RHIZOME DIGEST: 9.20.02

discussion

Posted Sept. 19 2002 20:00

RHIZOME DIGEST: 9.20.02

RHIZOME DIGEST: September 20, 2002 Content: +editor's note+ 1. Rachel Greene: This week +opportunity+ 2. Pamela Jennings: Carnegie Mellon University Electronic Time Based Art openings +announcement+ 3. Honor: BORDER CROSSINGS: an invitation to an event in London +work+ 4. Thomson & Craighead: dot-store opens +review+ 5. McKenzie Wark: Review – Geert Lovink, Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture +thread+ 6. Marc Lafia and James Buckhouse: Re: In Search of a Poetics of the Spatialization of the Moving Image, 3 + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 1. Date: 9.20.02 From: Rachel Greene rachel@rhizome.org) Subject: This week… Rhizome Raw is busy with a discussion about relaunching Rhizome Rare, and that thread will appear in next week's Digest. This week please find a review of Geert Lovink's new book 'Dark Fiber' by McKenzie Wark, and posts from an ongoing conversation about the spatialization of images between Lev Manovich, Marc Lafia, and James Buckhouse. (Older posts from this thread are available in Rhizome.org's text archive.) In other news, this week Rhizome HQ launched our annual Community Campaign. So if you appreciate the wares of Digest, Raw, or other Rhizome programs, we ask you to make a contribution at any level you can. Even small donations make a difference, and we recognize all donors for their support: $10 = an email address @rhizome.org; $25 = a Yael Kanarek mousepad; $50 = a Rhizome.org T-shirt, and $250 = a Rhizome.org laptop backpack. We gratefully accept secure online credit card contributions or donations via PayPal at <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/support/?dig9_20">http://rhizome.org/support/?dig9_20</a> . You can also send a check or money order to Rhizome.org, 115 Mercer Street, New York NY 10012. Money orders can be in any currency. Help Rhizome be self-supporting! + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 2. Date: 9.17.02 From: Pamela Jennings (pamelaj@cs.cmu.edu) Subject: Carnegie Mellon University Electronic Time Based Art openings Tenure-Track and/or Visiting Faculty Positions - Electronic Time Based Art Beginning August 2003 Carnegie Mellon University School of Art The School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University is seeking to fill two full-time faculty positions: one tenure track position and one visiting position or two visiting positions in its Electronic Time Based Art area. We are seeking dynamic individuals working in technology-based art with experience in one or more of the following areas: robotics, programming for Internet based interactive and/or virtual environments, interactive audio, performance, motion capture and real time graphics and/or 2D imaging, computer vision, artificial life or biotechnology. Artists with a significant track record in digital/electronic forms who are qualified for joint appointments between electronic art and computer sciences, natural sciences or engineering will also be considered. Visiting faculty with expertise in electronic media and additional experience in other visual media are also encouraged. A multidisciplinary orientation, conceptual strengths and contextual sensibilities are sought to teach freshman through graduate students and work with a dynamic faculty team to build the electronic time based area in the School of Art. Qualifications: Advanced Degree or equivalent. University level teaching experience required beyond teaching assistant. A versatile artist with a significant digital/electronic, time based media art background and exhibition record. Affirmative Action, Equal Opportunity Employer, women and minorities encouraged to apply. Appointment Levels: Visiting Assistant Professor or tenure-track Assistant/Associate Professor. Positions beginning late August, 2003. Salary & Benefits: Nationally competitive and commensurate with experience. Additional Programmatic Information: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.art.cfa.cmu.edu">http://www.art.cfa.cmu.edu</a> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +ad+ Limited-time offer! Subscribe to Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA), the leading electronic newsletter in its field, for $35 for 2002 and receive as a bonus free electronic access to the on-line versions of Leonardo and the Leonardo Music Journal. Subscribe now at: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/INFORMATION/subscribe.html">http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/INFORMATION/subscribe.html</a>. