chalked up to a natural resistance to a change in our conditioned view of the world. In addition to being counterintuitive, indivisible time seems to make any scientific question impossible to answer. It seeks to destroy the functional division of time that governs our lives. By binding science so strongly to the interval measurement of time, Bergson can reconcile science and fluctual time and remove science as an opponent to it. He first explains that fluctual time has no meaning to science. Modern science “always considers moments, always virtual stopping-places, always, in short, immobilities. Which amounts to saying that real time, regarded as a flux…escapes the hold of scientific knowledge” (113). Science cannot exist without points in time to calculate on. Here, just when any scientist is apt to be at their most extreme opposition to a continuous view of time, Bergson quite brilliantly explains that in fact, his view of the world and science can coexist. Precisely because of the modern scientist’s inattention to specific instances, science and fluctual time are not mutually exclusive. In his words, what “is important to the physicist is the number of units of duration the process fills; he does not concern himself about the units themselves and that is why the successive states of the world might be spread out all at once in space without his having change anything in his science or to cease talking about time. But for us, conscious beings, it is the units that matter” (114). Correct proportions are the only things that matter in calculations, so science can continue unchecked even if everyone embraces the true nature of time. Bergson seems to be making a sort of covert compromise by indicating that it is acceptable for the functionally useful façade of divisible time to continue as long as we all realize that it is only a construction and that in reality time never stops. Suddenly his ideas do not seem quite so difficult to consider.
3. Bergson’s most interesting idea in this section involves a reversal of the usual view of the constancy of time. It is easy to imagine that although time fluctuates quite a bit based on our experience—time flying during fun or slowing to a crawl during a boring activity—there is some external clock that ticks away at a constant pace. He begins with the example of waiting for a sugar cube to melt: “While the duration of the phenomenon is relative for the physicist,…this duration is an absolute for my consciousness, for it coincides with a certain degree of impatience which is rigorously determined” (114). Certainly this makes sense; a person looking at the amount of time over which the event took later sees only a number. Their experience of it takes only as long as their eyes are on the page or their mind is on the matter. Bergson dwells on his complete lack of power to influence the period of the melting. His experience of that time (the “psychical duration” as he calls it) is absolutely forced upon him. Though this makes little sense looking from a scientific perspective, it has a kind of undeniable visceral truth. To me, to everyone, the only absolute time is the time each person experiences. Every other time is only imagined and can be purposefully distorted to any amount, whereas our experienced time is out of our direct control.
4. Bergson goes further with this idea and relates it to art. Considering a child putting together a jigsaw puzzle of a painting, he posits that because the child will get better at finishing the puzzle after multiple experiences, its completion time will move toward instantaneous. The time taken is variable and not absolute. On the other hand, an artist making a painting is creating something. The act of creation “is not an interval that may be lengthened or shortened without the content being altered” (115). The puzzle will never change no matter how long it takes to put it together, but the real painting must take a certain amount of time or it would not be the same painting. That is to say, the act of creation in itself creates absolute time. “Time is invention or it is nothing at all” (115). This theory values art and creation highly and is perhaps a criticism of our abandonment of genuine art for a manufactured third-person timescale. Bergson seems fed up with the fake construction of an interval-based existence. His ultimate point is simple: It “will appear the necessity of a continual growth of the universe, I should say of a life of the real” (116). Almost paradoxically, this call for a life of the real harkens to the original quest of science for absolute truth. According to Bergson, our quest has sadly led us farther away from truth rather than closer to it.
Tuesday, February 6, 2007
Bergson's Creative Evolution - Ethan Makhluf
1. In the selection from Bergson’s work “Creative Evolution”, he theorizes on the function and basis of human intellect. “The function of the intellect is to preside over actions. Now, in action, it is the result that interests us; the means matter little provided the end is attained” (99). Bergson gets his idea across by using the analogy of a person lifting their arm. This action requires several steps to complete, yet the human mind does not consider all the muscles contractions and tensions required – it just envisions the end result. The rest – the steps involved to produce the action – “elude our consciousness or reach it only confusedly” (99). Bergson finds that human perception is based on distinguishing qualities such as color and sound from different persons, objects, and motions. What does it say about human intellect if the main function of it is simply presiding over actions? What then drives the actions themselves, and do we have control over this seemingly arbitrary force? This, combined with his idea that the steps involved in an action either completely elude our conscience or confuse us, and we could assume that, while not outright faulting humans, Bergson does not think as highly of the human mind as others would have you believe. Further, if the human intellect is only concerned with the end result for such frivolous actions as raising an arm, does this apply to more serious concerns and actions? For some, if not many, this would seem true.
2. It seems as though Bergson is criticizing the way the human mind perceives things. With the human arm analogy, Bergson notes that the mind only thinks of the end result. It is as if nothing happens from when the arm leaves point A and arrives at point B. Bergson, though, states “the body is changing form at every moment; or rather, there is no form, since form is immobile and the reality is movement. What is real is the continual change of form: form is only a snapshot view of a transition” (101). He finds reality to be fluid and continuous, and since our perception chops up this reality into different forms and re-presents it, our mind is essentially tricking us. Bergson’s main idea is his comparison of this way of perception to a cinematograph. Our mind works much the same way as a cinematograph, which for instance could take several pictures of soldiers in formation and then animate it to suggest or recreate the action of marching. “We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, and, as these are characteristic of reality, we have only to string them on a becoming…situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge, in order to imitate what there is that is characteristic in this becoming itself”(103). With that said, maybe Bergson isn’t criticizing the way the human mind perceives things – after all, how could this be helped? It simply is. Rather, perhaps Bergson is criticizing cinema/film.
3. Bergson also talks about the motion of an arrow, specifically the break down or “spatializing” of its path (the same diagram we saw in class). He says that you cannot break up the movements of the arrow mathematically, that it is one constant motion, never stopping. There is only a starting point, point A, and an ending point, point B. This is related to the idea of a human being progressing through life. Bergson notes that we imagine stops on the evolution of life – infancy, adolescence, maturity, old age. Like the arrow though, Bergson feels life travels along a path, never stopping along the way, but constantly changing: “The reality, which is the transition from childhood to manhood, has slipped between our fingers…[becoming] is the reality itself” (106). To see – for lack of a better word – correctly, Bergson says we must “escape from the cinematographical mechanism of thought” (106). Bergson believes that in life there are no distinguishable stops - or check points, in a sense - that can be applied from birth to death. Life is a constant state of transition. From this we could perhaps extract his own opinion about evolution itself: the human of today is not the end point of the evolution process, we are still in a state of transition/evolution (however slow and indiscernible it may be) and will undoubtedly look, act, and think different down the line.
Ethan Makhluf
Friday, February 2, 2007
River of Shadows - Christina Norbygaard
1. Solnit’s “River of Shadows” is a very detailed account of photography’s effect on time and space as well as the economy of the US at the time. In the first section of the reading, there is a great amount of discussion on the shrinking of space. In addition to talking about photography, she mentions how the railroad “shrunk” space for travellers and “transformed the experience” (53). This section focuses on the idea of relative time by describing how the human experience of time and space changed. Time became a measure of speed; how far you could go in a given time. Distances that people use to walk in days were now covered in hours, and with the advances in technology came the desire to move faster. Now that people were capable of higher speeds, more could be accomplished and time suddenly became more valuable. It is interesting to note how humans always strive for the fastest route; even today, when planning a flight across the US, the idea of having a lay over seems unnecessary. Why take the slow option when you are capable of something faster?
2. People also began to see the extent of time with the findings of geologists, which comes as a surprising side note in Solnit’s reading. Through dating of the Earth, geologists concluded that Earth was much older than the Bible depicted, although the exact dates were still unknown (53). So while the telegraph and railroads quickened the pace of human life, geology made the appearance of life even shorter. Now that they knew how long geological processes took, it made human existance seem so short and unimportant. The Bible on the other hand had made human life the center and importance of the Earth’s life, which is how people still think today. Rarely does anyone want to consider the slower processes, since we as humans simply cannot see it.
3. Another interesting idea that Solnit mentioned was the fact that the camera could now capture “what had always been present but never seen” (59). Cameras are capable of capturing a moment in time, but not an entire motion. This would seem like something new and “exotic” as Solnit describes it, allowing people to get a different view on the world. Muybridge’s sequence of photos also were able to capture a movement, not just a moment, making it seem like technology could out perform the human mind.
