T-Rays

Terahertz radiation can pass through clothing, paper, cardboard, wood, masonry, plastic and ceramics. It can also penetrate fog and clouds, but cannot penetrate metal or water. (wikipedia)

The Editing Room

Jean-Luc Godard i editeringsrummet

In Scénario du Film Passion, Godard constructs a lyrical study of the cinematic and creative process by deconstructing the story of his 1982 film Passion. "I didn't want to write the script," he states, "I wanted to see it." Positioning himself in a video editing suite in front of a white film screen that evokes for him the "famous blank page of Mallarmé," Godard uses video as a sketchbook with which to reconceive the film. The result is a philosophical, often humorous rumination on the desire and labor that inform the conceptual and image making process of the cinema. Standing before the screen or directly addressing the camera, exploiting the immediacy of video to fluidly recompose and orchestrate images from the film, Godard constructs a potent social analysis that examines art and history, money and sex, romance and work and ultimately becomes a love letter to the cinema.

Harun Farocki: Interface (Schnittstelle) (1995)

This video was derived from an installation Farocki made for the Lille Museum of Modern Art, about his own work and working methods. Farocki sits behind his editing stations and describes and illustrates his ways of working, the difference between film and video, working with found footage vs. filming new material.

Farocki’s instrument is no longer the camera but the editing room. In one of his ironic insights he apostrophised himself as a “(sales) representative” for what has been pre-filmed. In his double-image video installation, Schnittstelle, he ends up representing himself. The idea of a double projection is not new (many artists and avant-garde filmmakers have been employing it for ages), you have to wonder why Farocki didn’t do something of the sort earlier. For he always wanted to commentate on the use of images by using images. And although yet again he makes an image of himself and his own workplace, this time too he keeps a distance from his object: himself. Yes, he shows how he becomes his own encyclopaedist and analyst. But it is not an honest attempt, at most a winking, roguish intermezzo. Farocki is by no means what Schnittstelle might suggest, an oddball fiddling alone in his studio, remote from the real world. If not earlier, the end credits with the crew involved in the production highlights this collaboration. The impression is that someone here is chatting a bit about his work – in actuality he is trying to coach us again in how to see. Reading between the lines, however, Farocki here articulates his failure. His biggest problem is that writing has reached its historical endpoint.

Descartes Goes to Hollywood: Mind, Body and Gender in Contemporary Cyborg Cinema (1995)

BODIES AND CULTURE IN THE CYBERAGE

“There is no escape from the meat, the flesh, and cyberspace is nothing
transcendent. These are simply the disguises which pander to man’s
projections of his own rear-view illusions; reproductions of the same desires
which have guided his dream of technological authority and now become
the collective nightmare of a soulless integration” (Plant, 60).

“From the viewpoint of human evolution, VR (virtual reality, GLR)
resembles the invention of fire”(Heim, 69).

“Running free in cybernetic spaces, proliferating and transmuting at
unpredictable velocities, autonomous digital entities operate at a further
remove from the gaze or touch of the human agent than any prior generation
of forms”(Clark, 130).

“By prosthetic memories I mean memories which do not come from a
person’s lived experience in any strict sense. These are implanted
memories, and the unsettled boundaries between real and simulated ones are
frequently accompanied by another disruption: of the human body, its flesh,
its subjective autonomy, its difference from both the animal and the
technological”(Landsberg, 175).

“VR is less a change of levels than a mutation of circuitry; a matter of
additive sensory-motor reloopings, compressing anthropohistorical
consensus reality into a menu option as it denaturalizes the brain”(Land
203).

Noter til projekt om teknologi og krop

Eksempler på forskellige rum, deres karakter og funktion. Rummet kan ændres undervejs. F.eks. ved at flytte skærme eller vægge.

Editeringsrummet

Godard, muligheden for at ryge cigar og tegne på billederne. Farocki, analyse af billederne, muligheden for at afspille i slowmotion eller standse en bevægelse og dissikere billedet og dets komposition eller overgange mellem billeder. Backstage, analyse, distance, diskussion, eksperimentarium.

Præsentation/talk/lecture-rum

En person guider tilskuerne, taler til dem, introducerer ideer. Mime et formelt eller akademisk format. Muligheden for at dreje, bruge forventningen her og arbejde med et mere abstrakt eller performativt udtryk i denne form.

Oplevelsesrum, beskueren modtager, alt er planlagt. Multimedieoplevelsen. Ingen live krop er til stede bortset fra beskuerens.

