improvising the presence

light piece

2006-12-14T17:28:00.000-08:00

light piece

2006-12-14T17:26:00.000-08:00

This is just a playful experiment: a little bit of Christmas, a little bit of time and me.

2006-12-07T15:52:00.000-08:00

improvising the presence

2006-12-07T15:39:00.000-08:00

Novalis Travel

2006-12-07T14:45:00.000-08:00

This piece was initially planned as a response to the quote from Novalis that I
found in a book on sublime in contemporary art: "we dream of traveling through
the world; but isn't the world within us? ... The mysterious road goes
inwards". Of course, this statement is not extraordinarily original, for
thinking people not at all. But in today, in the situation of industry of
tourism, when the unifying global culture forces to act “outwards”, to explore
geographical areas of others more than the other inside yourself, the dichotomy
of internal and external journey is one of the most crucial. All depends on how
you see external in relation to your own inner paths, goals, structures, moods.
In 2005 Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago published what might be meant to be a catalogue to the exhibition but actually can serve as an independent book on tourism and itsartistic critique."Universal Experience: Art, Life, and the Tourist's gaze" is a wonderful collection on excerpts from the most important academic sources on modern travelling. "One can travel the world and see nothing. To achieve understanding it is necessary not to see many things, but to look hard at what you do see" (Giorgio Morandi)

Reflrctions on & of "Connected Body".

2006-11-08T11:18:00.000-08:00

Performance, which starts with fear, fear and anxiety. If body is an instrument, than instrument of what? Execution of an idea means also its punishment by inadequacy, otherness of body language. How are bodily actions connected to the abstract notions of mind? How and what exactly can gesture reflect? The questions that are absolutely trite for professional dancers.
But I have to start from the very beginning, from clarifying once again the facets of my identity. If you have never been considered to be an artist, your artistic self, nourished randomly and intimately, needs to lay the road by itself. What is important is the process of endless attempts not even to envision, fantasize, but to actually do something – using your own body, or all sorts of objects and scenes you can find around.
This project, however pretentious it may seem, would be just an exploration of my inner self and its artistic capabilities with the methods I’m unaccustomed to, as non-artist. A number of mirrors grouped at various angles create an intricate environment of reflections. I could go deep into the meanings of mirror as a cultural and philosophical phenomenon. But I’ll leave it away for now and focus on notions of reflectivity as a physical characteristics and metaphor for mental processes. What do reflections add to the original image? How can we distinguish “reality” of an image in already mediated form of video projection? Even if it’s not a really immersive and engaging experience, it still should be an illusion of boundless space of multiple dimensions, transitory and transitionary. The objects, or better active elements, examining the volume of the space, are parts of my body that try to communicate pieces of information to each other, both real and reflected, thus, producing the effect of disrupted continuity, fragmented into numerous layers, and presenting idea of impossibility of true connection/connectedness.
“Moving involves a constant listening, inviting being seen, being awake to infinite possibilities of experience of the totality of life/death”, as Johannes Berringer describes dancing strategy-philosophy of Deborah Hay, one of the leading members of Judson School (J. Berringer, Media and Performance. Baltimore, 1998. p. 109). To activate movement and to give it voice – both figuratively and literally – to explore and to experience interconnections.

New Philosophy for New Media.

2006-10-19T14:14:00.000-07:00

First of all really, how new is "new" media? All digital experiments of the last few decades are virtually rooted in the first cinematic practices, in dadaism of M. Duchamp and various kinds of critiques of perception.
According to Mark Hansen, the main change happend in the postformalistic, post -Greenbergian understanding of art media as characterized by not just opticallity, but the very bodily phisicality of artist's thinking and hapticality of the result image. The focus of our analysis of the issues of viruality and digitality should be traced back to Bergsonian idea of the "affective, prediscoursive body as the active source of meaning". For Deleuze, affection designates a certain modality of perception, artistic contentand the primary framing function grows from this "affective", "proprioceptive" modus of a body. Perception, as argued by Bergson, demarcates the selection of a subset of the aggregate of images (that composes the world) by a "center of indetermination", which is human body itself, full of creative active capacities.
Interruptions that movement-image creates can be interpreted in a phisical way - as the pulse of a body, or the states, discrete conditions of a mind.
If it is the body that informs the medial interfaces, "with a flexibility brought by digitization, there occurs a displacement of the framing function of medial interfaces back onto the body from which they themselves originally sprang" (p. 22). But how is this displacement possible if the frame is programmed, cyberly coded? Isn't it just a new way of interraction with reality that poses the rhythm and frame itself?