4. Overall, Solnit describes the advancements in science and film as progress, but her tone suggests that she is hesitant to let go of the human side to interpretating life at a different speed. Or perhaps, the things she states simply makes the reader realize what our minds have been subconsciously thinking. The way she describes how the railroad made the landscape become a blur had a dissappointed tone. With our new technology, are we forgetting to slow down and see the world for all that it is?
2. People also began to see the extent of time with the findings of geologists, which comes as a surprising side note in Solnit’s reading. Through dating of the Earth, geologists concluded that Earth was much older than the Bible depicted, although the exact dates were still unknown (53). So while the telegraph and railroads quickened the pace of human life, geology made the appearance of life even shorter. Now that they knew how long geological processes took, it made human existance seem so short and unimportant. The Bible on the other hand had made human life the center and importance of the Earth’s life, which is how people still think today. Rarely does anyone want to consider the slower processes, since we as humans simply cannot see it.
3. Another interesting idea that Solnit mentioned was the fact that the camera could now capture “what had always been present but never seen” (59). Cameras are capable of capturing a moment in time, but not an entire motion. This would seem like something new and “exotic” as Solnit describes it, allowing people to get a different view on the world. Muybridge’s sequence of photos also were able to capture a movement, not just a moment, making it seem like technology could out perform the human mind.
4. Overall, Solnit describes the advancements in science and film as progress, but her tone suggests that she is hesitant to let go of the human side to interpretating life at a different speed. Or perhaps, the things she states simply makes the reader realize what our minds have been subconsciously thinking. The way she describes how the railroad made the landscape become a blur had a dissappointed tone. With our new technology, are we forgetting to slow down and see the world for all that it is?
Thursday, February 1, 2007
River of Shadows - Anthony Castanos
River of Shadows
- In River of Shadows, Rebecca Solnit describes how “photography was faster than painting, but it could only portray the slow world or the still world . . . The bustling nineteenth century had to come to a halt for the camera, until Muybridge and his motion studies” (55). While Muybridge’s camera could catch an inconceivably small moment for its time, technology has and will continue to advance and cameras will continue to snap faster and faster. However, when time is broken down into Zeno’s theory of infinitesimal increments, it suggests that cameras will never stop advancing because they will never reach an infinitesimally small increment of time. Because reaching infinity is impossible, no camera could possibly epitomize Zeno’s divided stream of time. This is “the difference between the time that the camera sees and the eye sees,” in that the speed of the camera can always be improved to capture a smaller frame of time while the eye can see whatever increment of time it imagines (48). Eyes see what they want to see, while cameras see what they’re told to see. Cameras are restricted from capturing an infinitesimal moment in time because there is always something moving in the picture, no matter how small.
- The progress of the industrial revolution led to the idea that “if distance was measured in time, then the world had suddenly begun to shrink” (51). Solnit describes the annihilation of time and space as capitalist intentions to advance and make profit, and while the saying “time is money” is a common theme in the reading, the idea that “space is money” seems to be just as common (62). Once goods could be shipped across the continent in a week, the removal of past space barriers spurred more trade and more profits. So if getting a job done quicker means time equals money, then shouldn’t getting a job done with less distance make space equal money? Whether it’s something literal like selling land space or something more abstract like capturing a landscape and selling it on a 3 by 5 postcard, the idea of controlling space, in turn, makes money.
- The overall tone of Solnit’s “Time and Space” chapter, even while talking about the advancement of camera speed, still conveyed a dark, gloomy look at capitalism, technology, and the future. Her repetitive use of the term “annihilation” gave an almost apocalyptic view of the world as we know it. At first, the use of the term innocently described a figurative shrinking of the world to visually illustrate the industrial revolution, but then Solnit goes on to describe Marxist views of capitalism and the insatiable desire for better and better technology. But these technologies were literally a part of our being as a form of evolution, “the art of the hand had been replaced by the machinery of the camera; the travel of the foot, human or equine, had been replaced by the pistons of the locomotive; bodies themselves were becoming insulated from nature by machinery” (56). Suddenly people are becoming robots by literally becoming their own technological advancements. So then what’s left in evolution? Darth Vader? Sulnit closes the chapter with the thought that “the age of the computer is an increasing abstraction” (58). Acting as if a warning to the future, Sulnit describes the past of the industrial revolution to convey a foreshadowing of the future. Much like the development of trains and cameras annihilated time and space, computers continue this mechanical evolution until the next technological advancement.
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
The Present Reading Response by Cathy Hwang
1. In the beginning of The Present, Kern uses the example of the Titanic to introduce the “magical powers” of wireless technology. Even though it is ironic that the wreckage of the grandest invention built by man around the turn of the century glorified the advent of wireless age, Kern nonetheless succeeds in transitioning his discussion to wireless technology and its implications. He believes that this new tool can overcome the shortcomings of human senses: “what the eyes and ears of man could not perceive the wireless could receive over vast distance and through darkness and fog” (35). But more importantly, wireless transmissions bring people of remote distances together to share the tragic news of the Titanic. Kern seems to be fascinated with this aspect of expanded range of experience, or what he later calls the simultaneity of distant events, that is made possible by wireless technology. The awareness of the simultaneity is treated as universal by Kern when he said, “this rescue effort was particularly highlighted because so many were aware of the tragedy” (35). However, the perception of the present varies greatly among the people who are informed of the accident. Survivors watching the ship from life boats would surely have a different observation of the present than people who read about the incident from the newspaper. Even though both parties receive the simultaneity of the distant event, in this case the sinking of the boat, Kern’s treatment of these two perceptions as if they were equal is inadequate. Even among different sources of wireless means, the experience of the present would be distinct. A person who receives a telephone call regarding a death in the family would perceive the “present” very differently than radio listeners learning about the “present”. Differentiation among the perceptions of simultaneous distant events is an element that Kern fails to address throughout the passage.
2. In order to expand the concept of simultaneity, Kern presents many artistic expressions that utilize different techniques to achieve the simultaneous present. Films can further the sense of present by showing “several noncontiguous events” or “showing one event from a variety of perspectives.” Through the uses of double exposure, the montage balloon, and parallel editing, filmmakers are able to pioneer the expansion of the present: “cinema could appear to take the viewer from one place to another instantly and achieve the effect of his being ‘simultaneously here and there’” (37). Audiences are trained to adapt the continuity between lapsed sequences as simultaneously occurring events, in order to experience the tension and suspense of the climax that followed. Contrary to the direct attempts of representing simultaneity by film directors, poets are more subtle in this endeavor. Kern points out that, “past poets expressed the voices of a successive universe; the contemporary poet ought to express them all at once as they are perceived by senses and magnified by technology” (38). Verbal montages are ultimately used to achieve the same effect in film but to a lesser extent, as temporal and spatial simultaneity could be represented more readily through film than through words. Kern considers music as “the model for simultaneous art and poetry” (39). The sense of intensity and urgency can be achieved by having two or more voices “sing different words at the same time” (39). Kern elaborates on each artistic form: film, poetry, and music, in great detail to show that viewers, readers, and audiences can be trained to perceive simultaneity when events are only seemingly occurring concurrently. Even though Kern later on presents scientific argument to refute this representation of simultaneity, Kern seems to identify with the artistic interpretation of simultaneity through his extended analyses of these mediums.
3. In the last portion of the passage, Kern discusses the concept of simultaneity and thickened present. Although both terms have relevance to the perception of the present, Kern distinguishes the two by stating, “simultaneity was the more directly influenced by technology, because electronic communication made it possible for the first time to be in a sense in two places at once, while temporal thickening derived from a theory of experience that could have been articulated in any age’ (46). These two disparate views are then put into the same context through the discussion of cinema. Using different cinematic technique, simultaneity could be represented by “bringing together an unprecedented variety of visual images and arrange them coherently in a unified whole” (46); thickened present could be achieved by splicing during the editing process of the film. Kern concludes the paragraph without a clear implication of which concept is more relevant since the nascence of wireless transmissions; however, the last paragraph states, “the new technology changed the dimensions of experience so rapidly that the future seemed to rush toward the present” (46). The association of technology and simultaneity mentioned earlier in this context seems to imply human’s inquisitive nature of looking into the future, and looking at “present” elsewhere as the main motivator for technological advances. I wonder if Kern overlooked the human desire to seize the present that could also contribute to the science of time travel.