Diskussions- eller dialogrum: Hvor der lægges op til at tilskuerne aktivt deltager i diskussion. En iscenesat og kunstig situation. Problemerne ved at satse på det dialogbaserede, at have forventninger til hvad deltagerne skal sige. Vores erfaringer fra gruppeterapien.

Lecture, talk, performance

Virkemidler:

- Voiceover, der er tilstede i rummet uden en krop

- Styring af lys og lyd

- Tre eller flere skærme

- Flytbare vægge og skærme

- Green Screen

- 3D animerede verdener

- Live aspekt, hvor kroppen er tilstede i rummet og kan indgå eller interagere med opsætningen eller teksten.

Manuskript

Ideen om et manuskript, der inkluderer alt. Manuskriptet kan indeholde diagrammer eller andre abstrakte instruktioner, et partitur, der fortolkes frit undervejs. Oplæsning eller instruktioner der følges live.

Eksempler vi talte om

- Peter Weibel: Synthesis. En abstrakt brug af lectureformatet.

- Trisha Donnelly: Talk på MoMA

- Steve Kado artist talk om modeller på Kanalen. Kroppen interagerer i det visuelle oplæg.

- Aaron Flint Jamison artist talk i Den Gule Risalit. To projektioner, der informerer hinanden, og har forskellige status.

- Ida Börjel. Forfatter, der holder en talk, hvor hun instruerer sig selv samtidig med at hun giver sin talk. Manuskriptet er skrevet dagen før og læses op.

En idé

Vi caster/inviterer en gruppe "eksperter" og beder dem diskutere et oplæg eller udsnit af en film. Denne workshop dokumenteres og vi viser dokumentationen som installation.

Donna Haraway: A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html

Thinking in Loop: Three videos on iconoclasm, ritual and immortality (Boris Groys)

The topic of these videos by art historian and philosopher Boris Groys is, actually, video as a medium: the use of the image within the video, the analogy between video and essay, the difference between private and public use of the video, the video running in loop as a contemporary form of ritual. The film footage is not used here as a mere illustration to make the text more comprehensible, or to make certain theoretical positions more evident. Rather, these video lectures thematize the gap between what we hear and what we see, and reflect on the relationship between image and word in our media-driven world.

Boris Groys, Global Professor at New York University, is a philosopher, essayist, art critic, media theorist and an internationally acclaimed expert on late-Soviet Postmodern art and literature, as well as on the Russian avant-garde. Dr. Groys' writing engages the wildly disparate traditions of French Poststructuralism and Modern Russian philosophy.

Boris Groys, Thinking in Loop, 2008 - Curated by Bart van der Heide

Trisha Donnelly

Trisha Donnelly's photographs, drawings, and video, sound, and performance art challenge viewers to consider the meaning of signs, logic, and narrative. Through gestures, expressions, and the passage of time, she cryptically reveals imaginary languages and belief systems that alter viewers' perceptions of images and environments.

Peter Weibel «Synthesis»

A discourse on language, technology and politics. An endless text, a finite model of infinite time. The speaker says 'on', and presses the ON swtich of the magnetophone. Recorded on the magnetophone is an endlessly looped sequence of the word 'off'. The tape says 'off'. The speaker presses the OFF key, then says 'on', and presses the ON key, and so it goes on. The text is carried out until either the magnetophone breaks down or the speaker gives up, exhausted. The speech process as a dialogue between natural and artificial elements, between spontaneity and rules (machines).

Peter Weibel

x-ray

Ideologi

Synsmaskinen

"I det øjeblik, hvor vi foregiver at skaffe os midlerne til bedre at se mere af universets usete, er vi på nippet til at miste vores skrøbelige evne til at forestille os det. I sin egenskab af model for synsproteserne fremviser teleskopet billedet af en verden uden for vores rækkevidde og således en anden måde at bevæge os på i verden, og perceptionens logistik indstifter en ukendt overførsel af blikket; den skaber teleskoperingen af det nære og det fjerne - et accelerationsfænomen, der ophæver vort kendskab til afstande og dimensioner."

Paul Virilio

Hartmut Bitomsky - Playback (1995)

Playback is a documentary film about a workshop that took place at the Nederland Fimmuseum in Amsterdam in 1995, and which was supported by the Goethe Institute. The subject of the workshop was the early documentary cinema between 1910 and approximately 1920 - and also making of this video.

The participants included film students, filmmakers, visual artists, film historians and archivists from the Filmmuseum, and surrounding them was a crew of cinematographers, sound technicians and camera and production assistants, who recorded almost everything that was going on.

