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The role that the virtual plays in its intersection with time, with memory, can be described by a performance value that will be initially termed the Cinematic Threshold. The main theme that this paper develops is that there is inherent to this Cinematic Threshold a certain quality that involves us as viewers / participants in such a way that duration is invoked. This is built into the method of the cinema, and to varying degrees into each technology that we live within.
The role that the virtual plays in its intersection with time, with memory, can be described by a performance value that will be initially termed the Cinematic Threshold. The main theme that this paper develops is that there is inherent to this Cinematic Threshold a certain quality that involves us as viewers / participants in such a way that duration is invoked. This is built into the method of the cinema, and to varying degrees into each technology that we live within.
The role that the virtual plays in its intersection with time, with memory, can be described by a performance value that will be initially termed the Cinematic Threshold. The main theme that this paper develops is that there is inherent to this Cinematic Threshold a certain quality that involves us as viewers / participants in such a way that duration is invoked. This is built into the method of the cinema, and to varying degrees into each technology that we live within.
Ed Keller ( mantis@basilisk.com.) copyright1995 1.0 THE VIRTUAL I would like to begin with a mise en abyme, a meditation on the nature of the virtual which will throw this essay through its entire trajectory and deposit us in a place where a more detailed development of each of these concepts can occur. As a starting point I find the formulation of the virtual that Deleuze gives us via Proust fascinating : 'Real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.' p96, Bergsonism This understanding of the virtual insists upon its operative nature; moreover, the operative nature of something that is not, most likely, visible. It is used by Deleuze within the context of the performance of memory as a force that conditions our perception ineluctably and shapes us as subjects. In Deleuze's investigation of the subject through Bergson's idea of memory, virtuality is the key realm within which memory locates itself . 1.1 The Threshold The role that the virtual plays in its intersection with time, with memory, can be described by a performance value that will be initially termed the Cinematic Threshold. The term, which I take from Deleuze, reminds us of a spectrum of instrumental qualities that are identifiable in film and in photography; as well as in techniques manipulating space, and rative. The cinematic threshold is a revealing possibility in film, which exposes the previously unseen and unthought. As such it maintains an instrumentality that has a direct effect upon the configuration of our subjectivity; it gives us more than an expanded lexicon; in fact, the main theme that this paper develops is that there is inherent to this cinematic threshold a certain quality that involves us as viewers/participants in such a way that duration is invoked. This is built into the method of the cinema, and to varying degrees into each technology that we live within. So the description of such instrumentalities will be our focus. 1.2 The Invocation of Duration; Speed's role in relation to Duration One of the special relations developed by the Cinematic Threshold is the 1 involvement between time and certain intrumentalities. As it performs, at the limit condition of our retinal capacity, it invokes time in a particular way which we can call duration (following Bergson). Speed is invoked, as well, for the varying speeds and slownesses present around the cinematic threshold (the slow mo/ the closeup/and so on) extend the retinal limit in a way that would be previously outside of thought. Speed's relationship to time will take on a larger significance (this connexion will be developed through Bernard Steigler's analysis of Nietzsche) in the action that memory plays in configuring our perception, our subjectivities, because of the concern that has been revealed vis a vis our physical limits, and time as the area into which perception descends. The main trajectories of this investigation are thus revealed. Our concern is, with the configuration and extension of subjectivity, understanding the virtual as the chief realm for those configurations. 1.3 OPERATIVE FICTIONS...(who ever said I was writing anything but fictions...) Note the model of subjectivity in William Gibson's Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive. The individual's perceptual field is not restricted to their own library of experience, nor to a purely retinal model. Telepresence thus becomes legitimized as a realm of experience along with the retinal, and the haptic, in such a way that the individual's extension into the virtual is a commonplace. As well, their access to libraries of other's experiences is a field that extends their personal subjectivity in much the way that our current technology of the hard drive and the Internet might be said to functionally extend our memory, creating a deployed subjectivity. This point assumes not that our subjectivity was ever purely localized, but that the instrumental qualities of our current technology allow a new form of an already existing deployment. The importance of this example is twofold- it opens the question of the virtual as always having been present in the operative nature of any instrumentality, however concrete- and it simultaneously notes the instrumental peculiarites inherent in Gibson's understanding of virtuality. As noted above, there is an affiliation between the performance envelope of film, which evolves from it's particular instrumental characteristics, and Bergsonian duration. A favorite example from another discipline employing the explicity operative virtual is the work of Max Ernst, specifically his collage novels, which have been the subject of some attention in Krauss and Foster. I use Ernst as an example of a somewhat different understanding of the collage as a model of hyperplanarity/inchoate becoming animal, and thus a perfect site for an analysis of virtuality. This argument depends upon an understanding of the surface of the image in Ernst not as a site for a purely psychoanalytical or textual decoding, but a field of intensities that 2 invoke the inchoate and the savage. Andrew Benjamin's term timing captures the element of this new form of savagery well in it's understanding that the work of the work is to TIME: to throw the subject into duration. 1.4 CGI/CAD This is a realm that is close to home for architects, but also for the modern filmmaker. Questions of 'presence' will be opened here, vis a vis the interface. It is linked in my mind to the development of modern computer games, which are one of the primary examples of an extension into cyberspace of the operative realm of the virtual in a way that is specifically spatial (as an extension of the subject into a virtual space through telepresence). Marathon, a new game for the Macintosh platform, is a good example. 1.5 POWER Power is coursing through the virtual in it's inflections of our everyday freedoms. Any understanding of the virtual must take into account the matrices of power that bound it's practical and passionate uses. The issue of power may be understood via it's two aspects developed by Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault: puissance and pouvoir. As Brian Massumi clarifies: 'Puissance refers to a range of potential...It may be thought of as a scale of intensity or fullness of existence...puissance pertains to the virtual, (the plane of consistency), pouvoir to the actual (the plane of organization). D&G use pouvoir in a sense very close to Foucault's, as an instituted and reproducible relation of force, selective concretization of potential.' -1000 Plateaus, p xvii The relation of power to the virtual takes on tremendous force within the Internet. Between the dialogic formation of subjectivity and the instrumentalities of cyberspace can be found one potential escape path from some of the matrices of power I will touch upon. There are conditions which can be drawn from cyberspace and mapped onto other disciplines, as well, so one is not limited to cyberspace's constrained virtuality; however, my main theme recognizes that our society is moving increasingly into the technologized virtual, into a composite or cyborg condition; therefore, I feel it crucial to theorize techniques of the virtual for this deployed base. It is important to note, as well, that computers and the Internet itself accelerate techniques of surveillance, and provide powerful tools for cataloging individuals. This aspect pervades the use of the networked computer and has sinister overtones at best. In theorizing the Internet then, these aspects, which deploy a truly crushing kind of panopticism against the individual, must be considered carefully. 