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 3. Date: 9.17.02 From: Honor (honor@va.com.au) Subject: BORDER CROSSINGS: an invitation to an event in London Hi Rhizome, For those of you based within the UK, or within travelling distance to London, I wanted to warmly invite you to an evening seminar we are staging at Tate Modern called Border Crossings. The event features input from Heath Bunting, Armin Medosch and Florian Schneider. I'd be absolutely delighted if you could come, as would I'm sure, the participants of the event. If you're interested, drop me a line :-) Greetings Honor Harger Webcasting Curator Interpretation & Education, Tate Modern Digital Programmes, Tate honor.harger@tate.org.uk <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/audiovideo/">http://www.tate.org.uk/audiovideo/</a> PH: (44) 020 7401 5066 FIRST ANNOUNCEMENT BORDER CROSSINGS A seminar / discussion at Tate Modern, London, UK TIMES AND DATES Tuesday 1 October, 1830 - 2000 International Times for the webcast: 1730 - 1900 [ GMT ] 1930 - 2100 [ Central European Time ] 1330 - 1500 [ US Eastern Time ] 2300 - 0100 [ Indian Time ] 0330 - 0500 [ Australian Eastern Time - 2 October ] 0530 - 0700 [ New Zealand Time - 2 October ] LOCATION Starr Auditorium, Level 2, Tate Modern, London, UK ABOUT THE EVENT Europe's borders are increasingly frontlines of political and social dissent. Asylum-seeking and political migration are some of the most significant issues of our time. This discussion will explore the contentious role of borders in Europe and beyond, and the way artists are contesting these geographical and cultural perimeters. Artist, Heath Bunting talks about his project, borderXings Guide, which consists of 'walks' that traverse national boundaries without interruption from customs, immigration, or border police. The project is currently on display on Tate's website (<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/netart/">http://www.tate.org.uk/netart/</a>) German critic and activist, Florian Schneider will discuss the disruption of European borders through civil disobedience campaigns such as Cross the Border and No One is Illegal. Writer and critic Armin Medosch will chair the discussion. Tickets UK£6 (UK£3 concessions) WEBCAST This event will be presented live on the Tate website, as part of Tate?s Webcasting Programme. You can experience the event live online in audio and video using the Real Player. To find out more, visit: (<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/audiovideo/">http://www.tate.org.uk/audiovideo/</a>). If you haven't experienced Tate Modern's webcasts before, please visit our technical help page: (<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/audiovideo/help.htm">http://www.tate.org.uk/audiovideo/help.htm</a>). MORE INFORMATION For more on this event, see: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/programmes/events.htm">http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/programmes/events.htm</a> or contact: Honor Harger, Webcasting Curator, Interpretation & Education, Tate Modern Email: honor.harger@tate.org.uk PH: (44) 020 7401 5066 For more information about Tate or getting tickets for the event: Tate Box Office Email: tate.ticketing@tate.org.uk PH: (44) 020 7887 8888 URL: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.tate.org.uk">http://www.tate.org.uk</a> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +ad+ **MUTE MAGAZINE NO. 24 OUT NOW** 'Knocking Holes in Fortress Europe', Florian Schneider on no-border activism in the EU; Brian Holmes on resistance to networked individualism; Alvaro de los Angeles on e-Valencia.org and Andrew Goffey on the politics of immunology. More @ <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.metamute.com/">http://www.metamute.com/</a> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 4. Date: 9.19.02 From: Thomson & Craighead (j.thomson@ucl.ac.uk) Subject: dot-store opens <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.dot-store.com/">http://www.dot-store.com/</a> dot-store.com is now trading. shop@dot-store.com A worldwide web of vintage products and services. e-shop as Readymade. A dotcom when most others have dotgone. c u there, best wishes, Jon & Alison _________________________________________________ Thomson & Craighead / www.thomson-craighead.net dot-store.com is now trading / shop@dot-store.com …………………………………………. Currently: Gameon @Barbican, London & Touring Coming Up: templatecinema.com / REMOTE, Scotland / Mobile Phonics, Belgium / Mobile Home, London / dot-store @ ICA, London / BitParts, Shrewsbury.. _________________________________________________ On 21st October 2002 at 7pm, we will be making a presentation on our work at RCA, London. Part of "Writ Large" in association with The Independant + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 5. Date: 9.18.02 From: McKenzie Wark (mw35@nyu.edu) Subject: Review – Geert Lovink, Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture Geert Lovink, Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture, MIT Press, Cambridge Mass, 2002 ISBN 0-262-12249-9  US $27.95 Reviewed by McKenzie Wark The book is becoming a residual art-form. Like carving in stone, it is a way of presenting