During the two weeks of sessions more than 30 films were reviewed, a few times in a movie theater and additionally on TV screens, and in discussed in general group sessions, in which reports were prepared and presented by individual participants. Later on, various video installations were set up, which were then again recorded by cameras. Finally, the workshop was presented to the public at the Rotterdam Film Festival, where the films were shown and the first results of the workshop discussed with the festival audience.

What are these old and seemingly old-fashioned films able to tell us today? Do they still convey to us a meaning, and if not, does the difficulty in understanding them lie with us or them?

And is there any need to preserve films if they are no longer capable of communicating to us in a manner that corresponds to our contemporary way or perceiving and understanding reality?

While we are working on coming to terms with these kinds of questions in the workshop, the following quotation from Umberto Eco appeared, who was visiting Amsterdam at that time: 'Creativity is not so much the inventing of new materials as it is the rearranging of materials that are old'. This rearranging of old materials is exactly what the video Playback does. It conjugates, so to speak, old films by using various media and by offering interpretations, and through forms of perception and experimenting with ideas in order to find out how much we are alienated from our (even recent) history and how much work is involved in showing it again.

"Playback" is a documentary of workshop in Amsterdam, for studying films which was made in 1910�`20s.It's important that this film is also a documentary of people studying 'media literacy'.For example there is a sequence that people discuss with each other while they watch fragments of silent films called 'beauty contest'.One says 'They're called 'beauty contest' but they're all beautiful',one says,'No,they might have been forced to face the camera like Pasolini's "Salo",and they look sad.',and another one says,'But there is a part that a boy stands close to a girl as if he protect her'...Probably "Playback" is influenced by the sequence of Rouch's "Chronique d'ete" that people who were filmed comment after projection of the film,but it is a great documentary of the meeting between people and images that separates the time of 80 years,and of inventing an idea and discourse from there. And we can imagine someone makes a documentary of people who discuss while they're watching "Playback" in future.It's a rare documentary opening to the future.

Bitomsky says the collapse of the direct relation between image and reality because of digital image's appearance and disappearance of images in war, are challenges to documentary.It may lead falling down of truth of image,and our judgment under presence and consumerism is submit itself to 'official announcement'?Will it become impossible for us to persuade a trace in an image?If we could be liberated from prompt reaction and secure the space and time to think,we can have something that was potential surface to view. He says "the task of the future documentary will be to create doubt. You could say, the more sophisticated literacy that could read not only images but also the method of working images." Cinema is the only place because it lost position of the mass media. The circulation of preservation, criticism, and creation of image can offer us how to defend ourselves.

Screen Play

Maria Chavez, Marina Rosenfeld and Tristan Shepherd performing Christian Marclay’s Screen Play, New York City Whitney Museum, 1 July, 2010

Pleasure, progress and the free market

http://perceptionnyc.com/content/iron-man-2

http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/movies/07iron.html

"An apostle of pleasure, progress and the free market, he is the kind of devil-may-care, lady-killing capitalist demigod that just about every hedge-fund cowboy and high-tech guru of the past 10 years has dreamed of being. And he cares too: about world peace and race cars and scientific innovation, among other things."

And interfaces are great reflection of his persona. They’re not the calm, clean, democratic elegance of an iPad. Instead they’re a collection of hyper-kinetic, hacker, engineer, power user, everything-at-once, all-for-me experiences. Just like Stark.

Travels around Kgs. Nytorv (in google maps)

Plakat af 'Inception' i 'Københavns bybillede i google street-view

ca. brede/længde grad: 55.676045,12.567973

Google earth

Visualizing Eleven Dimensions

"..Does anybody here happens to be interested in other dimensions?.."

quantum mechanics... conciousness... and...

Inception (2010)

Time, Frame, Cinema: spatiotemporal (virtual camera movement) effects

http://www.digitalair.com/pdfs/Space_Time_Frame_Cinema.pdf

Travels in Hyperreality

Fra filmen 'Surrogates' (2009)

Nedenunder er et citat fra Umberto Eco's 'Faith in fakes'
kapitlet: Travels in Hyperreality, The Fortresses of Solitude