... to be continued.

"Reality" in Time. Cinema, Virtuality, and the Gaps of Sublime.

2006-10-04T13:56:00.000-07:00

It is an age-old human need to be connected to something (a sphere, object) that is independent, absolute and in a way indiscrepant/consistent in its persistent trueness. The notion of the “real” as it is used today in an everyday life seems to possess the characteristics of a religious subject. Perhaps, a keen interest of modernism and postmodernism to “reality” has its roots in a basic religious feeling of communion with an ontological essence (with ancestors, each other, through a god, or a prophet).
In its widest sense, reality includes everything that is, whether it is comprehensible, or self-contradictory by any system of analysis (philosophy, science, art). Theoretical debates and artistic search for the authenticity of experience and aura that took place in the 1920s and later was perhaps the first hint of this desire to reexamine our attitude to reality. For a decades it had been a parallel developing between visual art, theatre, and music (this is a subject, which itself is worth of a special long discussion).
M. A. Doane notes that contemporary viewer becomes more and more aware of manipulability of the visual image – “its status as a simulacrum with no origin or referent” - so that its authority to represent reality (doesn’t matter imaginative, or actual) passes on/proceeds from space to time based arts ((De)realizing cinematic time).
Time is crucial as a constitutive structure for all cognitive and practical activities. “Time is the form of all cognition, deliberation, will, decision, commitment, action; it’s the form of that self-development in the continuity of selective becoming that is the biography each person is in the process of constructing”. (Charles M. Sherover, Are We In Time? Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univ. Press, 2003)
Frequently addressed as inseparable from the phenomenon of motion, which itself can be represented only by reducing it to stillness as its opposite, the continuity of time is a pledge of a possibility of grasping the real.
Gilles Deleuze, in what he claims is "the style of ancient philosophers" refers to time as the "number of movement”, measurable time. Measurability/”measuredness” implies not only discretion and break, but also potential, hope for change and transformation. “In motion, a body is in an immediate, unfolding relation to its own nonpresent potential to vary” (Brian Massumi, Parables of the Virtual. Durham. Lonon: Duke Un. Press, 2002) That relation, in Deleuze’s terms, is real but abstract. Here abstract means: never present in position, only ever in passing.

Cinematograph appeared as a way to accomplish "the transmutation of the discontinuous into the continuous, negated by Zeno". Modernist cinema (primarily of the 1960s and 1970s) demonstrates that “the cinema is capable of producing an image of pure time, liberated from movement”.
The concept of "real time" is often used nowadays to convey the capabilities of new media with their specific relation to temporality. "Real time" here signifies not only “pure continuity” but "instantaneity" and “now” (as opposed to “after”) where is no any gap between the phenomenon and its analysis.
In addition, digital real time, through the concept of interactivity, stirs the lure of the internet – “the lure of connectivity, of being in touch, of synchronicity, and of availability--24/7/365” (Doane).