information for ritual occasions that might more easily be conveyed in other ways. In his new book Dark Fiber, Geert Lovink is well aware of the anachronistic quality of a book about net culture. "Scholars are stuck between print and online forms of knowledge hierarchies", he writes. But while official book culture is in media limbo, the freelance intellectual has the liberty to approach the problem more artfully. Lovink uses this book-based mix of his online writings as a way to get "text crystals" to move differently. The internet is good for getting words across space, but nobody knows how it will work out as an archive. The book is the empire of time. Too many books of net journalism grow obsolete even before they are printed. Unlike the more feverish apostles of the virtual, Lovink comes to print at a more reflective moment. "Cyberspace at the dawn of the 21st century can no longer position itself in a utopian void of seamless possibilities." While Dark Fiber is very much of its time, it will be a valuable resource, many years into the future, for understanding that weird time between cyberspace utopia, dot.com mania and the pale triumph of media business as usual. Lovink has a unique trajectory in the net criticism world, as he is equally fluent across the heavy scholarship of German media theory, the ludic pragmatism of Dutch media activism, and has taken the time to figure out how to translate those worlds into English. His approach draws on the work of Friedrich Kittler and others, who dissented from critical theory's reduction of media to the social, cultural or economic domains. Media is above all a technical medium, in their view. Lovink lightens the scholastic-bombastic German approach with the stylistic flair of his maverick predecessor, Vilem Flusser. In moving into the English language, Lovink draws on the pragmatism of philosopher Richard Rorty, particularly his book 'Philosophy and Social Hope'. Lovink espouses a "radical pragmatism", somewhere between the desire for utopia, the will to negation, and the practicalities of carving out spaces for creation. He identifies the problem of synthesizing tactical media with strategic theory, a union that is "easier said than done." Lovink's pragmatism is an attempt to break new ground, at some remove from the three bodies of thought that elsewhere inflect and infect net criticism. In Lovink's view, Parisian high theory is in decline: "If the Gulf War did not take place, then Jean Baudrillard no longer exists either." Marxism has lost the plot of its revolutionary subject: "With one eye on streaming financial data, another on the Financial Times at the breakfast table, Negative Marxism without Subject has reached its highest stages of alienation." The intellectual poverty of American cyberutopian effusions is all too obvious: "The consensus myth of an egalitarian, chaotic system, ruled by self-governing users with the help of artificial life and friendly bots, is now crushed by the take-over of telecom giants, venture capital and banks and the sharp rise in regulatory efforts by governments." When writing in Dutch or German, Lovink and his fellow theorists in the Adilkno collective favored a strategy of theory as rhetorical overkill. The group's pet topics included the colors of boredom, electronic solitude, collective forms of disappointment. They were the Sam Becketts of theory, acting out the ritual of its impossibility, but persisting with the effort, nonetheless. Adilkno's problem was finding a way to write within a spectacle that no longer aroused any cultural friction. "This is the unbearable lightness of the exploding media universe: more channels, less content, less impact." They settled for "Negative dialectics 2.0 used as a tool for anti-cyclic thought." In their book 'Media Archive,' they exploited the rhetorical possibilities of turning media theory against itself with a cool hand. 'Dark Fiber' is a very different book to 'Media Archive,' and partly the difference is attempting to come to grips with the possibilities of English, both as a language and a cultural tradition, and one with a more powerful grip on the invisible spatial empires of the net. Hence, pragmatism: "A net pragmatism requires vigilant efforts to articulate the net with materiality." This approach is less optimistic for what theory can achieve, but more optimistic about what it has acheived – the ability to make more or less good descriptions of the world. And so much of 'Dark Fiber' is taken up with dispatches from attempts all over the world to bring together artists, theorists and activists with the technicalities of creating networks. "Cyberspace is still a work in progress", Lovink writes, and he details many of the setbacks as well as the much fabled successes in building an open net culture. Central to Lovink's trajectory is the recognition that you can't get new thinking out of old institutions. New media