Paranarrative, Postcinema, and the Unheimlich Glitch

Leonardo, 2020

The author discusses digitization as video’s deficiency; pixels are conceived as isolated fragments without an existential link to the source image. This article explores the ontology of digital video through Mulla Sadra¯’s (1571--1641) theory of Substantial Motion. Sadra¯, a Persian Islamic existentialist, proposed that substance (material/visible and immaterial/invisible) undergoes an internal change, creating intimate connections between the smallest parts and the One, visible and invisible. We can think of these dynamic connections in terms of pixels and frames. From the view of Sadra¯’s substance, pixels are explored as open to change. The apparent weaknesses of digital materiality become potentials toward understanding its existence in time.

2014

Present day cinema's singular pursuit of digital visual effects has resulted in a perceptual alienation of the audience due to missing constructive collaboration between artist and audience resulting from the imperfect mix of multiple analog and digital sources in the creation of the illusions. The digital's ability to represent anything and everything on its own reduces the viewer to a mere spectator and no longer an imaginative participant. The reintroduction of imperfect analog effects, married to the digital medium, allows the viewer to contribute to the illusion rather than be pushed away by the perfectionist digital rendering that does not require their assistance. Both absence and imperfection are essential to selling the illusions of the cinematic landscape. This thesis project, the feature film Prairie Dog, is designed to address this singular digital disconnect in present day cinematic illusions by creating and experimenting in a variety of analog effects in combination with digital processing to illustrate the viability of analog incorporation in present day digital cinema.

In this theoretical discussion with case studies, I investigate a possible interdisciplinary approach to examine the current flow of hybrid media and art on screens. Following Jean- François Lyotard’s concept of the Figural that describes form as a matrix for thinking, contemporary theorists in Art and Philosophy call for an exhibitionary mode of thought, conveying scientific argumentation not exclusively by writing but through spatial formation, with potential to change perception and discourse outside of linguistic rationality. Based on Lyotard’s concept Figure, the hysteria in Deleuze, das Unheimliche in Freud, and The Real from lacanian psychoanalysis, understood through Julia Kristeva - I suggest that what makes art works effective, disturbing, and potentially subversive – like for example Lars von Trier’s Antichrist – is that they offer a crack into the symbolic order, where logic is drawn from a pre-conceptual “carnal” experience, like in dreamwork. Key words: Aesthetic Technologies, Database, Lev Manovich, Intermediality, The Affective Turn, Jacques Rancière, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, D.N. Rodowick, The Figural, Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Lars von Trier, Judy Gammelgaard, das Unheimliche, Sigmund Freud.

TILDA conference, 2022

The Dark Precursor: Deleuze and Artistic Research

In The Virtual Life of Film, D. N. Rodowick (2007, 127) notes that "the very nature of a medium . . . is to be variable, not identical with itself, and open to aesthetic and historical transformation." As a medium that persists beyond its classical representational parameters, the cinema ceases to be confined within the analogue image and continues to morph into a multimedia network of digital images. The ontology of cinema undergoes a simultaneous and seemingly contradictory process of both self-persistence and transmutation. If, on the one hand, the materiality of cinema is subjected to digital manipulation and the logic of its assemblage becomes computational, on the other hand, the appearance of the image in the digital age is still cinematographic. To quote Rodowick (ibid., 180), the cinema "remains the baseline for evaluating our aesthetic experience of moving images and of time-based figural expression." At the same time, he also admits, digital media change notions of space, movement, and time both in the way these are materially produced and in the effects they generate in the audience.

Thinking the Commodity Through the Moving Image: Cinema, Time and Capitalism (VDM Verlag Dr. Müller), 2009

If the cinema of the Italian neorealism was an attempt to re-open cinema to the possibilities of mediating the social time of the everyday, and Antonioni's time-images sought to refold the existential back into the non-alienated Utopian space of collective desire, then cinema has in the information age closed off these possibilities and beckons the spectator-subject to find ontological assurance in the monadic inner space of its digital universes. The anxieties that the time-image induced in the films of the neorealists and Antonioni are alleviated by the data-images of the special effects blockbuster, which transcend the phenomenal world and immerse the spectator in the sublime time of the 'artificial infinite'. 1 Like the cinema of the time-image, the cinema of special effects privileges a phenomenological mode of address that eschews the classical narrative dimensions of film, so as to, in Scott Bukatman's view, 'redirect the spectator to the visual (and auditory and even kinesthetic) conditions of cinema and thus bring the principles of perception to the foreground of consciousness'. 2 It is this commonality that allows us to thread together two seemingly incommensurable cinematic forms: the post-war cinema of Italian neorealism/Antonioni and the contemporary Hollywood blockbuster. By contrasting the divergent nonnarrative temporal and spatial image formations through which the cinema of the time-image and the special effects blockbuster address the spectator, we can locate historically and aesthetically a transformation in the way the spectator-subject 'thinks through' the cinematic form as it becomes integrated with the distributed media of electronic and digital technologies. Jameson famously theorised the 'waning of affect' that accompanied the cultural turn from modernism to postmodernism. In Jameson's assessment the modern affects of anxiety and alienation have become displaced by the 'euphoria [of] free-floating and 1 Scott Bukatman, 'The Artificial Infinite: On Special Effects and the Sublime' in Annette Kuhn (ed.) Alien

Dějiny - teorie - kritika, 2018

The article looks at basic questions concerning mediality, which it defines as a common attribute of techno-anthropological means of representation and communication, as developed and developing through mutual interaction, such as to give rise to a particular environment in which certain forms (of sense) can be distinguished. Among the basic questions of mediality and media are thus also those of whether and to what extent media conceptualize their own history and development. The study presents – primarily from the perspective of the theory and history of literature and art – a critical overview of media theory, starting with the ideas of Friedrich Kittler. It compares these with certain aspects of Marshall McLuhan’s thought, pointing out a conflict between the concept of an escalating development of media towards a closed cybernetic loop, and the concept of media as an evolutionary extension of human senses. The rhetorical and stylistic aspects of Kittler’s perspective are interpreted through Bürger’s (and Benjamin’s) thesis of the melancholic dimension of modernism. The basic principles of Niklas Luhmann’s theory of systems are analysed as a stimulus for thinking about mediality, together with his concept of a system of art as a functionally differentiated social system, historically established with the dawning of the modern age. We also pay attention to the intermedial research carried out by Lars Elleström and his description of a system of modalities, which sets up a new frame for approaching media. Elleström’s model enables us to reflect on media from many varied perspectives (such as mass media studies, new media, film media, film science, art history and theory, literary criticism, etc.), yet does not cover sources of media dynamics; these may relate to a certain gap or difference that enters the relationship between consciousness and communication, technology and the body, technology and the senses, and seems to set in motion the development of these constantly changing techno-anthropological tools.

Metacritic Journal, 2021

This paper adopts an art-based research model to investigate how media objects as entangled material agencies can become co-creators with artists and condition the viewers' memory and imagination. My work Recycled Series, among other artists’ work, are the subjects of this analysis. All these works involve images that are degenerated with a copy machine. The degenerated images lose coherence and become forms of ruins that the copier builds. Drawing from theories of things (Brown; Harman; Shaviro), I examine these works as examples of “media-as-things” to show when media is misused, the potential of media can be revealed. I place these works in the context of “broken-tech art” (Boym) and “haptic visuality” (Marks). I argue that these images determine a different object-subject relationship for their audience and their “thingness,” which is intensified through degeneration effects, becomes a major factor in their aesthetic reception.

2014