BOW A3: Planning notes

I wasn’t beginning to panic exactly but about two weeks ago I was wondering if I was ever going to settle on something that felt tangible and a little more focused, something to really begin digging down into.

I’ve been concentrating on the ideas and theories that I’m trying to understand and not really making much in the way of work – although have continued looking/searching for footage and relooking at my own recent work to see what’s emerging.

There are some films I think may be useful. If they haven’t got any actual material in them which I’d like to use, then perhaps phrases or titles inspire me.

I had the following disparate entities along with ideas/responses so far:

• A string of seemingly unrelated snippets of text  – some in the ongoing stream of Random Notes for a Short Story ##, and some other things that might be called poems – although I want to avoid that word and looking back over these, I think I will find a way of typesetting to avoid them looking like traditional poems and rather like prose perhaps using / between each line. This not only negates the sense of fixed poetry, but it also echoes Barad’s explanation of intra/relatedness. 
• I looked at images I’d made in Italy (and not used in A2 but in another sequence). The themes are related but the images made me yawn even though they are quite nice photographs. (Hover mouse over image for explanatory captions written for the sake of this post)
  

  Stopping the ‘natural’ simulation with high speed shutter

  

  Giving the impression of solidness with high shutter speed – waves made to look in the photograph like a wall

  

  again walls- held up with structures
  A convention of used footage (appropriated) downloaded from the internet to make new films, and also still images by simply screenshotting or else literally photographing my computer and the images on the screen – less frequently. My commitment to using digital habits/techniques is deliberate  – see DI&C A3. I have a very serious problem with the common notion in the arts and photography that digital media and techniques are less valuable or less interesting than analogue and historical processes. This trend strikes me as being mired in middle-class, excluding values. I am also echoing a non-Western tradition of valuing things we in the West dismiss – an animist worldview. This was referenced in the Barbican’s recent Digital exhibition AI: More than Human (2019), Nam June Paik retrospective, Tate 2019, and in Lupton’s Data Selves (2019) (citing Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (2009), Thing Power & Enchantment etc… and counters exceptionalism and binary thinking). I will continue in this vein because I think it’s really important to defy the ‘insidious unconscious reinforcers’ (Small, 1999)* that limit us. Artists, in particular, can be as backward-looking as the populists they claim to know better than who come across as if they want to go back to an imagined time that was ‘better’ – by rolling around in nostalgic practices while dismissing newer ones which give creative access to many, many more people.  This strategy of mine is not a wholehearted endorsement of all things digital. It is not a niave embracing of the new and rejection of the old. tech media is not immaterial as many think. It ‘is not clean’ – see CCA talk below. It is certainly not without its negative impact and connotations. As mentioned in a previous blog – this ‘is also explored in Vilém Flusser’s Towards a Philosophy of Photography (2012). The ideology is in the apparatus and photographers (all except experimental ones!) are flunkies or to use his word, functionaries – they ‘are inside their apparatus and bound up with it’ (loc 2086).’ (Field, 2019). (One of the people I worked with via Pic London is doing a talk in Glasgow which I can’t make called ‘Our best machines are made of sunshine’. CCA)
• When I present work to a cohort of students who I meet regularly there is always a question about the form: ‘but is this acceptable? it’s moving image / or it’s about moving image and this is a photography course?’ It happens every time despite the fact I have sought reassurance from Wendy McMurdo (who suggested using moving image herself, just as I was discovering my long-term interest on the impact of cinema and its related activities on my developing sense of self), and Andrea Norrington (DI&C tutor); and reassurances have been verified by the fact both the tutors I now have are connected to and use moving image as well as other media. I do pass all of this on but yet, each time I’m once again questioned about my use of /reference to moving image. In terms of the recent essay, this questioning tells me I need to make a particular concept much clearer and will discuss when writing up feedback, but other than that, this constant questioning reveals a common confusion over what photography is and how still/moving differ and are the same. What’s more – it reveals the ‘Cartesian habit of mind’ (Barad, 2011) which I am at pains to deconstruct. It highlights the lines we modern Western humans are so desperate to impose. But – even my tutor asked, ‘are you going to concentrate on still or moving?’He has not been following my work for a while though so it’s somewhat forgivable. My cohort, if not avidly following my progress might have least have noticed constant freezing of moving images  – making a single frame out of several, focusing on the cut from one scene to another – where there is a blend of frames on view. They might have seen the reverse action – i.e. instead of adding many frames together to make them move, I have taken single frames and stopped the animation.  Then reintroduced animation while maintaining the stillness. Had they been looking they might have picked up on the desire to stop the ongoing simulation with its ‘insidious unconscious reinforcers’ (Small, 1999) and seen me step inside of it and take a look around.
• I have explored the difference between film and still image – they are both the same at the centre. We humans either look at a single frame or we add many frames together to create the impression of reality. It is, however, an impression, we do not move at 24 fps and some filmmakers are experimenting with higher fps but we are so used to having an impressionistic view that we don’t always much like it in cinema. But video games, ‘today are developed with the goal of hitting a frame rate of 60 fps but anywhere between 30 fps to 60 fps is considered acceptable. That’s not to say that games cannot exceed 60 fps, in fact, many do, but anything below 30 fps, animations may start to become choppy and show a lack of fluid motion.’ (Klappenbach, 2019)
• To reiterate – I am stopping the simulation when I take a screenshot or focus on the glitchy frames that show two scenes chopped together.
• I am making work in the reverse order that is usually made/and chopping up the order.
• I am looking at the capturing of light  – the core activity of still and moving photography. What happens afterward re the temporality we impose on our captured light (life) is also of interest because it relates to the constructive nature of existence  – which according to some visual scientists is what we ourselves do in any case even when we’re not making films.
• See ancient mythology and compare to modern mythology (advertising whether honest or subversive in the cinema).
• The following may be a useful paper for me –
  A New/Old Ontology of Film Rafe McGregor (2013)
  The purpose of this article is to examine the ontological effects of digital technology, and determine whether digital films, traditional films, and pre- traditional motion pictures belong to the same category.
  https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/pdfplus/10.3366/film.2013.0015 
• Not wishing to introduce spoilers – but McGregor concludes ‘At this point in the second decade of the twenty-first century, however, digital film remains – like traditional film and its predecessors – the art of moving pictures’ and I suspect I will find that at the core of both film and still, regardless of digital or analouge  – the capture of light is the same thing. However, various processes enable different social outcomes due to access, cost, and social biases that are linked to ideologies feeding into them.
• But – moving image (digital or analogue – once it’s on the internet, there is no difference) gives the appearance of being more like a wave than a particle and therefore, perhaps a useful means of conveying some of the ideas that come along with the particular weird phenomenon where particles behave like waves when measured under certain conditions – and related phenomena.
• This resolute determination to exist with a Cartesian habit of mind in our institutions and society means two things for me:1. I have found a way forward for this project. I have ordered a Super 8 home movie made in 1971 from E-bay. I was looking for two things – a moving image format that I could cut up (made still) and it should have been made in the year I was born. I will use this alongside fragments of text and make a book (a3) and film (thereafter) with it. I will need to digitise it before cutting it up into what I will need and playing with it which might delay me slightly – but knowing it’s on its way means I am free to carry on writing in the meantime.
• 2. But it also infuriates me because it’s about pigeon-holing. The need to categorise everything into arbitrary manmade labeled domains limits us exponentially. It stops us from seeing and accepting complexity and nuance. It filters out difference – see Barad ‘indeterminacy is an undoing of identity that unsettles the very nature of being and non being’. You can see this in England right now as it grapples with its identity crisis – what am I? British, European, Labour, Conservative, Liberal or none of them  – oh my god – how can I be all these things and none of them…’ aaargh!!!!’ goes the collective wail. It is reductive and insulting to keep pigeon-holing. It’s also rude and belittling. It is the antithesis of superpositions.