"Holography could prosper only in America, a country obsessed with realism, where, if a
reconstruction is to be credible, it must be absolutely iconic, a perfect likeness, a "real" copy
of the reality being represented.
Cultivated Europeans and Europeanized Americans think of the United States as the home
of the glass-and-steel skyscraper and of abstract expressionism. But the United States is
also the home of Superman, the superhuman comic-strip hero who has been in existence since
1938. Every now and then Superman feels a need to be alone with his memories, and he
flies off to an inaccessible mountain range where, in the heart of the rock, protected by a
huge steel door, is the Fortress of Solitude.
Here Superman keeps his robots, completely faithful copies of himself, miracles of
electronic technology, which from time to time he sends out into the world to fulfill a
pardonable desire for ubiquity. And the robots are incredible, because their resemblance to
reality is absolute; they are not mechanical men, all cogs and beeps, but perfect "copies" of
human beings, with skin, voice, movements, and the ability to make decisions. For
Superman the fortress is a museum of memories: Everything that has happened in his
adventurous life is recorded here in perfect copies or preserved in a miniaturized form of
the original. Thus he keeps the city of Kandor, a survival from the destruction of the planet
Krypton, under a glass bell of the sort familiar from your great-aunt's Victorian parlor.
Here, on a reduced scale, are Kandor's buildings, highways, men, and women. Superman's
scrupulousness in preserving all the mementoes of his past recalls those private museums,
or Wunderkammern, so frequent in German baroque civilization, which originated in the
treasure chambers of medieval lords and perhaps, before that, with Roman and Hellenistic
collections."

Bergsons cone

..forsøgte at huske forskellige former for repræsentationer af tid (gennem diagrammer).. kan huske at Daniel Birnbaum sidestillede de forskellige i 'Cronology', men kan ikke huske hvor jeg har lagt bogen... måske på loftet.. måske ikke..

Matrix Green Screen

What kind of history?

"The question of the new requires a historical problematic, a temporal and spatial framework in which there are risks of setting up the new as a culmination, telos or fulfillment of the old, as the onset of utopia og dystopia. The conceptual problem is to enable a historical differentiation of old and new without initialising a totalising narrative."

New Media. A Critical Introduction.

Hastighed og Politik (2)

Sammentrækningen af afstandene er blevet en strategisk virkelighed med uberegnelige økonomiske og politiske konsekvenser, eftersom den svarer til en ophævelse af rummet.

Manøvren som før bestod i at opgive området for at tjene tid mister enhver mening. Nu er det at vinde tid udelukkende et spørgsmål om vektorer og territoriet har mistet sin betydning til fordel for projektilet. Faktisk har den strategiske værdi af hastighedens ikke-sted fuldstændigt erstattet stedets, og spørgsmålet om besiddelse af tiden har fornyet spørgsmålet om tilegnelsen af områder. (...) Med den supersoniske vektor (fly, raket, magnettog) blandes gennemtrængning og ødelæggelse med hinanden; distancehandlingens øjeblikkelighed svarer til den overraskede modstanders nederlag men også og især til nederlaget for verden som felt, som afstand, som materie.
Den umiddelbare gennemtrængning, eller den som er på vej til at blive det, identificeres med den øjeblikkelige ødelæggelse af miljøbetingelserne, for efter afstand/rum er det afstand/tid som forsvinder i den voksende acceleration i transportmidlernes præstationer (præcision, rækkevidde, hastighed).

(...)

Tidens sammentrækning og det territoriale rums forsvinden medfører, at begreberne før og efter ikke længere betegner andet end fremtid og fortid i en form for krig, hvor 'nu'et' synes at forsvinde i beslutningens øjeblikkelighed. Den sidste form for magt vil altså ikke i så høj grad være knyttet til opfindsomhed som til foregribelse, nemlig for så vidt det at styre ikke vil være andet end at forudse, at simulere og at huske simulationerne. Det nuvrende "forskningsinstitut" vil kunne fremstå som modellen for denne sidste magt, utopiens magt. Tabet af det materielle rum leder til styringen af tiden alene; Tidsministeriet skitseret i enhver vektor vil endeligt fuldendes i dimensionerne hos det største transportmiddel som findes, Statsvektoren. Hele den geografiske historie om opdeling af jord og landområder, alt dette ophører til fordel for en enkelt sammenlægning af tiden; magten kan ikke længere sammenlignes med andet end en slags "meteorologi", en usikker fiktion hvor hastigheden snart bliver en skæbe, en form for fremskridt, det vil sige en "civilisation" hvor enhver hastighed lidt vil være en "region" af tiden.

