Marc: Sure, or I can do more soon. I've been caught up with a number of
things (such as my tenure process here at the university) but I am
writing an essay on Alan's use of avatars and will incorporate the
material below in it. I could send you some of that in a few weeks.
Sandy
>>> marc <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 10/13/2006 11:03 AM >>>
Hi Charles,
I have forgotten where we left off now - did you wish me to post the
text below as the review?
wishing you well.
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
Sondheims 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. Sondheims 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 th!
> 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