Summary:

• My work is an attempt to visit a non-cartesian world and see what it looks like
• It is a response to Cartesian reductiveness and habitual narrowing of meaning
• It hopefully will do this via many intra/related mico-narratives
• The themes are human temporality – both biological and mechanical, consumerism (the modern religion) and the relationship between narrative and the evolving worldview we are revisiting (we weren’t always in this place)
• The process in CS is informing the potential outcomes in BOW for the momentOverall – I think the work could be called PLEASE for mercy’s sake stop with the arbitrary categorising, stop with the Cartesian habit of mind!! But it’s not very catchy, is it?
• I am not decided yet but I may simply call the work CUT  (perhaps with a subheading about fragments for the modern consumer but I will decide later) linked to the fact I will cut up the film I’ve ordered, edits in filmmaking and meaning (see BBCs latest accepted ‘mistake’ re-editing different answers to questions to imply a new meaning) and links to Barad’s agential cut.

‘Kember and Zylinska (2012) use the concept of the agenital cut to argue that any attempt to impose meaning and order is an intervention (a cut) that produces specific effects, and is inevitably part of the matter it seeks to observe or document. They represent photography as a specific cut in meaning, a way of delimiting from all the choices available that can be recorded and displayed, and therefore, how meaning can be generated. It is the means by which things are brought into being by humans and non-humans (e.g. cameras) working together. Photography makes agential cuts that produce life forms rather than simply documenting them. It is a way of giving form to matter’ (Kember and Zylinska 2012:84) They do not differentiate here between moving and still photography (I would need to investigate further  but it makes no sense to in these terms.)

‘To see one must actively intervene’ (Barad, 2007:51 – citing Hacking)

*Quote taken from an anthropology book about the formation and feedback of culture and self in relation to cost/benefit ratios and social-economic needs. Although the book focuses on childcare practice cross-culturally, the premise is relevant. By looking at photography through the prism of child anthropology (along with the other intra/related disciplines I visit), perhaps I am engaging in a diffractive practice.

Refs:

Barad, K. M. (2007) Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.

Flusser, V. (2012) Towards a philosophy of photography. London: Reaktion Books.

Klappenbach, M. (2019) Understanding and Optimizing Video Game Frame Rates. [Gaming Magazine Online] At: https://www.lifewire.com/optimizing-video-game-frame-rates-811784 (Accessed 02/12/2019).

Lupton, D. (2019) Data selves: more-than-human perspectives. Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA: Polity.

Small, M. F. (1999) Our babies, ourselves: how biology and culture shape the way we parent. New York; London: Bantam ; Kuperard.