practices require the integration of new thinking in [into] new kinds of organization. "Today's challenge lies in orchestrating radical intercultural exchanges, not in closed monocultures." He has always taken his distance from opportunist academic programs in 'new media studies' as much as from speculative business models. One of the real treats of 'Dark Fiber' is the case studies. The Digital City project in Amsterdam gets a preliminary assessment here, as does Berlin's Internationale Stadt, Public Netbase in Vienna and Ada'web in New York. It's curious how the same problems keep coming up. Not many attempts at building alternative networks ever really embraced a participatory democracy that included its users. With roots in artist's collaborations or activist projects, the problem is often a lack of formal structure, which could lead all too easily to a management takeover or privatization. There's a lot still to be written about the experiments of the 80s and 90s in alterative networked economies, polities and cultures. There's a taste here of European experiments to set alongside experiments more familiar in the US such as The Well and Lambdamoo. 'Dark Fiber' also includes travel reports from Taiwan, India and Albania, and an account of Serbia's B92 radio, giving the book a wonderfully cosmopolitan range. Lovink is aware that whether one comes from theory, art, or activism, what counts is the ability to combine attributes of all three. From the politics comes the art of compromise, of addressing different people directly about things that affect them, and working with people within an autonomy that respects differences without fetishizing them. From the art comes the politics of how languages work, of how to seed awareness of communication, and to do it in appropriate forms. From the theory comes both the art and politics of relating the conjunctures of the moment to history, the point of contact between the particular and the abstract. By examining this problem from different points on the globe, Lovink provides test cases for any theory, any practice, with pretensions to an ability to be generalized. For example, in the Balkans, 'tactical media' has to come to grips with the limitations of working in a local way during wartime. Locality is no longer a virtue when it means you can be shut down and cut off from your audience. By looking at places like Taiwan, where computer hardware is manufactured, or India, where programming and service support are becoming proletarian industries, one gets a reality check on global cyberspace fantasies, be they from left or right. What Lovink invents here is a practice of negotiating how to describe things in the emerging vectoral world. A particular treat is Lovink's account of the early years of Nettime – the New Left Review of the digital, post-pomo politico set. Nettime evolved "a dynamic beyond the internet itself." It was a mailing list, but it was also a series of meetings, and publications in different formats. It had what noncommercial networks need to survive: "a vision, a groove and a direction." What that was depended on who you asked. It thrived on the positive confusion of the aims of its participants, all of whom could think of it in their own way and imagine everyone else concurred. Started in 1995 by Lovink and others, Nettime arose out of the discontents of critical theory. It found a negative semantic terrain in its hostility to Wired magazine, the Rolling Stone of new media sellouts. Nettime positioned itself against the "unbearable lightness of Wired" Confronting the full blown ideology of a free market digital utopia, Nettime was a negative consensus around the need for a countervailing theory. "The pretense that American technoculture would lead the rest of the world is kindly refused here." As such it was way ahead of its time. Always a fragile mix of writers, artists, activists, techies, Nettime was the venue for the collaborative invention of the practice of "collaborative text filtering", and experiments in how to express textual information for different media vectors – as listserver, online archive, photocopied collation, fullblown publication or free newspaper. It is still going, one of the most viable legacies of Lovink's past collaborations. His version of its past could be a useful tool for thinking about its future. Nettime embodies a wider phenomena: "A meta techno intelligentsia is on the rise, transcending the primitive social Darwinism with its winner-loser and adapt or die logic." But it has yet to grow beyond the fragments from which it arose. Perhaps what's needed is not tactical media, but strategies, logistics, but ones that build on, rather than ignore, the gains and lessons of new forms of local and contingent work. Again. it's easier said than done. Ever the pragmatist, Lovink identifies the material conditions for moving forward:  "What is needed are new spaces for reflection