BENT FAUSING

IN-BETWEEN-IMAGES
Reflections on Fascination and Affect and
Sensoric Images

My research, my publications, exhibitions, tv-

programs, interviews and articles have been and are
still centered on two key terms, fascination and affect,
to put it briefly in modern media and especially the
visual aspects of these terms in the new media. I work
with a perceptual or sensoric image conception, which
indicates that everything has its fundament in
visualization; the letters and words I write here on the
screen, the images the music in my room creates, the
images the smooth surface of the table brings along
and the sight the clouds on the sky outside my
windows, etc.

The fascination and affect belongs to the

phenomenons in the outside world, and to our inner
world. We create images of the meeting between the
external and internal world. Out of this meeting we
establish 'in-between-images'. A thing, a phenomenon,
is never just a thing, but it is something we always
relate and interact mentally with through different
forms of fascination and affect. A thing is never
indifferent, but is constantly perceived with affect.

From these meetings with our internal images and the

external perceptions, we create subjectively our own
perceptual world - as it most obvious in memory,
visions and dreams - and pass it on intersubjectively
to others such as in pictures, stories, theories, science,
gossip, media, rites, gestures...

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Further about my research, books, publications,tv-
programs and interviews I will sum up with these key
words:

- Emotions and interaction through visual media.

- Internal image formation and external images. The

in-between-images between perceived and perceiver.

- We are social and imagemaking species. Social in the

sense of interaction, imagemaking (and imageseeking)
in the sensoric sense:

- Sensory images (a surface, music, sound,

temperature, letters, looking out of the window - all
are translated into images of our sensory apparatus
and sensory system).

- Mechanical industrialization/technology (c. 1900) and

digital industrialization/technology (c. 2000). From
linear gradient to unexpected events (what will the
next click bring?).

- This unexpectedness has an influence on the places

and event we remember, time and place which was
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before distinct events has been moved into the endless
superspace and our memory will/has also been
influenced by the new, new media.

- The human technology (digital technology does not

alienate or wears out; it expands - so it looks - the
human interaction space and human perception and
body. It is in its own self-understanding a positive
technology, which brings back the qualities of face-to-
face interactions).

- Anthropomorphism or face management by the new

technology, its media and companies and institutions
(branding, story-telling, 'connecting people' Nokia).

- Simulations - the new digital technology is

particularly suitable for producing simulations -
artificial intelligence, artificial life, robotics, third life,
synthetic biology, etc. - how do these simulations into
other simulations as human imagination, memories,
dreams, symbols, metaphors and thoughts like 'what if
...'

- The small narratives (minibloking on walls, thumb

up, emoticons, upload pictures, links, videos are all
small narratives - which we also know from
sociolinguistics). Which story was not made, but is also
embedded in these condensed narratives?

- The digital coded comprehensive intervention in our

lives - in contrast to other technologies and media,
does the digital code into all parts of society, nothing
and no one is untouched. Why and how?

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Round up:

Reality is too much to take in directly; therefore we

must ritualize it and make it into images. It can only
be transmitted and comprehended through all the
different kinds of images we constantly create of it
through the body – internal, external, concrete,
abstract, as sounds, as things we taste and touch, as
affects etc. These elements constitute the material
which stories from and about reality are made of.

We pick up the world and form it through the images

we shape and seek out. We go out into the world with
our images and the world enters us through its
images. The body is the meeting point and
intermediate link for the images which come to and
from us.

We are not only sensing subjects; we are constantly

symbolizing and getting hold of our sense datum
through imagery. To see and sense is in itself a way of
formulating. It is a need so great that we cannot stop
it. The images must come out – in dreams, in concrete
pictures, constructed or not, in phantasms, in sound
images, in the metaphors of words, in bodily
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expressions, in sensations of textures, and in
synaesthetic sensing.

The world is perceived from the inside though the body

and we have the possibility to

look at it from the outside the images, which are made

from this material.

The images are all taken from my albums on

Facebook. The last one is described in the album
'Visible and Invisible Cities' if you want some details
about the when and where chance smiled to me and
even melted my icecold camera.

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If you want to read more about my interpretations and
research in the areas of fascination, affect and
sensoric images in media, I will very short mention
these two articles. The first is about Orlan and all the
cultural connotations she involves, and it is called "To
Create an Image - and Be an Image" in:
http://www.artnode.dk/nikolaj/nemo/fausinguk.html -
the second is an article concerning two net- or tv-
commercials for Nokia and is an analysis of mainly the
anthropomorphising of the new technology and how
this involves our senses, and it is called "Soulful
Technology. Everyday Aesthetics and Visuality in New
Media" in:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/20249649/Bent-Fausing-
Soulful-Technologies-Everyday-Aesthetics-and-
Visuality-in-New-Media

Bent Fausing, October 2009/March 2010.