Walter Kern, The Present--Chloe Kloezeman
1. Walter Kern begins his argument by laying out the two school’s of thought on the ambiguous idea of the present by first writing about the heart-wrenching story of the Titanic, and then attempting to explain it with the experience of the present. Kern states, “the present is a sequence of single local events or multiple distant events, and whether the present is a slice of time between the past and future or of more extended duration” (36). It has been decided that the past is the past with little argument, but with left for interpretation is the idea of is there a real “future” or does the present continue to move with us along the spectrum of time. The future is something that is very illusive, but the present is constantly changing and moving forward on our shoulders, which is an uneasy declaration because the more simplistic view would be the idea of time on a continuum [past, present, future], a clear beginning, middle and end. We perceive the present as a series of local events because by the time one hears about the distant events, events that were present in that specific location, become past events in our mind because we were unable to experience them for ourselves. This concept is very difficult to grasp and one of the only questions that Kern raises that he does not give credit to another.
2. Kern quotes Henri-Martin Barzun’s poetry to further describe our present world as a “simultaneous reality” (38). Barzun’s quotation “aviation has transformed distant…multiplicity of modern life” is a complex synopsis of our world today. The ways in which we have defined the world in the past have changed as much as the world itself. No longer can song use its “monodic” character in an effort to encapsulate the true nature of our world’s tone. But rather, we must look at the world through a “polyphonic lends”. Things as drastic as airplanes and the Internet have brought our world together as one. This is a time where no one can stand-alone but yet everyone has been forced together to operate as a democratic society. Simply put, the innovations of the democracies in control have forced all the others to play its game their way.
3. Einstein argued that there could be “no such thing as a universe with moving parts” (80). Meaning that the present is a series of local events. That one can only define what is going on around them as the present, not events that are happening across the world. But the counterargument to this claim is that on the eve of the war, one historian was able to conclude that the present now had the capability of tying together events taking place around the globe, happening in simultaneous fashion. Previously, our society as a whole, was incapable of drawing these connections due to a lack of technology. As mentioned before, technology has created an “information highway” that no longer allows us to deal only with ourselves, but has forced us to consider what is happening “now” in the rest of the world. While Einstein’s idea made sense during a time when one could only encapsulate the events in its own arena, our world has made massive strides in connecting simultaneously.
Chloe Kloezeman
2. Kern quotes Henri-Martin Barzun’s poetry to further describe our present world as a “simultaneous reality” (38). Barzun’s quotation “aviation has transformed distant…multiplicity of modern life” is a complex synopsis of our world today. The ways in which we have defined the world in the past have changed as much as the world itself. No longer can song use its “monodic” character in an effort to encapsulate the true nature of our world’s tone. But rather, we must look at the world through a “polyphonic lends”. Things as drastic as airplanes and the Internet have brought our world together as one. This is a time where no one can stand-alone but yet everyone has been forced together to operate as a democratic society. Simply put, the innovations of the democracies in control have forced all the others to play its game their way.
3. Einstein argued that there could be “no such thing as a universe with moving parts” (80). Meaning that the present is a series of local events. That one can only define what is going on around them as the present, not events that are happening across the world. But the counterargument to this claim is that on the eve of the war, one historian was able to conclude that the present now had the capability of tying together events taking place around the globe, happening in simultaneous fashion. Previously, our society as a whole, was incapable of drawing these connections due to a lack of technology. As mentioned before, technology has created an “information highway” that no longer allows us to deal only with ourselves, but has forced us to consider what is happening “now” in the rest of the world. While Einstein’s idea made sense during a time when one could only encapsulate the events in its own arena, our world has made massive strides in connecting simultaneously.
Chloe Kloezeman
Friday, January 26, 2007
Walter Kern-Joanna Bennett
Kern first addresses time with two opposing ideas. Isaac Newton states that absolute time, “flows equally without relation to anything external” (21), whereas Immanuel Kant defines time as a subjective form of all experiences. It was not until the late nineteenth century that the homogeneity of time was even considered questionable. Many novelists, psychologists, physicists and sociologist brought about a debate over homogeneous versus heterogeneous time. Kafka uses his novel to address his personal feelings toward the conflict time produces when he says, “The inner one rushes on in a devilish or demonic way while the outer one goes, falteringly, its accustomed pace” (24). Taking a scientific approach, Einstein developed the special theory of relativity stating that time depends on the perspective of “relative motion between an observer and the thing observed” (25). Sociologists such as Durkheim believe time is dependent upon social agendas and groupings. They believe there is a social relativity of time that is affected by recurring events such as feasts and ceremonies. Turning to a psychiatrist’s opinion of time in relation to mental illnesses, Karl Jasper provides examples from two cases in which one patient experienced time as interminable, while another patient experienced a lifetime of inescapable anxiety due to her distorted sense of time.
Science, film and art all contribute to the argument for the atomistic nature of time. Newton’s calculus envisions time as a, “sum of infinitesimally small but discrete units” (26). In film, chronophotography is used to piece together pictures taken simultaneously to create a finished product of, for example, a horse galloping. Also photodynamist is used in film by leaving the lens open longer to capture the blurred vision of the in-between movements. Both these forms of film support time as having an atomistic nature. Many use art as an argument for atomistic time, saying that in art, “everything was fixed in a single moment” (27). Artists such as Paul Cezanne, Juan Gris and Salvador Dali painted obscured and sometimes defaced clocks to acknowledge their inability to depict an image over time. Opposing atomistic nature, the theory that time is flux is inspired by the theory that human consciousness is a stream. William James describing the mind as “pailfuls” of rain first suggested the theory in an essay. He argues that, “each mental event is linked with those before and after it” (28). Henri Bergson attempts to compare movement with time stating both are an indivisible flux. He believes atomism opposes time’s true nature saying, “we cannot consider movement as a sum of stoppages nor time as a sum of temporal atoms without distorting their essentially fluid nature” (29). Edouard Dujardin’s novel addresses temporal fluidity with a monologue displaying the, “mixture of thought and perception, and its unpredictable jumps in space and time” (30). The monologue depicts a moment of thought flowing from one subject to another free of breaks or pauses. This monologue exemplifies the reality of thoughts in time, showing the fluent nature these thoughts entail.
The forward movement of time, clocks and days tell us by instinct that time is irreversible. New technologies such as electric lights and cinemas sparked a dispute on the reversible nature of time. The ability to run film backwards was introduced by Louis Lumiere, and caused many to question their certainty about the irreversibility of time. Novelist such as James Joyce have experimented with time in their novels by using, for example, forty pages to describe a few seconds of thought. Psychologists and sociologists use dreams, psychoses and magic to argue for the reversibility of time, saying they neglect chronological relations. Freud relates his theories on the reversibility of time by arguing that, “unconscious mental processes are ‘timeless,’ for the passage of time does not change them in any way and the idea of time cannot be applied to them” (31). All arguments presented in Walter Kern’s debate over time are compelling and display strong opinions in regards to the controversy of time.
Kern concludes his work on time by distinguishing between the reality of private time as opposed to that of public time. He pronounces public time as human interrelated, and distinguishes this time by its homogeneity and irreversible nature. In opposition to public time, Kern describes private time as subject to solely the individual who is consumed by it.