and critique, free zones where researchers of all kinds can work without the pressure of sponsors and administrators." Lovink has experimented successfully with temporary media labs, but perhaps its time to think about longer durations. "What is badly needed are autonomous research collectives that critically examine the social, economic, and even ecological aspects of the information technology business." They exist around questions like food or sweatshops – so why not the net? So-called 'tactical media,' which Lovink had a hand in promoting, has been an enormously enabling rhetoric, but it has its limitations. It's interesting just how much semantic freight Lovink tries to get this term to carry. Tactical media is to "combine radical pragmatism and media activism with pleasurable forms of nihilism." But it is also "into questioning every single aspect of life, with 'the most radical gesture'." Tactical media plays with "the ambiguity of more or less isolated groups or individuals, caught in the liberal-democratic consensus, working outside the safety of the Party or Movement, in a multi-disciplinary environment full of mixed backgrounds and expectations." It is also "about the art of getting access, hacking the power and disappearing at the right moment." While "Tactical media are opposition channels, finding their way to break out of the subcultural ghetto" it is also "a deliberately slippery term, a tool for creating 'temporary consensus zones' based on unexpected alliances." "What counts" with tactical media "are temporary connections between old and new, practice and theory, alternative and mainstream." But it is also "a question of scale. How does a phrase on a wall turn into a global revolt?" Tactical media may intervene within a movement, but it may also link a movement to social groups. Or perhaps it is even a "virtual movement", with no existence outside of its network expression. Then again, "Perhaps we are just a diverse collection of wierdos [weirdos], off topic by nature." The most tactical thing about tactical media is the rhetorical tactic of calling it tactical. Curiously, this deployment of language tactically turns out to be a consistent Lovink strategy. There's a big difference between the Adilkno texts and Lovink's travel reports, but both use language within the context of the net vector as something meant to work within a given dispersal of space and time. By not being too specific, by not exhausting a rhetoric to the point of implosion, as for example in cyberutopian writing, Lovink keeps open the sense of possibility within net discourse – the possibility of possibility. "Here comes the new desire."  [is the preceding quote somewhat oprhaned – could it have "as Lovink writes…"] Above all, 'Dark Fiber' is a freeze-dried sampling on acid-free paper of a certain kind of practice, traces of this exemplary intellectual's attempts to work in (and against) the world. + + McKenzie Wark (mw35@nyu.edu) is the author of 3 books, including Virtual Geography. He was a co-editor of the Nettime anthology, Readme! With Brad Miller, he co-produced the multimedia work Planet of Noise. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 6. Date: 9.17-9.18.02 From: Marc Lafia (marclafia@earthlink.net) and James Buckhouse (jbuckhouse@yahoo.com) Subject: Re: In Search of a Poetics of the Spatialization of the Moving Image, 3 Marc Lafia wrote: Thanks Lev for your post Where then is the place to begin to consider the moving image before montage, before cinema, to retrace the steps of cinema to start again. This is what interests me in this writing, to find a place to begin, and I am thankful to Lev and his encouragement of this pursuit. I try in this writing to retrace some steps to see before or beyond the idea of montage, even montage vs. co-presence or simultaneity, which Lev mentioned in his earlier email, co-presence or simultaneity having many complications and possibilities, very interesting ones. Yet perhaps we can start with the idea of visioning (Visioning and Montage) and then return to some of the characteristics of ?co-existence¹ or ?co-presence¹. In Search of a Poetics of the Spatialization of the Moving Image, 3 Marc Lafia ?I am still very interested in the image being experienced self-consciously rather then it merely being a given. In that sense I am not referring to the media frame of the image and its representation but rather the process of seeing and that¹s linked to thinking and language.