3 The techniques examined here, within these contexts, do suggest at least the mention of the word resistance. However, I use this word with caution, not seeking to proffer examples of what I consider useless revolutions that we have seen in the past, but to think through the problem in the way that Walter Benjamin devoted himself to mechanical reproduction. This paper's trajectory is an attempt to extend the theories of Deleuze & Guattari, Ensenzberger, Bahktin, et. al. into the consideration of the dialogic as it irrupts across the World Wide Web. Crucial is a theory of the virtual from a viewpoint which assumes not an independent subject, (even in the virtual) but a dialogically configured subject; and one that does not cast aside the elements of aura that Benjamin struggled with, but was unable to incorporate into his socialist schema for mechanical reproduction. Lest anyone cry global village here as a riposte to these issues, let me hasten to add that simply having global telecommunications broadcasts is NOT enough. 2.0 THE CINEMATIC THRESHOLD The Cinematic Threshold refers to the operational value of a set of techniques inherent to the filmic, and particular actions these techniques carry out within matter and our perception. This bases the notion of the performance of cinema, not on a largely psychoanalytic model (cf. Christian Metz) but rather on a model invested in a multiplicitous space of capability- by this I mean an assemblage that works through a combination of the interpretive and the machinic. Thus developed is the notion of the subject formed by an assortment of forces both enunciative and machinic. By enunciative I mean textual, but also imageistic, habitual; narrative in the sense that even an appliance might be, in that it restricts program to a single sequence and function within the logic of capitalist consumption. Machinic forces are those that realize their effect outside of, or within the fabric of, a subject's interpretation. The machinic is to some extent invisible. The setting up of this invisibility may be revealed through an interrogation of the instrumental qualities inherent in certain filmic techniques. There are analagous techniques of virtuality not limited to the purely cinematic which will also implemement these new degrees and kinds of subjectivity. But let's start with film... "Movement has an essential relation to the imperceptible; it is by nature 4 imperceptible. Perception can grasp movement only as the displacement of a moving body or the development of a form. Movements, becomings, in other words, pure relations of speed and slowness, pure affects, are below and above the threshold of perception. Doubtless, thresholds of perception are relative; there is always a threshold capable of grasping what eludes another: the eagle's eye... But the adequate threshold can in turn operate only as a function of a perceptible form and a perceived, discerned subject. So that movement in itself continues to occur elsewhere: if we serialize perception, the movement always takes place above the maximum threshold and below the minimum threshold, in expanding or contracting intervals (microintervals). Like the huge Japanese wrestlers whose advance is too slow and whose holds are too fast to see, so that what embraces are less wrestlers than the infinite slowness of the wait (what is going to happen?) and the infinite speed of the result (what happened?). What we must do is reach the photographic or cinematic threshold.." Cinema 1, p280-1 Deleuze here uncovers a host of concerns; for example, the limits of an individual perception, the relation between speed, time and perception. This project is addressed as well by Walter Benjamin when he says 'The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject.' -The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction The camera is an instrumentality that cuts out a bit of reality and reveals the unthought in it; similarly the moving section is one in the catalogue of filmic techniques that form an instrumental practice occurring in the evolution of cinema, an evolution that moves from the still image and POV to the moving image, to the moving POV/section, to finally a time image. The implications of this development of technology for the subject in relationship to power have been clarified by Jonathan Crary, who notes in reference to early camera technologies: As a complex technique of power, it was a means of legislating for an observer what constituted perceptual 'truth', and it delineated a fixed set of relations to which an observer was made subject. This begs the question of how power relationships decide a technology . Greg Lynn addresses this in comments from a recent virtually realized conference (published in print in ANY issue 10, 'mech in tecture') when he writes There should be a distinction made between more fluid and supple relations 5 of operation in space and time (abstract machines) and the mechanisms produced out of these relations (concrete assemblages). What is interesting is the argument that the diagram comes before the concrete machine: "techniques are selected by diagrams: for example, prison exists as a mechanism only when a new diagram, the disciplinary diagram, makes it cross 'the technical threshold'." The diagram is the social and cultural organization that makes technology possible. Thus the threshold we are dealing with is one of both perception on a retinal level and perception, or configurations of the subject, on a more distributed plane. It also re-situates our question of the threshold back on the plane of the virtual, as this plane is where the abstract machine lodges its performance. The question is not here the chicken or the egg, but more, how do the two dynamically reconfigure each other- the technique working upon the diagram and vice versa. This brings us to the catalog of instrumentalities, filmic and otherwise. Any catalog of instrumentalities will be of course incomplete, and should be viewed as highly provisional, and to some degree culturally relative. However what is at stake here is realizing the operative nature they carry, and not defining an essential set of techniques. With that stated, I would like to move from the optic/cinematic, to the computer and its spectrum of possibilities, and finally to look at the intersections between power and the computer's instrumental characteristics. Deleuze identifies numerous techniques which are germaine to this discussion, which I will apply to several films. These instrumentalities are ordered in a sequence that parallels the evolution of cinematic thresholds that Deleuze maps in his Cinema 1&2. 