Science, film and art all contribute to the argument for the atomistic nature of time. Newton’s calculus envisions time as a, “sum of infinitesimally small but discrete units” (26). In film, chronophotography is used to piece together pictures taken simultaneously to create a finished product of, for example, a horse galloping. Also photodynamist is used in film by leaving the lens open longer to capture the blurred vision of the in-between movements. Both these forms of film support time as having an atomistic nature. Many use art as an argument for atomistic time, saying that in art, “everything was fixed in a single moment” (27). Artists such as Paul Cezanne, Juan Gris and Salvador Dali painted obscured and sometimes defaced clocks to acknowledge their inability to depict an image over time. Opposing atomistic nature, the theory that time is flux is inspired by the theory that human consciousness is a stream. William James describing the mind as “pailfuls” of rain first suggested the theory in an essay. He argues that, “each mental event is linked with those before and after it” (28). Henri Bergson attempts to compare movement with time stating both are an indivisible flux. He believes atomism opposes time’s true nature saying, “we cannot consider movement as a sum of stoppages nor time as a sum of temporal atoms without distorting their essentially fluid nature” (29). Edouard Dujardin’s novel addresses temporal fluidity with a monologue displaying the, “mixture of thought and perception, and its unpredictable jumps in space and time” (30). The monologue depicts a moment of thought flowing from one subject to another free of breaks or pauses. This monologue exemplifies the reality of thoughts in time, showing the fluent nature these thoughts entail.
The forward movement of time, clocks and days tell us by instinct that time is irreversible. New technologies such as electric lights and cinemas sparked a dispute on the reversible nature of time. The ability to run film backwards was introduced by Louis Lumiere, and caused many to question their certainty about the irreversibility of time. Novelist such as James Joyce have experimented with time in their novels by using, for example, forty pages to describe a few seconds of thought. Psychologists and sociologists use dreams, psychoses and magic to argue for the reversibility of time, saying they neglect chronological relations. Freud relates his theories on the reversibility of time by arguing that, “unconscious mental processes are ‘timeless,’ for the passage of time does not change them in any way and the idea of time cannot be applied to them” (31). All arguments presented in Walter Kern’s debate over time are compelling and display strong opinions in regards to the controversy of time.
Kern concludes his work on time by distinguishing between the reality of private time as opposed to that of public time. He pronounces public time as human interrelated, and distinguishes this time by its homogeneity and irreversible nature. In opposition to public time, Kern describes private time as subject to solely the individual who is consumed by it.
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Reading Response Assignments
Reading Response Assignments
The due dates below mean posted on the blog by 5pm that day.
You only need to do a reading response once.
You will need to post comments to someone else’s reading response at least two different times over the semester. But, posting quality comments more than twice will give you extra points for participation.
Kern: Nature of Time
Joanna B. and Tessa B.
Date Discussed in Class: 1/29
Response Due by: 1/26
Kern: The Present
Chloe K. and Cathy H.
Date Discussed in Class: 1/ 31
Response Due by: 1/30
Solnit: River of Shadows
Date Discussed in Class: 2/5
Response Due by: 2/2
Braun: Marey, Art, and Modernism
Date Discussed in Class: 2/7
Response Due by: 2/6
Bergson: Creative Evolution
Date Discussed in Class: 2/12
Response Due by: 2/9
Bergson: Creative Evolution
Date Discussed in Class: 2/14
Response Due by: 2/13
Bragaglia: Futurist Photodynamism
Date Discussed in Class: 2/21
Response Due by: 2/19
Doanne: Emergence of Cinematic Time
Date Discussed in Class: 2/28
Response Due by: 2/26
Videos: Boomerang and Centers
Date Discussed in Class: 3/7
Response Due by: 3/6
Deleuze
Date Discussed in Class: 3/14
Response Due by: 3/13
Deleuze
Date Discussed in Class: 3/19
Response Due by: 3/16
Virilio: The Perspective of Real Time
Date Discussed in Class: 4/2
Response Due by: 3/30
Sobchack: Carnal Thoughts
Date Discussed in Class: 4/9
Response Due by: 4/6
TBA on Digital Media
Date Discussed in Class: 4/16
Response Due by: 4/13
TALKS, FILMS & EVENTS
You are required to attend the 4/22 dance performance on campus as well as TWO other events. One must be a film, the other can be a film or lecture. Post a response and evaluation for both the events you choose to attend. Please start a new post if you are the first to respond to an event. Then other people who also attended can post their responses as comments to the initial response. The responses should be similar to reading responses, describing the film a bit for those who did not see it but focusing on your ideas rather than on summarizing, doing some thinking about relationship of the event to themes in the course.
More events may be added to this list as they are announced. You may attend up to three extra events for extra credit (extra events 10pts each, required events 25 each except April 22 event counts double for 50).
I've put stars ** by the events I particularly recommend.
Websites for More info about locations, tickets, etc:
Yerba Buena http://www.ybca.org/
Berkeley Art, Technology, Culture Colloquium http://atc.berkeley.edu/
Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/
California College for the Arts http://www.cca.edu/calendar/
**Tuesday February 27 PFA
7:30 Pine Flat
Sharon Lockhart (U.S., 2005, 138 mins)
[guest icon] Sharon Lockhart in Person
The long static shot has been used to beautiful, often demanding, ends by filmmakers as diverse as the Lumière Brothers, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Andy Warhol, and James Benning. For Pine Flat, Sharon Lockhart, who is also a photographer, collaborated with a group of youths living in a small town in the Sierra foothills. As they worked together over three years, an intimacy developed, and the kids shared the places they valued and the rhythms of their everyday life. Slowly a film emerged: a girl reading alone, a boy asleep outside, some kids playing in the river, others traipsing among the trees are depicted in twelve ten-minute shots. While Pine Flat provides a portrait of rural life and landscape, the pregnant shots also contain the promise of narrative. Tender and endearing, the film gives the young people unusually extended time on the screen, and allows us to contemplate how we experience the passing of time.
Sunday, March 4 at 8:30pm
Film Art Phenomena: Works by Nicky Hamlyn, Nicky Hamlyn In Person.
701 Mission Street (corner of Third) Tickets: 415-978-ARTS
Composing his work “in camera,” the films of Nicky Hamlyn incorporate each shooting’s unique character, producing open-ended outcomes while questioning matter and perception. Quoting from his Film Art Phenomena (published 2003): “I see my films as arising out of an encounter between a situation or location or subject, and a camera/production strategy. I have been inspired partly by Robert Morris’ reading of Jackson Pollock’s paintings as resulting from the interactions of horizontal canvas, paint viscosity, stick, gravity, arm mechanics. Morris’ behavioristic take on Pollock redeems it from an expressionistic reading.” Screening: Minutiae, Hole, Not Resting, Pistrino, Water, Matrix, Penumbra, Object Studies, and Transit of Venus, which records two consecutive passes of Venus across the sun. (Caroline Savage)
**Monday March 12 7:30 Kaja Silverman (lecture)
Art Technology Culture Colloquium, on campus (see website for location)
Berkeley Rhetoric and Film professor Kaja Silverman delivers a lecture on the time-based art of James Coleman, particularly a digital video installation he made based on da Vinci’s painting The Last Supper.
Wednesday, March 14 at 8:30pm
Live Cinema Lab: viDEO savant, viDEO sAVant and Friends In Person
California College of the Arts: 1111 Eighth Street (near Sixteenth)
“What happens when you take cinema out of the movie theater, wrench the reel off the projector and start editing the images and sound live, in front of the audience? LIVE CINEMA!” (Holly Willis, New Digital Cinema: Reinventing the Moving Image) The mysterious multi-media ensemble viDEO sAVant has travelled the world presenting its own brand of live improvisational cinema since 1990. This will be their first Bay Area appearance. This dynamic performance will feature a synthesis of sound and moving images with elements produced and mixed on the spot in a process of live interaction between projectionist and musician, yielding fluid results, shifting and varied, never the same twice. Participants include Charles Woodman on images, Margaret Schedel on cello and electronics, and Yoni Wolf (of Anticon’s Why?) on vocals, samples and assorted sound makers. (Steve Polta)
Thursday March 15 PFA
7:30 L’avventura, Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy, 1960, 140 mins)
While exploring a volcanic island on a yachting expedition, a troubled young woman named Anna disappears, leaving her lover Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) and close friend Claudia (Monica Vitti) to search in vain, and fall in love. L’avventura unfolds against Anna’s very palpable absence, a love story in a void. As always, landscape is the screen onto which Antonioni projects human emotions. Anna’s pain is articulated in the parched suburb from which she came, and in the rocky island on which her cohorts wander, not realizing it is they who are lost. (Anna may have escaped.) Stunning love scenes prepare us for those in The Passenger fifteen years later: love as a standoff, a sizing-up as in a bullfight, played out-of-doors. L’avventura is rich in Antonioni’s visual architecture, wicked humor, and, finally, youth: a shot of Vitti, hair blowing in the wind while village bells answer one another, may be unmatched in these films for its spirit of hope.