¹ Gary Hill In his most thoughtful essay, ?Montage, My Beautiful Care, or Histories of the Cinematograph¹, Michael Witt gives a very insightful and detailed accounting of Jean-Luc Godard¹s many positions through time on montage. ?The cinema is montage,¹ states JLG, and montage is anything but a simply affair. Montage is not only the linkage from shot to shot, it is that which is between frames of film, and is, at a macro level, the relationship between viewer and image, viewer and society, viewer and the world. Godard extends this even further by stating that Henri Langlois, the famous director of the Paris Cinematheque who introduced much of the Nouvelle Vague to the riches of cinema (especially silent cinema), made montage with projectors with the many films he screened. For Godard montage is not new to cinema and has been with us for a very long time as he states, 'Cinema was the true art of montage that began five or six centuries B.C, in the West.¹ For Godard, Eisenstein, Vertov, Griffith never truly achieved montage, they brought it forward, advanced it, but montage was a promise, an intuition, an emergent form that became ?a blocked chrysalis that will never turn into a butterfly.¹ Why, because industrialists and capital were afraid of the inherent power of it and how it allowed people to see, visualize the unconscious, the unspoken, and so, with the advent of sound, and especially after the second world war, and the abdication of cinema as a witness, montage, and its possibility becomes silenced by control and convention. It was in this limited sense, in the sense of wishing to find something before this silencing of montage, that I wrote that montage may no longer afford or allow for the possibility of finding something again in the promise of the moving image. And so in following I retrace the path of Godard¹s retracing of montage back to the cinematograph as once again a place to begin. In Godard¹s search for that which allows montage, perhaps that which proceeds it, he introduces the idea of the cinematograph, the instrument of the camera, ?a temporal microscope¹, ?a precise machine capable of intensifying perception¹, ?a mind opening vision machine¹, ?a powerful social x-ray machine capable of the revelation of hitherto imperceptible physical realities and the injuries of social inequality¹. ?As Jean Epstein insisted long before, the impact of radical formal novelty far out weights questions of localized narratives or representations: every metre of film serves to reveal and inform, to directly communicate a savage reality ?before names and before the law of words.¹ It was Hitchcock ?with a resolutely visual logic that was cinematographic montage¹ that for Godard gets closer if not achieves montage. To understand this simply, Hitchcock edited his films in camera, that is, he shot the edited version of his film, precisely, exactingly as a visualist seeing each frame of his film on screen as he shot it. I suggest this be read as Hitchcock seeing in montage, seeing a sequence as it would be on screen, seeing the film he is shooting, not constructing it in the editing room, with the best material he has as would be the common Hollywood practice. To be clear, Hollywood syntax was one of master shot, two shot, close up and reverse shot, always filmed with cut-a-ways in case converge was not all there or an editor had to cut out of a poor performance and needed a way to get to their next shot. This is still the Hollywood model. Hitchcock¹s visual logic was one where his films where shot as they were to be seen. He was a resolute auteur who had a very particular way of seeing. But his seeing or visualization was in terms of sequences of events, causes and effects. The conflation of the cinematograph with montage here need not deter us from seeing more clearly beneath the edifice of cinema to locate seeing itself and seeing or visualization as a way of thought, a sensual becoming. As we move from montage to the cinematograph, as if reeling back to the beginning of film and the invention of the camera and projector, we approach something that I believe is much deeper, and that is the image itself, or rather imaging itself. The camera, or more broadly, mechanical visioning is an altered seeing, proceeding montage, and it is this seeing that need be addressed as part of the issue of spatialization. How do we see in space, think spatially and in time? How do we give vision to the multiple, the simultaneous, the variable, durations? This is what I mean by starting at a forward place, in the middle of a new event of space-time in regard to the image. Seeing in multiplicity I don¹t suggest here an absence of chronological structures but perhaps a back grounding where in varied complications of time are layered behind and within, something less narrated than constructed. In his essay, ?Projection and Dis/embodiment: Genealogies of the Virtual¹, Thomas Zummer points out, ?there is an unavoidable perceptual bias in our relation to the instruments we devise¹ such that ?prosthetic perceptions occupy the same cognitive space as bodily sensations.