2.1 THE POSE This is a quality diagrammatically exemplified by still photography. Not surprisingly, many representations of architecture adopt the pose as well- static views of buildings frozen, concretized in time (the absence of time). Exceptions might be animations (sic.), some renderings by Zaha Hadid, and the like; or the work of Boccioni- I am thinking in particular of The City Rises, but Boccioni's work in general has a concern with the intersection between time, perception, and technical instrumentaliteis (cf. Sanford Kwinter's recent analysis of the Stati d'Anime series in Assemblage). A curious example of the pose in film can be found in Gus van Sant's My Own Private Idaho. I use this example knowing that it is not entirely within the theoretical limitations Deleuze identifies with the pose, however, it is so intriguing I can't resist. In this film, during certain moments of sexual tension, the film 6 denies specular pleasure to the viewer by immersing us in a series of 'poses'. Van Sant uses these poses with intent, unlike the internet which gives us a series of poses because of current technical limitation. The theoretical intent is of course, completely at odds in these examples but the result is somewhat the same. There is a distancing from presence, and as Deleuze notes, the development of a modern theory of montage depends on the idea that cinema has moved beyond this manner of involving us in motion. "In fact, to recompose movement with eternal poses or with immobile sections comes to the same thing: in both cases, one misses the movement because one constructs a whole, one assumes that all is given, whilst movement only occurs if the whole is neither given nor giveable.' p7, Cinema 1 In the case of My Own Private Idaho, these scenes turn the condition of sexuality on screen on its head, by virtue of their rhythmic and enunciative value within the film; in fact it is interesting exactly because these scenes function as time images, even though Deleuze relegates the pose to the beginning of the evolution of cinema. 2.2 DEPTH OF FIELD Deleuze notes in Cinema 2 that '... depth of field creates a certain type of direct time-image that can be defined by memory, virtual regions of past... This would be less a function of reality than a function of remembering, of temporalization: not exactly a recollection but 'an invitation to recollect...'-- p109 This notion of depth of field could be linked to painting: like Piero Della Francesca's Flagellation or Velasquez' las Meninas. Counter to it one might posit Uccello's Battle of San Romanoas an example of the lateral activation of a visual field. One could also discuss Tarkovski here at length in his explicit use of slow pans across Bruegel's painting Hunters in the Snow in the film Solaris; a lateral cinematic move over a painting that operates primarily through depth of field. Using any of these examples as an oppositional strategy would be a mistake. The point here is that a timing has occured which involves the viewer as a more active participant both perceptually and enunciatively in the space the film creates. This is a technique which intersects tangentially with the interpretive and the narrative in the way that it brings duration into play using the memory explicitly. 2.3 THE EMPTY SET is a technique akin in a way to silence in a musical composition (or an absolute volume/noise) where the screen dissolves utterly into a color. There is an abstract element to this, in fact, which 7 replaces the interpretive in the pose shot; this abstract or sensate realm is where the empty set locates its operative nature. In the opening sequence of Bergman's Persona for example, when our POV dives into the projector's arcing light, thus dissolving the screen in an intensity; such a move exposes in both an enunciative and an instrumental manner the apparatus of the film. As well, Kieslowski uses this technique of the empty set in a more expressionistic manner when in Blue his lead character experiences fugue states- moments of intense anguish and inspiration when she recalls the recent death of her family, or suddenly and cathartically hears the continuation of a symphony she is writing , in lieu of her dead husband. This intensity of darkness, of blue on the screen, is matched with brief passages from the symphony. They do not occcupy the role of transition, but take us both deeper into the experience of the character, and place us out of the filmic- thus problematizing the filmic experience in a sublime, or blissful manner (cf. Pellegrino D'Acierno, Roland Barthes). 2.4 SHOT AS MOVING SECTION Similarly, in the shot used as moving section, which begins to activate the POV of the camera; the shot understood as '...a mobile section, that is, a temporal perspective or a modulation.' Deleuze quotes Epstein: '...For the perspective of the outside he substitutes the perspective of the inside, a multiple perspective, shimmering, sinuous, variable and contractile, like the hair of a Hygrometer.' (One thinks immediately of Roberto Matta's multiperspectival deep space, in works like The Vertigo of Eros.) Filmically there is a parallel in the travelling tracking shots in Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, which reveal different realities as they transparently pass through architectural boundaries, poches; the intensities of violence swathed in white in the bathroom, in contrast to those in red, or green in the dining room or kitchen. Placing the characters in differently colored yet identical costumes as the pan passes through each architectural boundary is a revealing of the apparatus. For instance; the upward tracking in the opening shot, revealing the scaffolding of the set, emerging from the city set's underbelly to the muted growlings of the packs of wild dogs that populate its back alleys. Another travelling shot of great interest is the closing scene of The Passenger, which (and I am indebted to Pellegrino D'Acierno's analysis of this shot) sets up a series of limits- the window grate, for instance; and brings us into the climactic scene with perhaps, certain expectations; then lets us see, first, only Nicholson's feet, then, as we enter third person completely and our attention wanders out of the room, through the window, we pass through the barrier of the window and barely notice the gunshot behind us as we transgress this limit and move out into the court beyond. This shot is interesting as well because of it's out of field characteristics, but 8 I mention it here as an example of a focusing of our attention in the way that our POV/character is established in the shot, then transformed, in the course of a movement. 2.5 THE OUT OF FIELD As we see in this travelling shot, the out of field can play a particular role in focusing our attention. As Antonioni uses it in The Passenger, and in Blowup or L'Aventtura, we find that certain rhythms and expectations are set up which take us out of an absentminded apprehension of a narrative sequence in the film, and put us into a state of bliss.This sublime condition of perception/attention is of great interest in the extension of the analysis of the virtually operative in cinema out to other disciplines. Deleuze illustrates: 'In one case, the out of field designates that which exists elsewhere, to one side or around; in the other case the out of field testifies to a more disturbing presence, one which cannot even be said to exist, but rather insist or subsist....the further duration descends into the system like a spider- the more effectively the out of field fulfills its other function which is that of introducing the transspatial and the spiritual into the system which is never perfectly closed.' p17, Cinema 1 In the game Marathon (and also when one surfs the Net using Netscape,) the out of frame is a constant operative element. Marathon even maps Lacan's notion of the gaze as a hostile other, in that one is constantly under threat of attack by aliens; one's presence when surfing the net however is more akin to the sense that one is on an infinite plane of information (perhaps Bryson/Nishitani's notion of sunyata?). But the element that links Marathon and the Net is the possibility of the dialogic. In Marathon, we may immediately enter this dialogic condition by joining forces with other humans 'jacking in' to the game; whereas on the Internet the immediacy of communication is slightly vitiated, but has much more content and more closely approximates Bryson's understanding of other. (These models both differ from the out of frame that we have unpacked above in that the fully dialogic does not emerge from a linear filmic narrative in the way it can through the Net. ) 2.6 MONTAGE This model is has connexions to the one that we find developed for montage by Deleuze: 'What montage does, according to Vertov, is to carry perception into things, to put perception into matter, so that any point whatsoever in space itself perceives all the points on which it acts, or which act on it, however far 9 these actions and reactions extend. ' p81, Cinema 1 I extend this by noting Deleuze' comment on Tarkovski's conception: '...Tarkovski challenges the distinction between montage and shot when he defines cinema by the 'pressure of time' in the shot. What is specific to the image...is to make perceptible....relationships of time which cannot be seen in the represented object. ' p xvii, Cinema 2 Thus we return to our initial concerns with instrumentality and find them irrupting within the technique of montage. 