At the birth of modernity, time becomes a central element of a capitalist economy, measuring efficiency and along with money exemplifying a process of dematerialization and abstraction. But “modernity is also strongly associated with epistemologies which valorize the contingent, the ephemeral, chance”, fractal, emerging and “surprising”.
Rationalization as one of the main principles of modernity provokes a sense of longing for “affective, for the subjective play of desire, anxiety, pleasure, trauma, apprehension”. It was a role of avant-guard (including avant-guard cinema) to fill this niche (“contingency appears to offer a vast reservoir of freedom and free play, irreducible to the systematic structuring of "leisure time."
Doane draws a structuring oppositions rationalization vs. contingency and discontinuity vs. continuity. Digital media and internet technology with enabling/ activation of real time creates an opportunity to communicate with (even to commune to) the uncontrollable, to get access to “the unintended, the unshaped, the felicitous or infelicitous accident”.
This anxiety for the accident, the unintended, suspended continuity (remember Schtokhausen’s reaction on the 9/11) clearly corresponds with the avant-garde’s strong belief in change in its very ontological sense.
For Jean-François Lyotard, it is the avant-garde that has the potential to resist this logic by concerning itself with the question, "Is it happening?", as opposed to the constantly renewed declarative of commodity capitalism’s “This is happening.” “The avant-gardist task remains that of undoing the presumption of the mind with respect to time”. (J-Fr. Lyotard). There are two important moments/ modes of sublimity in art that in different ways accentuate the unpresentable alluded to by means of technique. On the one hand, emphasis is placed on “the powerlessness of the faculty of presentation”, on “the nostalgia for presence." Lyotard labels this mode "melancholia". And on the other hand, there is the mode of sublimity in art which Lyotard calls “novatio” that places emphasis on “the increase of being and the jubilation which result from the invention of new rules of the game, be it pictorial, artistic, or any other” (Jean-François Lyotard, Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism? in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: Un. of Minnesota Press, 1984, p. 79). In this way, new technologies diligently explored by contemporary artists can be interpreted in terms of the “novatio” of techno-sublime, investigating the limits of representation by technical means. “Technology has subsumed the idea of the sublime because it… is terrifying in the limitless unknowability of its potential, while being entirely a product of knowledge – i.e., it combines limitless with pure ratio – and is thus at once unbounded by the human, and, as knowledge, a trace of the human now out of the latter’s control” (Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime. New York: Allworth Press, 1999, p. 128.

Time Code

2006-09-28T14:21:00.000-07:00

To find a universally working formula for time means to describe fluidity through certain parameters. Rhythm is one of them. To figure out the matrix code, or at least approach to our understanding of time is possible while exploring it through a simple being.
One of the way of visual exploration of the phenomenon of time is presented in the film Time Code where division of the film image into 4 four coexisting parts intensifies the sense of simultaneity, i.e. wherever something happens it lays in the same time plane. Simultaneity is what unites all the characters and action. However the key to the understanding the essential idea is in the one of the final scenes: producer is suggested a project of a film without any montage, woven as a one whole in a “real time”. It would be definitely an adventurous experiment that contradicts the original idea of cinema as another, reflected and modified reality, the flow of events condensed into a short product. Devoid of any effects (montage is the first and the basic one), such a film, on the surface, would be a mere mirroring. The meaning of it, though, would be not representation of the event taking place in the space, but the continuity itself. Partitioned/split picture here as an interrupted narrative of The Babysitter discloses the nature of time.
The Long Now Foundation develops one of the most complex project exploring the issues of time and how it is in modern culture - longnow.org

improvising the presence

2006-09-28T14:20:00.000-07:00

improvising the presence

2006-09-27T21:44:00.000-07:00

Rhythm or Fever? Continuity in Sampling?

“Everything is rhythm, the entire destiny of man is one heavenly rhythm, just as every work of art is one rhythm, and everything swings from the poetizing lips of god” (Hoelderlin).

The statement of romantic poet of the period of his insanity is just to outline the tradition of the subject of rhythm in art without going deeper into the history of this concept. It would be enough to say that what makes rhythm the crucial general principles of art is that first of all it is a structure, scheme, in opposition to elemental, inarticulate nature. It is one of the author’s prisms that makes the piece a whole, but like Gestalt, a whole that contains something more that just a sum of its parts. It is also Measure and Logos. Essentially it consists of simply a flow and its interruptions – splits and stops.

Paul D. Miller’s, “Rhythm Science” is a thoughtful book reflecting his work electronic music and mixes as Dj Spooky. “Rhythm science is a forensic investigation of sound as a vector of a coded language that goes from the physical to the informational and back again”. Vector here is a metaphorical underlying of intentionality. It is not about “transparency” of intent. Transparent structures is something from Piet Mondrian. True “science” explores structures in their dynamics. This book examines the fascination of machinic processes. “Watch the flow: That’s the content versus context scenario of Dj culture. Hardware, wetware, shareware, software: The invisible machinery of the codes that filter the sound is omnivorous” (Paul D. Miller, Dj Spooky That Subliminal Kid. Rhythm Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004) - p.12)

There was no any “law of series or sequences” (how and what event to percept) in Victorian era, where biologist Paul Kammerer, tried to find an equation that would describe how things manifest in urban reality”. Now we can say that modern science (theory of dynamical systems) found an answer in the figure of an attractor (“a set to which the system evolves after a long enough time”), this temporal matrix. In asynchronic systems with chaotic dinamics functions strange attractor.

