marc <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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
>> 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 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"
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
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