2.61 Let's consider Stan Brakhage's short film 'The Dead'; what seem to be formal camera techniques initially throw us as viewers into an abstract realm. Above and beyond the absence of an explicit narrative, he employs rotations of the camera as a frame, rotation of composited frames within the overarching frame, lengthy continuous tracking and travelling shots, various effects like solarizations and color value inversions of the composited elements, handheld movements juxtaposed against the interminable tracking shots, the overlap of different color treated composites of the same image, which are often rotated against one another, the composite against a tracking shot or a 360 degree pan of its color inverted reverse, and so on. These strategies are initially impenetrable; however, as in the minimal compositions of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and John Adams, after a certain acclimatization period a shift in perception occurs- a shift analogous to the one that an attentive subject also experiences in Dan Graham's pavilion projects, (cf. the installation on the roof of DIA Center for the Arts, Manhattan). This perceptual shift opens the viewer up to continuously deepening levels of information and rhythms which the work begins to articulate. In this way, the work captures completely the level of simultaneous affect and effect that is a prerequisite for it to become a mise en abyme of the world- a Time- Image. {The performance of this kind of work takes place on many levels- within the enunciative, one can enact a whole series of interpretations on the work, in the way that Rosalind Krauss might- locating the work within an historic trajectory, analyzing the artist for their psychic investments, and so on. } However Brahkage's work also occupies a machinic realm that could be called a radical phenomenology, in the way that it functions purely upon the sensibility of the eye or the ear. It is this abstraction combined with a deep enunciative content that calls forth the question of duration. 10 3.0 MEMORY, DURATION, SPEED Let's look closely at memory, duration, and speed. It is clear at this point that each instrumentality deploys itself to varying degrees of effect depending on the 'balance' between these parameters. Bergson's memory is 'virtual coexistence.', and is identical 'in principal' to duration. The act of sinking into memory involves first a general invoking of the past, then a search for specificity. This is described as a 'leap into ontology.' After this leap has been made, recollection gradually takes on a psychological existence. "From the virtual it passes into the actual state." This actual state is the moment where the virtual becomes operative. Bergsonism, p57 This mechanism also becomes the locus for our confusion of recollection images and perception images- which is in part why the retinal exercises such a force and makes cinema (or more frighteningly, television) as powerful a realm as it is in the configuration of subjectivity. Bergson shows the relation between these two kinds of images by placing the mechanism of memory, the virtual coexistence of the past, coeval with the present: "The past would never be constituted if it did not coexist with the present whose past it is." Bergsonism, p59 Coexistence becomes a key factor in our understanding of how duration, memory, and perception intersect. 'Duration is indeed real succession, but it is so only because, more profoundly, it is virtual coexistence: the coexistence with itself, of all the levels, all the tensions, all the degrees of contraction and relaxation (dtente). Thus with coexistence, repetition must be reintroduced to duration... a repetition of planes rather than elements on a single plane; virtual instead of actual repetition. The whole of our past is played, restarts, repeats itself, at the same time.' Bergsonism, pp 60-1 3.1 Memory is a difference of kind- and calls forth non reducible differences. This condition aligns it with the mathematically/geometrically anexact: it is "...susceptible to measurement only by varying its metrical principles at each stage of the division." Bergsonism, p40 Existing/perceiving as we do in a continuous multiplicity is thus the condition of being thrown into duration, whilst simultaneously perceiving. Here we find the operative realm for strategies that produce encounters with duration. As part of their nature, they possess irreducible and anexact multiplicities.The non numerical multiplicity is duration. Duration/intuition bind together to form a rebuttal to the dialectic, which locates itself in a false articulation of the real, and then a false response to that articulation. 3.2 11 What is the role that speed plays in this constitution of memory in the virtual? For Bergson the delay in time, the actual neural delay, sets up the instrumentality of memory, putting it into duration. I am interested in this in that the computer invokes an increase in speed in terms of certain specialized computing tasks- and in the sorting and archiving of information. So speed plays a role in transforming structures- as in the vertebrate which folds itself in half so rapidly that it acquires the territory of the cuttlefish. This is what Foucault is touching on when he isolates speed, territory and communication as the three great variables of modern space. Before tackling the political significance of territory and communication, though, I would like to look again at the relation of speed to time and memory. 3.2.1 Bernard Steigler, a participant in the Electrotecture conference last year, makes two points of interest to us here. In the course of suggesting that speed may well be older than time, and considering the technological reasons at play in this idea, he suggests that in virtuality we question the recasting of the boundaries between the real and fictive: 'If we say that speed is older than space and time, then from the Nietzschean point of view this leads to an erasure of the difference not only between fiction and reality but also the organic and the nonorganic. This is a crucial concept for Nietzsche, particularly in terms of this notion of selectivity and the struggle for existence.' As we have developed above, the subject exists in an imperfect composite of perception and recollection, one always superimposed on the other. Steigler deals with a particular inflection of memory- he says 'I subscribe to Derrida's term retentional finitude, which ...means that our memory, which since Hegel has been thought as interim or interiorized memory, is in fact based on objective or external memory. ' Steigler cites Borges' story Funes, the Memorious, as an example of memory related to forgetting and selection, thus '(posing) ...the Nietzschean question of memory.' This ties the relation of power and the will to the idea '...that Nietzsche's elaboration of power is actually based on a technological understanding of selection.' Therefore, '... time (like space) cannot be thought except in relation to speed (which remains unthought).' [these quotes from ANY #3, Electrotecture ] The significance for us in these questions lies mainly in Steigler's questioning the operative limits of the real and the fictive, and the explicit tie to the instrumentality of speed upon the 'computerized' mind. Note also that the temporal dimension suffers an attenuation along the evolution that moves from real time vocal interaction, to much slower, textual interaction in printed matter (if in fact there is any interaction)-- 12 back to real time interaction with the telephone; arriving at potentially real- time but completely non interactive media, with the radio and the television. Finally we encounter the speed of games like Marathon, or the WWW, which invoke very different forms of the dialogic. These speeds demand a thinking through of the perceptual boundaries that inflect our definitions of the dialogic. The Internet steps into a new position, as it allows real time text communication, voice, image; and in a format that resists (currently) the canalizations that pouvoir imposes upon the current mass media. 