Thanks Charles,
That was a pleasurable read with my coffee this morning - it is also
refreshing to observe someone else's take on some of Alan's work.
marc
In the "Genjo Koan" of 1233, translated as something like "actualizing the fundamental point," Eihei Dogen explains that for Buddhism "here is the place, here the way unfolds," but immediately adds that "the boundary of realization is not distinct." The space and time of practice are already inhabited, are already demarcations within our lifeworld.
I see this realization of the indistinct (smear, the Pale) in Alan Sondheim’s recent visual work. These
images and videos of the last three or four months, working with complex laser scanning and motion capture
technologies, concern embedding spaces modeled and "presented" on screen. The presentation is
beautiful, the images are stunning. I easily slip into seeing them as visual abstractions, as familiar parts
of an "artistic" discourse. I slip into seeing them as images to be looked at. Sondheim’s writings
become important here: some part of these images remain invisible and only played out in the medium of words.
He calls the images figures ("this or that figure or figures"), emphasizing the split or disparity
between the phenomenology of sight or vision and the presentaiton of the images on screen. The partial and
particulate quality of these image/figures is specific to their digitality (the particular as the digital in
all images). Insofar as they are visible and in t!
h!
e visible, these images are already ruptured, already broken of their
digitality. The digital image pictures absence; this is its qualification as an
image.
The description of these images in relation to a "non-existent" "embedding" space is paradoxical first of all in the
simultaneous invisibility and ubiquity of this space. This space would in no way be susceptible to a kind of philiosophical de-layering; no
analysis will logically reveal this embedding. Sondheim describes the invisible space as "less than a frame, paregon,
peripheral." "Less than" implies that these other notions are too much, that they already assume too much structure and
cultural apparatus. The sequence of terms * frame, pareregon, peripheral * quote the art historical discourse of the ornamental and the
philosophical discourse of the supplementary. These concepts deal with the primordial technological presumption of a "propping
up" of the visible by a hidden grid of structures and relations. One could even collapse the sequence into the Heideggerian
"gestell" as a reasonable master term. The gestell enframes the visible and in this creates potential and !
d!
ynamics, energizing what is seen (in terms of the classical notion of "energia"
or pictorial energy). The ancient role of the gestell within our notion of technology and
technique is the relation of a more primal and productive space to visible or represented
space. The ornament or frame is always something.
When Sondheim speaks of invisible space as less than the parergon, this must be understood as a refusal of the economy of the frame and its placing in cultural production (and the production of culture). The gestell is productive, a machine of cultural prudction. By contrast, these images are quiescent, lacking in energy. To see an image requires some energetics, some "energia," but these images are not seen - they are themselves seeing (or scanning) of spaces we inhabit. What gets shown is the living-through or inhabitation of these spaces.
Rather than the gestell, the comparison is the invisible "punctum caecum" described by
Merleau-Ponty, a blind spot within consciousness that enables rather than excludes the invisible
within the visible. "It is not seen in itself, but causes us to see the rest." The image
does not give access to another space but is there in the embedding space, a space already here
across the visible like a laminate.
Dogon writes: "Each reflection, however long or short its duration, manifests the
vastness of the dewdrop, and realizes the limitlessness of the moonlight in the sky"
--
Furtherfield - http://www.furtherfield.org
HTTP - http://www.http.uk.net
Node.London - http://www.nodel.org