Thursday March 22 PFA
7:30 The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Mamoru Hosoda (Japan, 2006)
(Toki wo kakeru shoujo). One of the most acclaimed anime features in recent years, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is the first animated adaptation of a famous 1965 young adult novel that has spawned countless films and television programs through the years. Makoto is a vivacious—if klutzy—seventeen-year-old tomboy whose carefree summer days are literally thrown for a loop when she discovers a mysterious ability to leap back through time. Her trivial temporal maneuvers, like undoing little blunders or finding out exam questions in advance, soon lead to complicated wrinkles that have an inevitable impact on those around her, especially when her best friend confesses his love for her. Hosoda is a remarkable new talent who, together with art director Nizou Yamamoto (Princess Mononoke) and character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto (Neon Genesis Evangelion), has crafted a magical, affecting film full of humor, warmth, and the bittersweet pangs of first love.
Tuesday, March 27
7pm CCA, SF Rebecca Solnit (author of the Muybridge reading)
Graduate Studies Lecture Series
Timken Lecture Hall, San Francisco campus Info: 415.703.9505
Rebecca Solnit is a writer, art critic, curator, political activist, and educator. She won wide acclaim for her 1994 book Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West.
Another work, Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism (2000), combines text by Solnit with photo essays by Susan Schwartzenberg and traces the devastation attending San Francisco's dot-com-fueled gentrification: skyrocketing residential and commercial rents that have driven out artists, activists, and the poor; the homogenization of the city's appearance, industries, and population; and the decay of public life and erasure of sites of civic memory. Solnit is also the author of River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (2003).
**Friday March 30 PFA
7:00 Blow-Up, Michelangelo Antonioni (U.K., 1966, 110 mins)
For his first English-language film, Antonioni set a metaphysical mystery in the world of fashion, at a time when the director’s metaphysics had itself become a fad; the movie and its meaning were the talk of the swingingest parties of 1966. Photographer David Hemmings snaps images of Vanessa Redgrave and an older man apparently trysting in a London park; later, analyzing the eyelines, scrutinizing the grain, he believes he sees evidence of murder, but finds that the harder you look, the less you know. The same interpretive limits apply to the viewing of Blow-Up: is this portrayal of youth culture, with its pot parties and Yardbirds shows, its rehearsed rebellion and limitless cool, affectionate—perhaps parodic—or a lament over the inscrutable emptiness of hip? Is it really about philosophical depths, or fascinating surfaces? Like its closing game of mime-tennis, the film may be daring us to focus on something that doesn’t exist. Keep your eye on the ball.—Juliet Clark
**Wednesday April 4
7:30 The Medium Is, works by Lynda Benglis, Peter Campus, Hermine Freed, Dan Graham, Richard Serra
With its instantaneous feedback and image manipulation, video technology creates a nowness of perception along with the distraction offered by any good spectacle. In Now, Lynda Benglis’s first color tape, the eponymous word is repeated, questioning the currency and the command. Then, over-driving the color image, Benglis collapses the notion of the medium as neutral. Wearing headphones in Richard Serra’s Boomerang, Nancy Holt repeats phrases that are heard, then heard again in delay. The effect is of feedback effectively devouring its own message. Using a split screen in Two Faces, Hermine Freed faces herself, caressing her mirrored image. Suspended between images, Freed exists as a doubled person, alienated and adrift. Recorded in San Francisco, Dan Graham’s Performer/Audience/Mirror is a study of mediated relations, a mirror standing in for the TV as the artist describes the audience before him. The circularity of the exchange captures the phenomenology of feedback. In Peter Campus’s seminal tape Three Transitions, inherent properties of the medium become potent metaphors for the depiction of internal states and the breach between reality and illusion.—Steve Seid
Now (Lynda Benglis, 1973, 12 mins, Color, Mini-DV, From VDB). Boomerang (Richard Serra, 1974, 10.5 mins, B&W, DVD, From The Museum of Modern Art, New York). Two Faces (Hermine Freed, 1972, 8 mins, B&W, Mini-DV, From VDB). Performer/Audience/Mirror (Dan Graham, 1975, 23 mins, B&W, DVD, From EAI). Three Transitions (Peter Campus, 1973, 5 mins, Color, Mini-DV, From EAI).
• (Total running time: 59 mins, U.S.)
Thursday April 5, Friday April 6 PFA (counts as one event)
Thurs April 5 7:30 Tropical Malady, Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand/France, 2004, 118 mins)
Fri April 6 7:00 Tropical Malady: Shot-by-Shot, Discussion with Apichatpong Weerasethakul
(Sud pralad). The agreeably irrational Tropical Malady melds folk fable with euphoric modern moviemaking, effortlessly traversing the mundane and the miraculous. In this pastoral with a dark pulse, two beguiling stories unfold: the first a playful romance between a handsome soldier, Keng, and Tong, a country boy; the second, a nocturnal journey into a realm of shape-shifting creatures. While Keng and Tong’s blissful courtship is told through moody, tender tableaux, the seeds of a lurking apprehension are being quietly sown—a dead body is found at the edge of the jungle, cows are found slaughtered in the fields. The villagers tell of a spirit that inhabits the body of a wandering tiger. As the second story emerges, Tropical Malady leaves behind the matter-of-fact for the mystical, a lush jungle peopled by talking monkeys and tricksters in human form. And who is that stalking the dread tiger? Is it soldier Keng? In this numinous tropic, we relish the malady of not necessarily knowing. Winner, Prix du Jury, Cannes 2004.
Friday April 13 PFA
8:50 The Passenger
Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy/France/Spain, 1975, 123 mins)
A penetrating political thriller, The Passenger, set in the Sahara, is also a desert film, and it resembles the much earlier L’avventura—a desert island film—with its horizontal vistas and its theme of absence. Jack Nicholson portrays a London journalist named Locke who, sent to cover a rebellion in North Africa, assumes the identity of a man, Robertson, who has died in the next hotel room. Locke is running away from being a journalist—from the codes that replace knowing, the images that replace seeing. He’s much like Monica Vitti’s Vittoria in L’eclisse in his desire for escape, for a mask. But, embracing Robertson’s globetrotting, increasingly mysterious persona, he finds himself pursuing not the man’s life, but his death. Even the camera seems to have a will toward another world: it distractedly tracks a passing camel in the desert, an anachronistic horse-drawn carriage in Munich. The film’s famous final seven-minute zoom literally draws out the pain of seeing in focus.
(REQUIRED) Sunday April 22, 2pm Zellerbach theater, Berkeley Dance Project
Directed by Lisa Wymore
Featuring The Reception, a cross-disciplinary performance piece utilizing dance choreography and tele-immersion technology to explore a re-visioning of cyber culture and corporeal presence. Also featuring new choreographic works by Tammy Cheney, Robert Moses, Carol Murota, and Ellis Wood. The Reception: Co-directed by Lisa Wymore (TDPS) and Ruzena Bajcsy (CITRIS). *The April 22 performance will be followed by a post-performance discussion: Being Here: Presence/Remote Presence within Live and Media Based Performance by N. Katherine Hayles.
The Resonance Project is a team of choreographers, dancers, computer engineers, and visual and sound artists who are investigating concepts of presence/remote presence and corporeal and code interactivity within live and media based performance. Unique to the project is the use of a "performance as research" model, within which scientists and artists collaborate to explore a re-visioning of cyber culture and corporeal presence.
You do not need to buy a ticket for this performance, meet in front of the theater before the show.
**Monday April 23 Doug Aitken 7:30
Art Technology Culture Colloquia, on campus (see website for location)
Internationally known Video and Digital artist Doug Aitken talks about his work
Wednesday May 2
3:00 Goodbye, Dragon Inn
Tsai Ming-liang (Taiwan, 2003, 82 mins)
Lecture by Marilyn Fabe
(Bu jian bu san). In Goodbye, Dragon Inn, Tsai Ming-liang, director of Vive l'Amour (1994) and What Time Is It There? (2001), created the sharpest combination yet of his major themes—rain, missed connections, and the poetry of loneliness—juxtaposed this time against something completely unexpected: a martial arts film. It's a rainy night in Taipei, and the crumbling neighborhood kino-barn is showing King Hu's swordplay classic Dragon Inn. Most of the audience appears to be elsewhere, offscreen dreamers haltingly putting their thoughts of love into very slow motion while the onscreen kinetic frenzies keep blazing on like helpful cues. Visualizing the fantasies of anyone who's ever worked in a movie theater, or just adored being in one, Goodbye, Dragon Inn underscores the essence of why people watch films: to be reminded of what it is to live, and what it means to dream.