4.0 INSTRUMENTALITIES/PROJECTS is a small catalog and analysis of certain instrumentalities, and projects I have worked on that address them. 4.11 The archive/sorting One of the first instrumentalities that suggests itself for examination in the computational realm, and this in light of the extension of memory previously initiated by writing, then print, is the notion of the archival quality of the computer in regards to memory. Here we see the function of the computer as a virtualization of memory in an externalized form. Specific to the concerns of this paper as well are the ways to facilitate the organization of information. During the preparation of this essay, I assembled hundreds of pages of notes, previous writings, and downloads of texts off the Internet. To remember all this information would be almost impossible, for anyone but an idiot savant; to remember it and sort it requires a technology. Previous technologies might have been textual, functioning purely as an archive. However, now the archive has become activated through the hypertext links that can be formed within it. This essay was composed in Storyspace, a program used to compile all the text into a series of slightly differentiated fields; I then used a feature of the program called the 'Path Builder' to ferret out links from word to word. Thus I can follow a path with a label like speed through hundreds of pages, and in so doing, leave a map behind. So, although I outined the text in a conventional manner, within storyspace, much 'content' was gathered by following paths pertinent to each element of the outline. The next step in this process will be to distribute this text to a group of individuals for comment, so they may add a series of links throughout the 'space' formed within the application. In this final stage the essay is posted as a hypertext 13 document on the World wide web, with links to other documents worldwide. The process of publishing, research, and collaboration has thus been accelerated dramatically. The actual performance of memory is changed as well, as the geometric model from Bergson is currently replaced by card catalog-like models, such as Lycos and Webcrawler on the WWW. This is a temporary condition, however, as 2D and soon 3D spaces of information will come to the fore as the demands for realtime Net based VR begin to produce results, thus returning us to the cognitive/intuitive spatial map offered by Bergson. The Net is transforming as well the idea of the archive, as one can conduct research online with tremendous ease. This ubiquitous deployment has enormous implications for the way we understand our relation to memory- scientific, cultural, and personal. The question is raised- are we now configured- even constituted- as subjects within the Net? and more importantly, as the key theme of this essay- when were we ever NOT configured by a virtual assemblage? 4.12 Computer Graphics In the realm of Computer graphics and CAD the way the computer operator is integrated in the virtual space through the technique of the moving section becomes a key element to a transformative media.. In CAD, one might use a static section to describe a project for construction, or in certain development stages; but to visualize/experience the space, one moves, walks, or flies through it. This moving section invests the user of the computer with an understanding of the spatial configuration that would be hard to obtain through static tools. In addition, one may study the building as a dynamic entity in space and light, or even attempt to analyze its presence dynamically in regards to program. There is a paradigm shift at work here that has the potential to change the way we think about architecture. Worthy of note is the fact that many of the software packages that we now use to design and simulate space, and which were developed originally for the film industry (SoftImage, Alias, Wavefront) now have capabilities to run physics simulations. As Greg Lynn recently observed to me, there is even a quality of form that one might obtain from these softwares which differs between packages which focus on cadd/cam (Autocad), ones that describe objects in space in a more surface and spline oriented matter (Alias) or that describe object motion according to Fcurves which are precisely editable (SoftImage). 4.2 Projects The projects follow a evolutionary order of development, in terms of their involvement with duration and virtuality. 14 4.21 WHETHER CONDITIONS: institute for electronic clothing Daly and I were CGI artists and designers with Studio AEM for this project. We began with a set of supple grids which were brought into a 3D cartesian space. From within the perspective of the space, we traced the grids using splines. These splines were fairly aleatoric as we could not tell which plane of 3 space they were in; there was an overlap of the 2D image we were looking at on screen, with the 3D space the objects were forming in. To quote Stephen Perrella's description in AD vol. 100, Design decisions are weakly determined by resonance and effects occurring within specific meaning frames, within and beyond the sphere of the project. Intention does not control the development of form. In the Institute, the program is the other of the repressive programs of contemporary market driven information culture. These splines were then skinned, and we moved through them, searching for places that might become space. The institute now consisted of three overlapping objects, one glass, one metal, and one a coruscating LCD display screen that Sean created out of a map of digital phone lines. This movement through the 'objects' was akin to a digital spelunking, as many of the interior areas of the institute were completely dark until we moved light sources in to reveal the space. 4.22 SUPERSTRUCTURE Another competition completed with Studio AEM. The project was about as fast track as one can get; modeled and rendered on a Sunday afternoon, it was at fed ex the next evening, after a long night working on the board layout with Kunio Kudo. This degree of speed was in keeping with the agenda of the project. Earlier Perrella and I had discussed the theoretical intent of the project; I then developed the computer models and rendered them from a sketch he faxed me Sunday morning. The theoretical agenda is 15 best represented by our text on the board, which I quote from here. The hyper-surface superstructure of a virtual corporation headquarters investigates future intersubjective relations as they are transfigured into new forms of human settlement in the age of information...The virtual corporation diagrams a space between print publishing (two dimensions) and architecture (three dimensions). Within this dimensional framework, an electronic net bridges informational modalities into a hypertext surface. Service modules within the headquarters electronic furoshiki incorporate print and electronic publishing, interactive media such as CD-ROM, CD- Interactive, video and interactive television, animation, computer-aided design and modeling, and architecture...The entire event-apparatus of the virtual corporation functions as a hypertext surface where subjectivities are transformed into the digital flux of a disseminating electronic skin/ surface....This endless digital fabric may also be understood as the skin of the 21st-century cyborg the seam between human existence and information technology. 