My apologies regarding posting this email here - it is merely what has
been here before, weeks earlier - just to the wrong individual.
'even cute people make mistakes'
marc
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
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