More events may be added to this list as they are announced. You may attend up to three extra events for extra credit (extra events 10pts each, required events 25 each except April 22 event counts double for 50).
I've put stars ** by the events I particularly recommend.
Websites for More info about locations, tickets, etc:
Yerba Buena http://www.ybca.org/
Berkeley Art, Technology, Culture Colloquium http://atc.berkeley.edu/
Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/
California College for the Arts http://www.cca.edu/calendar/
**Tuesday February 27 PFA
7:30 Pine Flat
Sharon Lockhart (U.S., 2005, 138 mins)
[guest icon] Sharon Lockhart in Person
The long static shot has been used to beautiful, often demanding, ends by filmmakers as diverse as the Lumière Brothers, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Andy Warhol, and James Benning. For Pine Flat, Sharon Lockhart, who is also a photographer, collaborated with a group of youths living in a small town in the Sierra foothills. As they worked together over three years, an intimacy developed, and the kids shared the places they valued and the rhythms of their everyday life. Slowly a film emerged: a girl reading alone, a boy asleep outside, some kids playing in the river, others traipsing among the trees are depicted in twelve ten-minute shots. While Pine Flat provides a portrait of rural life and landscape, the pregnant shots also contain the promise of narrative. Tender and endearing, the film gives the young people unusually extended time on the screen, and allows us to contemplate how we experience the passing of time.
Sunday, March 4 at 8:30pm
Film Art Phenomena: Works by Nicky Hamlyn, Nicky Hamlyn In Person.
701 Mission Street (corner of Third) Tickets: 415-978-ARTS
Composing his work “in camera,” the films of Nicky Hamlyn incorporate each shooting’s unique character, producing open-ended outcomes while questioning matter and perception. Quoting from his Film Art Phenomena (published 2003): “I see my films as arising out of an encounter between a situation or location or subject, and a camera/production strategy. I have been inspired partly by Robert Morris’ reading of Jackson Pollock’s paintings as resulting from the interactions of horizontal canvas, paint viscosity, stick, gravity, arm mechanics. Morris’ behavioristic take on Pollock redeems it from an expressionistic reading.” Screening: Minutiae, Hole, Not Resting, Pistrino, Water, Matrix, Penumbra, Object Studies, and Transit of Venus, which records two consecutive passes of Venus across the sun. (Caroline Savage)
**Monday March 12 7:30 Kaja Silverman (lecture)
Art Technology Culture Colloquium, on campus (see website for location)
Berkeley Rhetoric and Film professor Kaja Silverman delivers a lecture on the time-based art of James Coleman, particularly a digital video installation he made based on da Vinci’s painting The Last Supper.
Wednesday, March 14 at 8:30pm
Live Cinema Lab: viDEO savant, viDEO sAVant and Friends In Person
California College of the Arts: 1111 Eighth Street (near Sixteenth)
“What happens when you take cinema out of the movie theater, wrench the reel off the projector and start editing the images and sound live, in front of the audience? LIVE CINEMA!” (Holly Willis, New Digital Cinema: Reinventing the Moving Image) The mysterious multi-media ensemble viDEO sAVant has travelled the world presenting its own brand of live improvisational cinema since 1990. This will be their first Bay Area appearance. This dynamic performance will feature a synthesis of sound and moving images with elements produced and mixed on the spot in a process of live interaction between projectionist and musician, yielding fluid results, shifting and varied, never the same twice. Participants include Charles Woodman on images, Margaret Schedel on cello and electronics, and Yoni Wolf (of Anticon’s Why?) on vocals, samples and assorted sound makers. (Steve Polta)
Thursday March 15 PFA
7:30 L’avventura, Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy, 1960, 140 mins)
While exploring a volcanic island on a yachting expedition, a troubled young woman named Anna disappears, leaving her lover Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) and close friend Claudia (Monica Vitti) to search in vain, and fall in love. L’avventura unfolds against Anna’s very palpable absence, a love story in a void. As always, landscape is the screen onto which Antonioni projects human emotions. Anna’s pain is articulated in the parched suburb from which she came, and in the rocky island on which her cohorts wander, not realizing it is they who are lost. (Anna may have escaped.) Stunning love scenes prepare us for those in The Passenger fifteen years later: love as a standoff, a sizing-up as in a bullfight, played out-of-doors. L’avventura is rich in Antonioni’s visual architecture, wicked humor, and, finally, youth: a shot of Vitti, hair blowing in the wind while village bells answer one another, may be unmatched in these films for its spirit of hope.
Thursday March 22 PFA
7:30 The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Mamoru Hosoda (Japan, 2006)
(Toki wo kakeru shoujo). One of the most acclaimed anime features in recent years, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is the first animated adaptation of a famous 1965 young adult novel that has spawned countless films and television programs through the years. Makoto is a vivacious—if klutzy—seventeen-year-old tomboy whose carefree summer days are literally thrown for a loop when she discovers a mysterious ability to leap back through time. Her trivial temporal maneuvers, like undoing little blunders or finding out exam questions in advance, soon lead to complicated wrinkles that have an inevitable impact on those around her, especially when her best friend confesses his love for her. Hosoda is a remarkable new talent who, together with art director Nizou Yamamoto (Princess Mononoke) and character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto (Neon Genesis Evangelion), has crafted a magical, affecting film full of humor, warmth, and the bittersweet pangs of first love.
Tuesday, March 27
7pm CCA, SF Rebecca Solnit (author of the Muybridge reading)
Graduate Studies Lecture Series
Timken Lecture Hall, San Francisco campus Info: 415.703.9505
Rebecca Solnit is a writer, art critic, curator, political activist, and educator. She won wide acclaim for her 1994 book Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West.
Another work, Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism (2000), combines text by Solnit with photo essays by Susan Schwartzenberg and traces the devastation attending San Francisco's dot-com-fueled gentrification: skyrocketing residential and commercial rents that have driven out artists, activists, and the poor; the homogenization of the city's appearance, industries, and population; and the decay of public life and erasure of sites of civic memory. Solnit is also the author of River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (2003).
**Friday March 30 PFA
7:00 Blow-Up, Michelangelo Antonioni (U.K., 1966, 110 mins)
For his first English-language film, Antonioni set a metaphysical mystery in the world of fashion, at a time when the director’s metaphysics had itself become a fad; the movie and its meaning were the talk of the swingingest parties of 1966. Photographer David Hemmings snaps images of Vanessa Redgrave and an older man apparently trysting in a London park; later, analyzing the eyelines, scrutinizing the grain, he believes he sees evidence of murder, but finds that the harder you look, the less you know. The same interpretive limits apply to the viewing of Blow-Up: is this portrayal of youth culture, with its pot parties and Yardbirds shows, its rehearsed rebellion and limitless cool, affectionate—perhaps parodic—or a lament over the inscrutable emptiness of hip? Is it really about philosophical depths, or fascinating surfaces? Like its closing game of mime-tennis, the film may be daring us to focus on something that doesn’t exist. Keep your eye on the ball.—Juliet Clark
**Wednesday April 4
7:30 The Medium Is, works by Lynda Benglis, Peter Campus, Hermine Freed, Dan Graham, Richard Serra
With its instantaneous feedback and image manipulation, video technology creates a nowness of perception along with the distraction offered by any good spectacle. In Now, Lynda Benglis’s first color tape, the eponymous word is repeated, questioning the currency and the command. Then, over-driving the color image, Benglis collapses the notion of the medium as neutral. Wearing headphones in Richard Serra’s Boomerang, Nancy Holt repeats phrases that are heard, then heard again in delay. The effect is of feedback effectively devouring its own message. Using a split screen in Two Faces, Hermine Freed faces herself, caressing her mirrored image. Suspended between images, Freed exists as a doubled person, alienated and adrift. Recorded in San Francisco, Dan Graham’s Performer/Audience/Mirror is a study of mediated relations, a mirror standing in for the TV as the artist describes the audience before him. The circularity of the exchange captures the phenomenology of feedback. In Peter Campus’s seminal tape Three Transitions, inherent properties of the medium become potent metaphors for the depiction of internal states and the breach between reality and illusion.—Steve Seid
Now (Lynda Benglis, 1973, 12 mins, Color, Mini-DV, From VDB). Boomerang (Richard Serra, 1974, 10.5 mins, B&W, DVD, From The Museum of Modern Art, New York). Two Faces (Hermine Freed, 1972, 8 mins, B&W, Mini-DV, From VDB). Performer/Audience/Mirror (Dan Graham, 1975, 23 mins, B&W, DVD, From EAI). Three Transitions (Peter Campus, 1973, 5 mins, Color, Mini-DV, From EAI).