4.23 CARDIFF BAY OPERA HOUSE see Greg Lynn's Text in Basilisk 1.1 for a complete project description Completed with Greg L ynn Form, this project began with an analysis of the site coastline around Cardiff at several scales, for it's branching morphology. This developed a branching oval system, which was used as a new profile of major and minor branches. The structural fins were developed as well from branching forms extracted from formal and programmatic configurations on the site. At a point when the program deployment had been partially worked out, we moved onto the computer and began to use it to verify certain design moves that were being made on paper. Ultimately most of the design was completed in a more traditional manner, but we produced a stereolithographic model from the 3D files, as well as these renderings and a short animation that made it onto the boards as a Muybridge-esque motion study. 4.24 YOKOHAMA Port Terminal This project began with an analysis of the site programmatically and in terms of the three or four cruise ships the pier was to handle. This set of requirements inflected the initial circulation diagrams. From this point on the project alternated between a virtual and a paper development. Greg Lynn 16 modeled some conceptual diagrams and then began inflecting them according to a notion of inversions and program pressures. These inflected forms were brought into Softimage and rendered, using stills and animations to bring the moving section into play in the design process. These forms took on a particular quality in terms of the specific instrumentality of the program (Microstation) that Greg was generating them in; there were peculiarities to the duplication process that produced what we termed 'Blebs' at points of folding in the program and urban surface. We opportunistically used these blebs as they had a direct relation to the program intensities that were informing their genesis. The project was resolved then on paper in the production of line drawings, using the computer plans and section elevations as underlays. At the same time I was developing a set of perspectives and elevations in Softimage using the forms that Greg had developed in Microstation. The final boards were a combination of hand drawn line work and Softimage generated CGI elevations, plans and perspectives. 4.25 Operative Voids/Derives -the project Begun several years ago with Gregg Pasquarelli, operative voids is an urban analysis project that developed out of a seminar Gregg and I took with Alex Wall and Stefano DeMartino at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture. This continuing project utilizes research, mapping and urban drawings that seek to understand operative fields, through an investigation that suggests conclusions about the relationship between enunciative (significant) and machinic (operative) assemblages in the city. 'Operative' architecture is activated by a recombination of understood typologies that are organized in varying ways to allow for the development of new conditions. The analysis and mapping of the urban environment must avoid sinking into simple representation and investigate the repercussion of transformations of programmatic and passionate relationships, thus drawing conclusions about possible reconfigurations of architecture as a machinic/ operative assembly which is complicit in the scripting of subjectivities. We use the derive as an analytic tool which, when employed in conjunction with a computer system and model of the urban spaces being traversed, allows an understanding of the dynamics of operative relations within the city. By utilizing a parallel process between the virtual space that has been constructed within the machine, and actual derives within New York, and colliding the experience and results, we have begun to identify qualitative changes and develop an abstract model that usefully articulates the 17 operative nature of the urban environment. This process takes place by photographing and filming during the derive, modeling extensive portions of the city on the computer, mapping intensities and flows both programmatically, spatially, and electronically and then moving through them simultaneously on the computer and in the city via mobile communications. Photographs, text, and mappings take on an indexical relationship to the passage through 'real' space and combine with isomorphic behavior within the 'virtual' model. 4.26 CUTTLEFISH -project animations- An urban intervention at the Trump City site on the west side highway in Manhattan. This project developed concurrent with the operative voids projectThe programme for this project called for a mediation between the speeds that the west side highway perpetuates, and the very different velocities that are present in the urban blocks bounded by the highway. One of the initiating concepts was the notion of barriers existing on the site, in part due to the west side highway, that might be happily removed, or altered. I began with a detailed program analysis of the site, and mapped the program location, and physical and the programmatic barriers on the site. These analyses were then used to deploy programmatic interventions. A site scheme was developed that attempted to respond both programmatically and formally to issues of speed, communication, the moving section, and a way of achieving TIMING on a larger urban scale. The event surface was used as one of several partially abstract models, as a mediator of the body, trajectories, the virtual surface, the real urban surface of the project, and the coruscating architecture. The initial design move actually took the highway from 96th to Battery Park city, and collapsed it back on itself to model the kind of circulatory and programmatic intensity that could occur, and that this site might support. As a diagram of how the process developed a working model, this sequence showing Oscar Nitzchke's Maison de Publicite lying down, compressing, and folding in two like Deleuze and Guattari's cuttlefish demonstrates the deformation of a more rigid programmatic and formal type. The speed that the vertebrate folds in two, Deleuze & Guattari note, is the factor that determines whether it becomes a cuttlefish. 18 The project involves the zones moving from highway and water access, and conversely from the city access, in a tangled zone where speeds and program overlap freely. Existing program and and its lines of force, use, and intensity were used as a basis for the accretion of form. The diagram from Nitzchke is used as a schematic for the sectional quality of the project, which lays a thick surface down on the site- this surface facilitates physical connexion between points across the site, on its upper surface various park and garden spaces pull people across from Lincoln center and Columbus circle, while in its interior it has an open loft typology supporting both working, commercial and dwelling space. Its underbelly becomes the thick facade/ light space of the Maison de Publicite, which can actually be inhabited, but which also provides a deep surface above the park and enables circulation zones below at ground level. The computer was used in this project to intensify the investigation of this site- work on the operative voids project played into an understanding of the site; the site was modeled in detail; and the virtual model was worked with using a material sensibility that took the form of the west side highway with its attendant program elements, bending , folding, and collapsing them into themselves, to form the cuttlefish. This collapse of form and program simultaneously in all three dimensions (not merely plan), according to certain intuited performance parameters, was one of the key concepts of the project. 4.27 The Unconfigured Subject Tract housing reconsidered | project animations '...the body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity) and a volume in perpetual disintegration. Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. It's task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history's destruction of the body... genealogy... seeks to reestablish the various systems of subjection: not the anticipatory power of meaning, but the hazardous play of dominations.' 