“Strange attractor” sounds like a character from a theatre piece, protagonist of the modernity in a way. “Commedia del Arte becomes digital, becomes total theatre… Technology is a collective hallucination”(p.16), theatrical in terms of playing with illusions. Sampling is presented as a kinesthetic theatre of memory. Antonen Arteau suggested “cruelty”, radicalism of act and pungency of perception to come to a genuine state of mind. However today we challenge ourselves by searching for the right code. “The challenge is to keep striving to create new worlds” while “wandering through an indeterminate maze of intentionality”, “the data-cloud”, “delirium of saturation”. We’ll never remember anything as it happened but we can improvise in the context, create similar, or rather completely different, stories in the same environment, absorbing randomly but with underlying structure.
“Rhythm science imposes order upon skill and the ability to deploy them both in electro-modernity’s sociographic space” (72).

People were quoting each other all the time – all the Medieval culture was based on a net/ circuit of transcriptions and borrowings. Among the most noticeable reflections on this phenomenon are ones by Harold Bloom and R.W. Emerson “Quotations and Originality” (1875). With invention of phonograph, “the memory machine”, in 1877 by Thomas Edison the discussion of quotation extended from literary to all other possible kinds of information. The postulate: “Aesthetics begins as ‘pattern recognition’” (Freidrich Kittler), became possible only after that.

“Act global, think local.” This is what Dj-ing tells us in the era of the sample. The sample is an interrogation of the meaning” (p. 113)
When collected, they group the archive of meanings, which exists not for the past, not for the present even, but for the future, giving a promise and messianic feelings. Though culture and art in particular makes them alive, animates, vivifies them in order to fill the gaps of interruptions (second procedure) and to maintain the process.

Improvising the Presence

2006-09-05T23:43:00.000-07:00

Improvisation always happens in present, it is almost tautology. This is to accentuate and to deepen our understanding of time as a condition for being and creative process as an instrument of self-liberation and learning. It is a specificity of aesthetics and any conversation about art – perpetual return (restitution), wandering in the same maze for ages. The answer is always alive individual experience of the path itself, its form and language. Black hole that sucks all the “revenew” of particular experience, realm of inexpressible, unconditional (nothing?) exists for sure, alluring and terrifying at once. Although the questions of activating the energy of unknown within the experience, questions of presentation, still remain.

Presenting the interruption.
Concepts of interruption, suspension, discontinuity have been in focus of different philosophical, religious, cultural traditions for ages. Modernism with its principle of self-critique and then postmodernism with its all-embracing openness and seemingly careless playfulness gave it some new dimensions, broader than just the primary temporal sense. Interruption is the border line between past and present experience, between here and there, me and the Other. Dualism, thinking by oppositions (for instance, in subject-object categories) is now less important than split itself and all the plentiful facets it produces.
Artist is the one who creates, or recognizes “real” in “unreal”, extraordinary in ordinary, i.e. breaks the continuity of any given data, extends the latent meaning of a media and our understanding of it. Writer’s voice is essentially the same as singer’s – just an instrument that operates and is operated by language and its elements.

Cutting, reassembling pieces – method of visual, literary, or audio collage used in the arts since Dada and Surrealist experiments of the 1920-30s – in a way is still the same principle of transformation and reorganization of materia, nature that traditional artists did with colors, lines, sounds, movements and other artistic means. The difference is to operate already immediated material of cultural database, constant producing and reproducing hypertext.
Political aspect raised by Burroughs in his praise for cutting is for sure democratic character of this method – poetry can be created by anybody (the same with music, in case of aleatoric movement). Although Cage, as well as Duchamp, were not accepted immediately and by everybody. Analogies with blog culture/art are not exactly direct and righteous. It is one of the examples of two-sidedness of culture in general – one and the same phenomenon has potential to be interpreted in a very elitist way and at the same time to be appropriated by mass culture with its omnivorousity, desire for comfort and consistent trust in illusion of power.