• (Total running time: 59 mins, U.S.)
Thursday April 5, Friday April 6 PFA (counts as one event)
Thurs April 5 7:30 Tropical Malady, Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand/France, 2004, 118 mins)
Fri April 6 7:00 Tropical Malady: Shot-by-Shot, Discussion with Apichatpong Weerasethakul
(Sud pralad). The agreeably irrational Tropical Malady melds folk fable with euphoric modern moviemaking, effortlessly traversing the mundane and the miraculous. In this pastoral with a dark pulse, two beguiling stories unfold: the first a playful romance between a handsome soldier, Keng, and Tong, a country boy; the second, a nocturnal journey into a realm of shape-shifting creatures. While Keng and Tong’s blissful courtship is told through moody, tender tableaux, the seeds of a lurking apprehension are being quietly sown—a dead body is found at the edge of the jungle, cows are found slaughtered in the fields. The villagers tell of a spirit that inhabits the body of a wandering tiger. As the second story emerges, Tropical Malady leaves behind the matter-of-fact for the mystical, a lush jungle peopled by talking monkeys and tricksters in human form. And who is that stalking the dread tiger? Is it soldier Keng? In this numinous tropic, we relish the malady of not necessarily knowing. Winner, Prix du Jury, Cannes 2004.
Friday April 13 PFA
8:50 The Passenger
Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy/France/Spain, 1975, 123 mins)
A penetrating political thriller, The Passenger, set in the Sahara, is also a desert film, and it resembles the much earlier L’avventura—a desert island film—with its horizontal vistas and its theme of absence. Jack Nicholson portrays a London journalist named Locke who, sent to cover a rebellion in North Africa, assumes the identity of a man, Robertson, who has died in the next hotel room. Locke is running away from being a journalist—from the codes that replace knowing, the images that replace seeing. He’s much like Monica Vitti’s Vittoria in L’eclisse in his desire for escape, for a mask. But, embracing Robertson’s globetrotting, increasingly mysterious persona, he finds himself pursuing not the man’s life, but his death. Even the camera seems to have a will toward another world: it distractedly tracks a passing camel in the desert, an anachronistic horse-drawn carriage in Munich. The film’s famous final seven-minute zoom literally draws out the pain of seeing in focus.
(REQUIRED) Sunday April 22, 2pm Zellerbach theater, Berkeley Dance Project
Directed by Lisa Wymore
Featuring The Reception, a cross-disciplinary performance piece utilizing dance choreography and tele-immersion technology to explore a re-visioning of cyber culture and corporeal presence. Also featuring new choreographic works by Tammy Cheney, Robert Moses, Carol Murota, and Ellis Wood. The Reception: Co-directed by Lisa Wymore (TDPS) and Ruzena Bajcsy (CITRIS). *The April 22 performance will be followed by a post-performance discussion: Being Here: Presence/Remote Presence within Live and Media Based Performance by N. Katherine Hayles.
The Resonance Project is a team of choreographers, dancers, computer engineers, and visual and sound artists who are investigating concepts of presence/remote presence and corporeal and code interactivity within live and media based performance. Unique to the project is the use of a "performance as research" model, within which scientists and artists collaborate to explore a re-visioning of cyber culture and corporeal presence.
You do not need to buy a ticket for this performance, meet in front of the theater before the show.
**Monday April 23 Doug Aitken 7:30
Art Technology Culture Colloquia, on campus (see website for location)
Internationally known Video and Digital artist Doug Aitken talks about his work
Wednesday May 2
3:00 Goodbye, Dragon Inn
Tsai Ming-liang (Taiwan, 2003, 82 mins)
Lecture by Marilyn Fabe
(Bu jian bu san). In Goodbye, Dragon Inn, Tsai Ming-liang, director of Vive l'Amour (1994) and What Time Is It There? (2001), created the sharpest combination yet of his major themes—rain, missed connections, and the poetry of loneliness—juxtaposed this time against something completely unexpected: a martial arts film. It's a rainy night in Taipei, and the crumbling neighborhood kino-barn is showing King Hu's swordplay classic Dragon Inn. Most of the audience appears to be elsewhere, offscreen dreamers haltingly putting their thoughts of love into very slow motion while the onscreen kinetic frenzies keep blazing on like helpful cues. Visualizing the fantasies of anyone who's ever worked in a movie theater, or just adored being in one, Goodbye, Dragon Inn underscores the essence of why people watch films: to be reminded of what it is to live, and what it means to dream.
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
(Sample) Reading Response for Lessing, Laocoon
from Course Policies handout:
"You will be required, one time over the course, to post a reading response to the blog. This should consist of three or four numbered paragraphs which each reference a specific passage in the text and focus on that passage in order to make an argument or offer an insightful interpretation. You will also be required, at least twice, to respond to other students’ posts on the blog. Append your comments to their reading response; refer to the numbered paragraph you are commenting on and the relevant passage in the text; go back to the text yourself and offer an elaboration or counterargument. Your comments should not be as much about ‘liking’ or ‘disliking’ the student’s response but either lending further support for their argument or offering an alternative reading of the same material. Always sign your full name to your blog posts since your login may not be recognizable."
Each numbered paragraph of your reading response should offer an interpretation of or argument about something specific in the text. You do not need to summarize the reading or cover all the reading in your response. Your responses should be about your own ideas rather than outlining the material.
(Sample) Reading Response by Brooke Belisle
on Lessing, selections from Laocoon (p.3 in reader)
1. Lessing differentiates poetry and painting based on an assumption that each medium is best at representing whatever corresponds to its specific mode of presentation. Since poems are constituted by “sounds in time” and paintings are constituted by figures in space, Lessing claims that “succession in time is the province of the poet, co-existence in space that of the artist.” (3) As his argument develops, however, he seems to describe a kind of “succession in time” that belongs to painting. In the section labeled “2”, he claims that when we perceive an object in space, “first we observe its separate parts, then the union of these parts, and finally the whole.” (3) If painting presents objects in space, then this argument introduces a kind of time into painting: ‘wholes’ are not instantaneously perceived but built-up from a process of perceiving parts and relationships between parts. In the first paragraph of section 2 he refers to “parts” but in the second paragraph he switches to the word “details” as if it is interchangeable with “parts.” If details are also considered “parts” then even the most simple, singular, or undifferentiated object—one which seemed not to have ‘parts’—would be multiple just in the sense of having details. I wonder if the way the whole painting works as a ‘pregnant moment’ could also be a way of thinking about how each detail in a painting works like a mini pregnant-moment, offering potential connections with everything else in the painting.
(I only wrote one numbered paragraph, but you will need to write three or four--though they don't have to be quite as long as mine. The Lessing reading was only one page (page 3), but for other readings you need to include page numbers. To avoid confusion, refer to the page number in the READER rather than the page of the photocopied text.)
"You will be required, one time over the course, to post a reading response to the blog. This should consist of three or four numbered paragraphs which each reference a specific passage in the text and focus on that passage in order to make an argument or offer an insightful interpretation. You will also be required, at least twice, to respond to other students’ posts on the blog. Append your comments to their reading response; refer to the numbered paragraph you are commenting on and the relevant passage in the text; go back to the text yourself and offer an elaboration or counterargument. Your comments should not be as much about ‘liking’ or ‘disliking’ the student’s response but either lending further support for their argument or offering an alternative reading of the same material. Always sign your full name to your blog posts since your login may not be recognizable."
