I posted this a while back refering to the face scans and access grid images 
that Alan was working on then. If you do a search of the wryting archive at 
http://listserv.wvu.edu/archives/wryting-l.html you'll find the references.

Sandy

>>> William Bain <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 10/13/2006 12:31:48 PM >>>
where are the images referred to?

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 
>> 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"
>>
>>
>> 
>>
>
>


-- 
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Node.London - http://www.nodel.org 


                
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