19 Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Geneaology, History This quote from Michel Foucault illustrates clearly the notion that the body is a diagram of the forces exerted upon it: social, economic, political, moral, and ethical. These forces inflect the configuration of the subject through language, film, social organization, architecture, modes of production, and the like. It would be contradictory to this idea of 'force' to reduce the configuration of the subject to merely a set of linguistic parameters- therefore, the notion of habit will be developed as a general term under which the full scope of the other parameters fall. Such an ontological system views habit as a force that demands an examination of it's relationship to perception, form and program. In the terms this project sets out- an interrogation of the dwelling as one site that habit manifests itself within, concretely, in an architectural manner, a useful starting point was the mapping of a very local movement. The process of mapping was informed by readings of Kwinter, specifically his essays in Assemblage dealing with the notion of a system transformation and that transformation's relation to the irruption of forms/chreods; the idea of a structural stability forming around singularities; and the conclusion that some at least provisional identification of those chreods was necessary. Interestingly in the mapping of certain affects and emotions, Kwinter focused his analysis on formal/imageistic characteristics within Boccioni's Stati D'Anime tryptych: "Each panel defines a unique field of unfolding, a section through a distinct epigenetic landscape in which forms exist only in evolution or equilibrium, that is, as event generated diagrams..." This reading of one kind of performance envelope that Boccioni sets up brought to mind the notion of the anamorphic program: a program condition, or more accurately a gradient of perception, which was modeled on a decentered/oblique vision, a hybrid perception, rather than centered single point perspective. The condition of the hyperplane becomes then an analogue to programmatic anamorphosis, in that the hyperplane maps diagrammatically the blends that occur in time between one program and another as we function as perceiving beings. (An example: the hyperplane between dreaming, sleeping, reading, and drinking tea.) From this idea of hyperplane emerged the consideration that the use of certain appliances in the domestic environment invoked certain perceptual states, and the movement from appliance to appliance could be more accurately mapped using the hyperplane model. 20 Simultaneously came the idea that the notion of the cutup or collage worked as a method to rethink program, due to the limitations that habit imposed upon the design process. Ernst, due to his aleatoric and collage processes, specifically his collage novels (La Femmes 100 Tetes), emerged as a jumping off point. His diagrams of reconfigured program in the collage novels were responded to, and considered as sites for intervention. The tract house was the site (within the program of dwelling) chosen for modification and deployment. As a way to problematize habit, and open the project up to unexpected possibilites, apparently 'fictional' configurations were used as program engines, and the program which emerged became one employing the reconfigured workplace and reconfigured sites of leisure as a way to link each tract house in a possibly heterarchical manner. This larger scale consideration was one that moving towards new definitions of work and play, public and private. Simultaneously, the intervention at a highly local level was being pusrsued, and the transformation of the appliance became a strategy to create new basins of attraction within the reconfigured dwelling. Burroughs' cutup was used as the initial method to arrive at redeployment of the program and the appliance within the shell of the building, which was itself the result of a sensibly guided cutup process used on a levittown house. The main concept guiding this process is the attractor (cf. chreod above), which could be a formal element, like the appliance or the boundaries of the space surounding the activity, in relation to the procedural (the event itself.) In a return to the analysis that Kwinter unpacked regarding the Boccioni tryptych, a technique was developed in Photoshop to investigate programmatic overlaps. A courtyard house by Mies was scanned in plan, then collaged with extensively reworked areas of a plan by the situationist/ unitary urbanist Constant. This collage was then altered using a smearing technique to explore ways that diagrammatic program, or intensities of program and activity, might blend through one another. The smearing was viewed as a loaded abstract expressionist/gestural move; a way to arrive at redeployment. Ultimately this informed a similar 'spatial' smearing that was used on the earlier iteration of levittown cutups, when a fairly simple 3D model of the levitloft detournement was 'smeared' in section as well as plan. The final step in the project was a series of rendered animations which explored as many of the previous techniques as possible in an attempt to 21 isolate instrumental moments in the process, and the expected result. This loose idea of specific instrumentality would be determined by an intuition judging the probable success or failure of a particular architectural/ programmatic/appliance configuration, or sequence (montage). In the first of these animations, we move through the levitloft interior- the spatialized cutup plan. This is simply a walkthrough taking us through the spaces generated by earlier steps. In the second animation, levitorbit, we find an agitated camera swooping around the levitloft house, observing a variety of activities performed by both unexpected program and individuals, and the buildings themselves. The sky and earth (which may be grass or water) are both elaborately manipulated by the smearing technique, as the initial animation was altered extensively, frame by frame, in Photoshop. This smearing links both formal (filmic and rhythmic) elements and program areas as well. Collage techniques, the cutup, and other methods all make their appearance in this final animation loop, - a situationist/surrealist collage using moving sections informed by abstract cinema moves (cf. Stan Brakhage's The Dead). 'A central structure to Marx's thought, according to Elaine Scarry, is the reciprocity between object and body- every manufactured object recreates the body, and the body itself becomes a kind of manufactured object. In the most primitive subsistence economy, "consumption" amounts to little more than food to fuel the body & provide for tissue regeneration. As economies advance, a "production" emerges that merely supplements more bodily functions with material objects: tools extend the hand, clothing augments the skin, and so on. From this perspective, there is no qualitative difference between the most elementary consumable object, food, and the most technically sophisticated prosthetics, for they all relate to the body as a permeable, manipulable surface, ingesting, incorporating, and expelling an expanding range of objects. Yet this open-ended circulation does not occur in some pure and open space; rather, as various bodily functions are extended outside the body, so the spaces of these extensions are embodied, in every sense of the word. ' p 507, Incorporations (ZONE 6) This quote illustrates the framework for this project. It charts a path towards Unger's transformative vocation, or Turner's anergic-ludic state, as a final goal- the creation of an architecture that fosters these conditions. These last two projects, which are ongoing, were begun in studios at the 22 Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, under Stefano DeMartino and Alex Wall (cuttlefish), and Jessie Reiser (unconfigured subject). 