Fra Paul Virilios Hastighed og Politik (1977)

Hastighed og politik (1)

Fascismen var kun totalitær i det omfang den forsøgte at blive helt igennem dromokratisk: "livsrummet" er blot en forsvinding af Europas geografi, som bliver et areal, en ørken uden egenskaber underlagt ekspansiviteten hos en "social" organisation som helt var funktionaliseret af hastighedshierarkiet, det samme hierarki som skabte nationalsocialismen på Berlins brosten inden det med den totale krig vendte tilbage til dets elitistiske kulturelle rødder. Fra starten udstiller den nazistiske propaganda med glæde angrebsmenneskets perfekte krop, den blode naturistiske arier. Det som man på Berlins stadion sætter i scene i fejringen af den olympiske liturgi er netop et kropshierarki ordnet efter gennemtrængningshastigheden. Sportskroppen er en prytanisk krop, som selv er projektil eller affyrer, ophidselsen over en hastigheds- eller afstandsrekord er den sammen som ved angrebet. Selve princippet for sportsudøvelsen, denne nedtælling i tid og rum, er blot en teatralisering af væddeløbet mod dens "absolutte stohed", af den militære fremrykning som begynder med en langsom og geometrisk march, og overgår i en mere og mere kraftfuld acceleration af kroppen for at give den det endelige fremstød.

Fra Paul Virilios Hastighed og Politik (1977)

The body and the new action film: Motion Capture / Optical motion tracking

Motion Tracking can differ from Motion Capture because in applications such as sports and missiles the object of interest is tracked optically instead of a person.

Michael Snow - La Région Centrale (1971)

The Optical Unconscious (Benjamin)

"Walter Benjamin defines the 'optical unconscious' as an unconscious visual dimension of the material world that is normally filtered out from people's social consciences, thus remaining invisible, but which can be made visible using mechanical recording techniques (such as photography and film: slow motion, zoom). In his words, «it is a different nature which speaks to the camera than speaks to the eye: so different that in place of a space consciously woven together by a man on the spot there enters a space held together unconsciously.»"

"A movie camera can be mounted on a speeding locomotive, dropped down a sewer, or secreted in a valise and carried surreptitiously around a city.  The camera reveals aspects of reality that register in our senses but never quite get processed consciously. Film changed how we view the least significant minutiae of reality just as surely as Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life changed how we look at incidental phenomenon like slips of the tongue. In other words, film serves as an optical unconscious. Benjamin asserts the film camera "introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses."
In Benjamin's lifetime photographic and cinematographic technologies improved dramatically, thus widening the spectrum of visual experience that can be caught on film. The idea that improved technology can expand our sense perception and make the unconscious visible continues today. Digital video has improved to the point at which an entire television series can be devoted to the filming of ghosts."

Andre Masson Automatic/Unconscious Drawng, 1930s

Detection of periodic motion

A custom view - animated cameras

Cameras present a scene from a particular point of view. Camera objects simulate still-image, motion picture, or video cameras in the real world.

Free camera

When a Free camera is initially created, it points at the negative Z-axis of the active viewport. The single parameter for Free cameras defines a Target Distance—the distance to an invisible target about which the camera can orbit.

Target Camera

Target cameras always face their target.

Neo’s Liberal Movement: The New Action Film as a Handmaiden to Globalism

"As far back as the 1930s, Walter Benjamin wrote about the dizzying cinematic effect of the placeless camera moving in shot-countershot while occupying multiple perspectives. He believed that such protean perspective broke down the viewer’s defenses against the power of its vision as the director dissected and reconstituted reality. One can only guess what he would have made of the new subjective movement in The Matrix’s opening scene, where the camera, like the object of its gaze, seems to know no limits. It raises up, it circles, it is above, then close-up, the range of focus deepens, then it does a 320 degree sweep around the room, cutting back and forth around 25 times in 30 seconds. "

Harun Farocki's 'Images of the World and the Inscription of War' (1989)

 "The greatest danger is posed by the objectivity and actuality of things. It isdangerous to remain physically near the object, to linger at the scene. One ismuch safer if one takes a picture and evaluates it later at one’s desk."

Paul Virilio's 'War and Cinema'

What defines cinema, Virilio writes, is not the production of images but their manipulation: pans and tracking shots, zooming in and out etc. Cinema is the manipulation of dimensions, producing depth through movement. As has been noted by artists and writers before Virilio, this aligns the experience of watching movies with that of flying. And while pioneer directors were coming to terms with this unique aspect of cinema, he argues, aviation in the early 20th century became less about breaking speed records and more about a new way of seeing.
Aerial photography was introduced during the American Civil War (via hot air balloons), but came into its own during the first World War. It epitomizes Virilio’s logistics of perception, in that it requires a large-scale operation, including planning and post-production.