¹ So it is, there is never just the instrument, but us in it. Further in his essay Zummer argues, that cinema engages us in a passive sense, we sit restively and fold ourselves into a dream unaware and unquestioning of its social, psychic and grammatic machinery. In the 60¹s and 70¹s artists begin to deconstruct the prosthetic of cinema through projective and interactive installations wherein the cinematic apparatus and its attendant social and psychic substrates is revealed as a particular kind of interface to the moving image, to desire, to representation, to our bodies. In constructing alternative configurations of the projector, image and space, much is revealed or made to be seen about cinema, architecture, light, the image, our bodies and varied other tropes of recorded media. As time-based images are made to move away from the flat screen, the single screen, a fixed projector, and distributed in space, opening up in multiple directions, an opportunity is afforded to re-imagine our relationship as to how we are thought and visualized in them. Montage - leads us to rhythm, representation, memory, desire visioning instruments, the camera being one of them - to perception, cognition, language, presence = and projection - to the consideration of architecture and space. With the spatialization of images artists continue along these paths. To retrace the steps of our two paths, it might be best to describe two recent exhibitions here in New York, one by Doug Aitken and the other, Gary Hill. In both, multiple screens are used. In one room, Doug Aitken deploys 4 circular screens in a mirrored room, where representational images are overlaid with a white graphic circular dot, where over time and at increasing speed, concentric circles form and move outward at ever increasing rhythmic intensity, treating film as pure surface and plastic. In a second room a 360 degree eye-shaped or butterfly-wing shaped set of screens allows the same set of images to be watched in surround vision. Here he creates an abstracted narrative of a young woman, whose life is saturated with images, giving us a film constructed with design effects where by certain moments are manipulated to isolate her and to abstract images, making them still or be marked out to then disappear. Within the many effects and design the mise-en-scene returns to the subject of the woman and her narrative. Aitken¹s work is somewhere between the trajectory of experimental or poetic cinema and experimental narrative. In Gary Hill¹s work, also distributed in several rooms over many projections, the work in one room on two screens, two hands writing, left and right, in another six screens of zoom shots never to be completed as more and more black is inserted as we get closer and closer in the zoom, and in a third a circular image of lush wallpaper - in the space of these images we are presented with a kind of puzzle about perception, cognition, the relay of the senses and how the mind and language figure them. Here montage or cinema is not the concern but the camera and its visioning is used to image the construction of thought, perception. What then does it mean that both works distribute images over space, each with very particular spatializations of time, particular distributions of time, of the movement of time, but also of thought and awareness, embodiment, consciousness, being and presence these last things exceeding or standing apart or along side or outside montage such concerns that have been brought forth in the work of much video art since its inception. What then is particular to spatialization that is an event in imaging and arrangement that might characterize a new or potential poetics? Perhaps my search for a poetics of the spatialization of the moving image is a search for a poetics of the event of space. With in the screen and between the screen, in the space of the screen and the body, in that space or spaces of screens is a play between the discursive and the figural, between montage and visioning which can bring us inside the event of our senses, inside the event of instrumentation, inside the event of our social configurations of such apparatuses and here in a future poetics sought. As my search takes pause, I can only suggest that we read forward toward the sense of the possible. In a future posing I will put forward a tentative list of characteristics and possibilities of a poetics, some already realized and others that might be realized, as it relates to moving and time based images through new instrumentations, display strategies and social configurations. + + + James Buckhouse posted: I am very impressed with Marc and Lev's exchange regarding the Poetics of the Spatialization of the Moving Image. Very briefly, I'd like to add a few ideas. In trying to differientiate between traditional cinemagraphic montage and the new possibilities (which, I think Marc is saying are actually very old possibilities) of the spatialization of the moving image, it might be useful for a moment to think in terms of architectural practice. Hitchcock as example - then defining terms: In addition to constructing the narrative, the sight-lines and camera angles of