5.0 Marathon Marathon is a new computer game that runs on the Mac; it is a lot like the game Doom. There is a cursory narrative structure that has to do with aliens, a spaceship... you've seen it all before. You go in, and take on Ripley's role as the lead bug killer. Of course, without Sigourney Weaver's panache, at least at first. Why am I talking about Marathon in this essay? Several reasons. It is a close to real time, texture mapped and shadowed environment; one can move through it with a full 6 degrees of freedom; bump into walls, flips switches; and there are others in the space. Two kinds of others: aliens, many types, which are pure constructs; and human standins. In the network game, one actually sees an avatar of one's partners in the melee; there is no facial detail, but, if you want you can talk over the computer's microphone, you can watch your partner napalm alien bugs, you can run past each other and bump into each other. If that isn't enough, you can even jack into their sensorium; you can experience space through their eyes.This is an interesting destruction of the shot /return shot formula, , and a powerfully dialogic detournement of that filmic move, in the way that a player can literally place themselves in the 'other' body of another player in marathon, thus seeing through the eyes of their partner/opponent. A VIRTUALLY DISPLACED GAZE. This becoming other however goes much beyond the return shot, as it puts one in the avatar of another, as a 'rider' (to use Gibson's term) experiencing their retinal world, helplessly. This trades the territory of command of one's own motions through a space, for the territory of co-presence (or surveillance, as in many cases in the game it may be used as a hostile tactic). Interestingly they can at the same time, if they so wish, ride you... And then, there is the hack of Marathon. Michael Hanson wrote some code that allows you to hack any parameter of the Game. The hack is downloadable freeware off the Internet. You can become invincible (which is rather boring...) or, more interestingly, you may specify behavior patterns for the aliens. Not just what guns they carry, but what flocking behaviors they adopt, how likely they are to attack, how likely to tenaciously pursue; how 'intelligent' they are; and who they consider friend or foe. It is 23 interesting to make them all enemies of each other- lob a grenade into their midst and watch the shooting start. Let me show you a few recordings of the game. To just make my point here. I had retinal afterimages for days after I first played it- and I did play alot. It's a good game. Bcause it involves one in the traversal of space. In real time. Who designed the spaceship? Better question: who will design the next set of spaceships, and set carefullly tweaked aliens free in them to study circulation patterns; and then the possibility of deploying information- did I mention that one can periodically jack in and read 'messages' from the ship's computer? What if that computer were someone else? And this runs on a mac IIci? Why aren't architects working with these people? Check out the hack. And others that already allow one to create spaces. The dialogic is irrupting in a spectrum of 'media' fostered environs, all virtual.... I refer of course to the WWW and games like Marathon. This becomes a realm for the development of a truly dialogic virtuality which we should not ignore, even if at first glance Marathon seems to be a video game. 5.1 The World Wide Web (The Dialogic and The Virtual) The key instrumentality of the WWW is found in its integration of a dialogic condition, which we can find defined by Bahktin and Enzensberger-- in relation to it's own use of speed. Enzensberger articulates the elements of a truly communicative media: Decentralized program, each receiver a potential transmitter, mobilization of the masses, interaction of those involved, feedback, a political learning process, collective production, social control by self organization. Speed as we have noted is a gateway under certain conditions to duration, and in this case a radically communicative realization of the virtual. I follow Don Langham in his outline of the progressive developments of media: the advent of speech, allowed communication at a speed approximating that of human thought. Writing... is slower than speech, but is powerful nonetheless for its ability to make speech dependent upon the speaker or the memory of the hearers ...the widespread use of moveable type...brought about a revolution not in the way people communicate, but rather in the way they conceive the world. Now, at the end of the millennium, we have what Harnad calls "electronic skywriting"--the "fourth cognitive revolution". In this revolution, writing will allow us to communicate 24 with speeds approaching that of speech, which is much closer to the speed of thought than other communication media. from The Common Place MOO: Orality and Literacy in Virtual Reality by Don Langham (langhd@rpi.edu) On the WWW text is only one part of a wide bandwidth communicative environment that embraces images, sounds, and the moving image as well. This brings back the question, following Bernard. Steigler's work, whether the deployment cybernetically of our memories is a vitiation of ourselves. To adequately address this problem we must also consider his thesis that we have never been deployed across any plane except one outside of ourselves... The lineage of technologies moving from speech (or perhaps with architecture as an inchoate form), to writing, then printing, the telegraph, the telephone, radio, film, and the television develops a set of behavior patterns in relationship to pouvoir, (in contrast to puissance, which is a liberating, doubly affirmative sovereignty) and insists upon a transmitter receiver model in its most proliferated form, the book/ radio/television/film. The 'narrative' sequences thus structured, which reflect the intentions of pouvoir in various forms, have little to do with communicative media as defined by Enzensberger. 5.2 (Dialogic fields or revolution.....) The Internet's origins were military in nature, thus invoking a particular kind of pouvoir. But note also that packet transmissions, designed to reach their destination and reassemble themselves, regardless of the path to their destination- bring to mind a different notion of the war machine: 'This analysis of the two assemblages and their coefficients demonstrates that the war machine does not in itself have war for its object, but necessarily adopts it as it object when it allows itself to be appropriated by the state apparatus.' p513, 1000 Plateaus, Deleuze & Guattari 5.3 In conclusion I will return to Foucault's three great variables of modern space -speed territory communication. Each of these variables is retheorized within the descriptions of the virtual that we have outlined above. A radical cynic like Baudrillard might consider much of the liberating potential I have described in the Internet to be temporary, as multinationals are currently taking great interest in the Net as a market. Marathon might escape him entirely- purely a meaningless pastime within a spectacular culture. I disagree. They are analagous to urban void spaces- A place for heterarchical program to boil forth- savage high plains. 25 In fact, the world wide web is much more savage than Marathon, though Marathon might seem more explicitly violent. There are similarities between a diagrammatic understanding of the web- nodes with great empty space between- and the urban void- explicit reified program surrounding an indeterminate zone. As well, there is a blending in the multiprogrammatic- be it in terms of architecture, subjectivity, or the Net- which sees play merging with work. Turner identifies a condition in social transitions- rituals- which is important to note here. He describes a socially reintegrative path of ritual transformation as a liminal path- and calls it ergic ludic, as it reinserts the subject into a social order. However, the path termed the anergic ludic is a game playing path that does NOT reintegrate, that does not work, per se, but plays, and that sees the general condition of society as a problem, not as a datum. In the current form of the Net each individual can establish themselves as intellectual, artistic and economic entities- with a sovereignty that will radically alter the reach of the individual and change the way that the industrial revolution imparted a set of demands on the laborer. The virtual is the site where puissance and pouvoir ripple through each other. Our subjectivities develop themselves through the intersection of the virtual (memory) and the 'real' (matter). It is important to understand, foster, and develop the current dialogic condition of cyberspace, as in its model we may find perhaps the greatest opportunity for humanity to step into a radical ethics, politics, and morality. -Ed Keller 1995 26