Each numbered paragraph of your reading response should offer an interpretation of or argument about something specific in the text. You do not need to summarize the reading or cover all the reading in your response. Your responses should be about your own ideas rather than outlining the material.
(Sample) Reading Response by Brooke Belisle
on Lessing, selections from Laocoon (p.3 in reader)
1. Lessing differentiates poetry and painting based on an assumption that each medium is best at representing whatever corresponds to its specific mode of presentation. Since poems are constituted by “sounds in time” and paintings are constituted by figures in space, Lessing claims that “succession in time is the province of the poet, co-existence in space that of the artist.” (3) As his argument develops, however, he seems to describe a kind of “succession in time” that belongs to painting. In the section labeled “2”, he claims that when we perceive an object in space, “first we observe its separate parts, then the union of these parts, and finally the whole.” (3) If painting presents objects in space, then this argument introduces a kind of time into painting: ‘wholes’ are not instantaneously perceived but built-up from a process of perceiving parts and relationships between parts. In the first paragraph of section 2 he refers to “parts” but in the second paragraph he switches to the word “details” as if it is interchangeable with “parts.” If details are also considered “parts” then even the most simple, singular, or undifferentiated object—one which seemed not to have ‘parts’—would be multiple just in the sense of having details. I wonder if the way the whole painting works as a ‘pregnant moment’ could also be a way of thinking about how each detail in a painting works like a mini pregnant-moment, offering potential connections with everything else in the painting.
(I only wrote one numbered paragraph, but you will need to write three or four--though they don't have to be quite as long as mine. The Lessing reading was only one page (page 3), but for other readings you need to include page numbers. To avoid confusion, refer to the page number in the READER rather than the page of the photocopied text.)
Monday, January 22, 2007
Assignment for 1/24: Analysis of description
Assignment Due in Class (in hard copy, printed) Wed 1/24:
Analysis of Description
In the Stella responses blog entry (see list on the left of all entries), find the blog comment posted below your own and paste this paragraph description of Battle of Lights along with the author’s name, at the top of a document. Below, write your own paragraph or two (at least 8 sentences) about the description. In the top right corner of the page be sure to put your own name.
Don’t argue about how ‘good’ or effective the description is, analyze exactly how it works. Point out specific details in the description and show how they create specific kinds of effects or produce meaning in specific ways. For example, if you noticed your author used the words “blending” and “oozing” you might point out some of the implications or effects of those words:
The author describes the colors as “blending” and “oozing,” suggesting that the colors intersect in fluid ways rather than defining clear boundaries. The gerund form of these verbs imagines the paint as still moving on the canvas, as if the paint is still wet and the painting is still in-process.
Remember you are writing about the description not about the painting, so, maybe you notice the author says “I noticed tons of lines.” You could point out the use of the first person, the fact that it is in the past tense, the unusual pairing of “tons” and “lines” (a ton is a unit of weight; so is he suggesting that the lines in the painting look heavy or is this a translation of number into weight, an exaggeration used to express being overwhelmed?). You might notice the author writes that “shadows are cast by a building” and notice that instead of describing how black paint angles from a rectangular patch of white paint, taking up the perspective of someone looking at a painting, the author imagines the paint as what it may represent, taking up a perspective that is projected into the ‘world’ the painting seems to represent.
Below are some things to think about as you read and begin to think about the paragraph you are analyzing. Don’t answer these questions directly, like a list, in your response. Use them to help you pick up on details, but then structure your analysis around what you discover. You might choose to move through the description following the order of its sentences. Or you might choose to group certain patterns you notice. Or, you might start with surface observations that you then develop into insightful interpretations. Don’t judge the description or suggest what the author could have done better; don’t talk about how their words affect you personally as a reader or how their experience of the painting compares to your experience or description—write impersonally and analytically.
++++++What words stand out in this description? What patterns of language do you notice, and how do these patterns correspond with what they describe? Does the author make judgments or offer interpretations, or does she simply describe? Where might you find implicit judgments and interpretations in what looks like pure description? How does the author convey his point of view (not in the sense of opinion, but in the literary sense) and what effect does this create? Pay attention to the verbs in every sentence. Who or what ‘acts’ in the description; does the author describe her own actions, the actions of the artist, the ‘actions’ of the artwork? Is the action literal or figural; if it is figural what might it actually correspond to or attempt to express? Where are passive constructions used and why; what ‘actors’ are being obscured or avoided? What is the tense or temporality of the action? How does time work in the description: what is described as in the past and what is described as in the present? Does the author describe the experience of the painting as if it is happening right then, at the time of the description—or does he describe the experience as if he is reflecting back on it? Do you as a reader have the sense of being shown or made to share the author’s experience, as if you were looking at what she looks at in the order she looks at things—does this bring you as a reader into the imagined ‘present’ moment of the description? Do you have the sense that the author is sharing his reflections about a past experience, allowing you to participate or share in the moment of his description as you read and consider it in your own moment of reflection? Where are there shifts in time and why do you think they happen; what effects do these shifts have?
Analysis of Description
In the Stella responses blog entry (see list on the left of all entries), find the blog comment posted below your own and paste this paragraph description of Battle of Lights along with the author’s name, at the top of a document. Below, write your own paragraph or two (at least 8 sentences) about the description. In the top right corner of the page be sure to put your own name.
Don’t argue about how ‘good’ or effective the description is, analyze exactly how it works. Point out specific details in the description and show how they create specific kinds of effects or produce meaning in specific ways. For example, if you noticed your author used the words “blending” and “oozing” you might point out some of the implications or effects of those words:
The author describes the colors as “blending” and “oozing,” suggesting that the colors intersect in fluid ways rather than defining clear boundaries. The gerund form of these verbs imagines the paint as still moving on the canvas, as if the paint is still wet and the painting is still in-process.
Remember you are writing about the description not about the painting, so, maybe you notice the author says “I noticed tons of lines.” You could point out the use of the first person, the fact that it is in the past tense, the unusual pairing of “tons” and “lines” (a ton is a unit of weight; so is he suggesting that the lines in the painting look heavy or is this a translation of number into weight, an exaggeration used to express being overwhelmed?). You might notice the author writes that “shadows are cast by a building” and notice that instead of describing how black paint angles from a rectangular patch of white paint, taking up the perspective of someone looking at a painting, the author imagines the paint as what it may represent, taking up a perspective that is projected into the ‘world’ the painting seems to represent.
Below are some things to think about as you read and begin to think about the paragraph you are analyzing. Don’t answer these questions directly, like a list, in your response. Use them to help you pick up on details, but then structure your analysis around what you discover. You might choose to move through the description following the order of its sentences. Or you might choose to group certain patterns you notice. Or, you might start with surface observations that you then develop into insightful interpretations. Don’t judge the description or suggest what the author could have done better; don’t talk about how their words affect you personally as a reader or how their experience of the painting compares to your experience or description—write impersonally and analytically.
++++++What words stand out in this description? What patterns of language do you notice, and how do these patterns correspond with what they describe? Does the author make judgments or offer interpretations, or does she simply describe? Where might you find implicit judgments and interpretations in what looks like pure description? How does the author convey his point of view (not in the sense of opinion, but in the literary sense) and what effect does this create? Pay attention to the verbs in every sentence. Who or what ‘acts’ in the description; does the author describe her own actions, the actions of the artist, the ‘actions’ of the artwork? Is the action literal or figural; if it is figural what might it actually correspond to or attempt to express? Where are passive constructions used and why; what ‘actors’ are being obscured or avoided? What is the tense or temporality of the action? How does time work in the description: what is described as in the past and what is described as in the present? Does the author describe the experience of the painting as if it is happening right then, at the time of the description—or does he describe the experience as if he is reflecting back on it? Do you as a reader have the sense of being shown or made to share the author’s experience, as if you were looking at what she looks at in the order she looks at things—does this bring you as a reader into the imagined ‘present’ moment of the description? Do you have the sense that the author is sharing his reflections about a past experience, allowing you to participate or share in the moment of his description as you read and consider it in your own moment of reflection? Where are there shifts in time and why do you think they happen; what effects do these shifts have?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