Hitchcock's films seem to create an architecture of power relations; both between the characters and between the audience and the directed point of interest on the screen. This idea has been written about by many people - so I will skip right to what interests me about this; if these sight-lines and shot-assembly constitute an architectural practice, then what is the "space" that is created? In my opinion, three types of space are created: and they overlay easily into the, also much written about, categories of the real, the actual and the virtual. It is possible that other readers will disagree with my defining of these three type of spaces here, none the less, I hope it won't be too distracting to use these definitions for the moment. Real, Actual, Virtual: In the architectual practice of cinematography, the space of the real would be the illusionistic, depicted space of the setting of the scene (inside a room, inside a courtyard, alongside a country road, etc). The space of the actual splits in half - the first is the actual location of shoot (where props, people, backdrops, staging, etc. were filmed and also are on occasion, altered, moved, or faked as necessary to create the image - even to go as far as to create elements digitally that do not exist - or even to create the entire film digitially with no actual photographic element). The second is the actual space of the viewer's environment while viewing - sitting in the theatre, at home in front of the TV, at a black-box gallery, inside of an elaborate media art installation…). Finally, the space of the virtual, which I think is the area that Marc is most interested in - is the overlay that is generated by the real and the actual, but exists only as generated in the minds of the viewer through the process of imaginary construction. We construct in our minds the space defined by the master, two, ECU, and reverse shots. We construct in our minds the architectual "program" of the sequence of shots. We generate connections to past ideas recently witnessed within the project we are viewing - as well as connections back to associated ideas from our own more distant memory. So what would the goal of this program be, as applied to the poetics of the spatialization of the moving image? I believe it is towards an art practice where the final medium is memory. What else do we have? We have only memory and exchange. If all thought can exist only as memory (even the most immediate thoughts or experiences we have can only be formed through the construction of memory - as nothing can exist in the ever-receding now-moment, but must be pushed out by the next now-moment), and if memory is both a specific and a cumulative construction, then all thought and all art is a result of past experiences combined with the near-immediate re-configuration of these experiences. The poetics of the spatialization of the moving image seem to be in service of this near-immediate re-configuration. The black-box video gallery, theatical cinematic apparartus, or elaborate video installation, all seem crafted towards creating a environment where the re-configuration can have maximum effect. The most successful installations, for me, give value to the process of imaginative construction, and respect and exploit the brain's ability to create robust and highly personal mental images and ideas in association to what is being seen in the actual space. Game designer Will Wright calls the brain "the most powerful graphics rendering device" - and I think he is right on when reccommending that the most compelling images are the ones that can somehow trigger this renderer and employ it's power to do the bulk of the work. Images that try to replace the mental renderer often feel impoverished. Personally, it is only recently that I have begun to understand that a camera can do both - both depict and trigger. This is where I believe that the spatialization of the moving image differs from the cinematic apparatus of a movie theatre or even watching a video at home: the place in which the moving image is presented is crafted within the specific architectual program and artistic practice of constructing memory, generated, in in a state of perpetual near-completion, on the most powerful rendering device in the world. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Rhizome.org is a 501©(3) nonprofit organization. If you value this free publication, please consider making a contribution within your means at <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/support">http://rhizome.org/support</a>. Checks and money orders may be sent to Rhizome.org, 115 Mercer Street, New York, NY 10012. Contributions are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law and are gratefully acknowledged at <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/info/10.php">http://rhizome.org/info/10.php</a>. 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