[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> FW: someding zu read

[Nmherman@aol.com]

In a message dated 8/5/2001 10:47:59 AM Central Daylight Time, 
leiloop@jps.net writes:

> Have we been castrated, made inept, because we
>  can no longer celebrate that what we are? this short article tries to deal
>  with the above conflicts and suggests alternative 'domains' which we as
>  humans can create without the use of technology or the affordable variety
>  of it, by just turning our imagination back on and invoking it in others.
>  

I like the gist of this post quite a bit, for several reasons.  Technology, 
especially media technology, is a dangerous means of manifesting congnition 
or inducing cogntion in others.  It has many many structural conventions, 
backed by centuries of fairly unquestioned preeminence, that are not adequate 
spaces for cognition and perception.  Using these conventions is a mammoth 
industry, in the trillions maybe, but usually this industry thrives by 
creating a false scarcity--like the diamond industry, it uses ubiquity and 
monopoly--and this scarcity is maintained by suppressing imagination in 
ourselves and others.  The content-creators bind themselves to convention, 
out of economic necessity and/or misguided faith in tradition, and the 
incapacitated content-consumers enter the confines out of fear there is 
nothing else to be had.  This essay focuses on film, a very good choice, but 
you can argue the same influences shape the novel, television, music, radio, 
amusement parks, holidays, marriage, indeed every expressive system to date.  


>  
>  A Hollywood Cathedral
>  
>  Lev Manovich has written that effect films are the ancient cathedrals of
>  the twentieth century. In a sense, this is true. Many highly skilled people
>  have worked for years, to create something which could only be accomplished
>  by group effort. But when considering the function of such a film in
>  comparison to a cathedral and the amount of holding interest over the years
>  for such a film, we come up with much less of a comparison.  A 'Chartres
>  II' is simply not needed, but we do need a 'Terminator II and III and IV
>  etc.' to keep the interest. The largest point of difference, is that action
>  films are taken off the market when they don't make money anymore. Making
>  your way through the labyrinth in Chartres is not the same as following the
>  bloody action of Terminator II. It is clear both do not have the same
>  message. We know from the newspapers and other sources that action films
>  have brought a high amount of violence amongst the young.  There are of
>  course many parallels to be drawn between an 3d graphic action film and a
>  ancient cathedral. The parallels have no substance and I prefer the  silent
>  space of a cathedral than the the wallpaper slaughter houses of twentieth
>  century fox.

Absolutely, cathedralist composition is still used but since the environment 
is so different now than in the 1100's they can't be substantially 
equivalent.  There are parallels, but they are about as profound as the 
parallels between Ancient Greek outdoor theater and contemporary urban USA 
outdoor theater.  That's why it's so sad when urban culturalists like the 
Mpls. Star Tribune tout a lakeside production of "the Importance of Being 
Earnest" as the heart and sould of a thriving city.  Transparency in police 
review boards have a closer kinship.  The real cathedrals today are money 
itself, possibly, the broadcast industry--always there, apparently impossible 
to either re-make or dismantle, absolutely powerful.  Perhaps the stylistic 
parallels between new and old structures are less important than how the mind 
works in contact with them.  (More than perhaps.  I agree that the mind is 
the real substance of art, in fact, the brain's chemicals and lobes are the 
substance, and you could and should add even fingers, toes, ears, heartrate, 
blood hormone levels, and so on.  Just as sore knees were a major substance 
of cathedrals.)

>  
>  In order to render a small part of the action films 'Terminator II',
>  'Jurassic Park' or any other film which utilizes modern 3d computer
>  graphics, it costs millions of dollars and takes over a year's time to
>  render just a few minutes of it. Ironically, we then get to view the
>  results on 2d wallpaper in a darkened room. The technical innovations far
>  out weigh the dramatic content and the presentation manner of the film.
>  One asks one self, where's the real innovation? 

I don't think there is a desire for innovation in the movie-going experience. 
 They make the most money by keeping it the same, like cigarette companies or 
McDonald's or elections.  If people start wanting something really different 
from the celebrity/special effects/cliche-wisdom formula of Hollywood, 
Hollywood goes broke.  Their market share shrinks.  Houses get mortgaged.  
For this same reason the meat industry hates and suppresses basic nutritional 
information like the "food pyramid."  They want people to think satisfaction 
and strength when they think meat, not biopollution and colon cancer.  Being 
a large industry, meat-makers enjoy very wide support from the corporate 
economy and our corporation-dependent government.  It seems our species makes 
money for survival by selling legal but damaging products.  the externalities 
are ignored almost totally.  And if the film industry doesn't feel like 
closing itself down as the state-sponsored church of self-loathing and 
degraded cognition, who will close it?  Government gets its hand bit for even 
discussing anti-business thinking.  (And I'm not talking about more 
censorship, I'm talking about the health effects and externalities of 
Hollywood that are hushed up.)  Who cares if Hollywood is cognitively 
unhealthy?  In moderation it's safe so making it illegal makes no sense.  
Anyone speaking against it looks puritan and jealous.  And Hollywood is so 
fully American no one wants to learn how to doubt it.  On the contrary, most 
want to learn to love it more!  Hence shows like Entertainment Tonight etc.  
But this desire to know more is a sign not of critical thought but of 
compulsive habit bred of cognitive malnourishment.

The reality like quality,
>  so sought after by the film makers is also too perfect. The effects of a
>  badly made home video manned by an unskilled camera person invokes more
>  reality than any trillion dollar film. It also conveys more by simple
>  including the human aspect of family even with its defects.  if we look
>  beyond the technical, we can recognize human values that are are inherent
>  in the action and not tacked in to text to be politically correct so as not
>  to offend its backers.
>  
Exactly, the "reality effect" is predicated on a crappy and cheesy paradigm 
of the cognition-seeking consumer.  It's the suspension of disbelief, 
morality-tale, or Aristotelian ideal dumbed-down for hefty sales.  The last 
movie I saw was "Made," and it didn't seem to offer much fuel to my mind in 
its quest for cognitive wellness.  My greatest need is to learn how to act as 
if the world is not becoming hell, so that I can work to better it without 
martydom.  "Made" offered nothing in that respect.  Movies substitute 
edginess and weirdness--the definition of mannerism--for simple direct 
discussion of the real problem:  over-dependence on bought images.  Woody 
Allen made "Celebrity" but it's a disingenuous prudism.  Every film worker is 
dying to believe that their work makes people's minds more healthy and happy. 
 They need to be needed.  That is how convention survives and attains the 
status of empire, by the inability of anyone to find any alternative or even 
to want to find one.
Hollywood might like "reality tv" but it's a totally fake reality.  It's 
painful to the healthy mind but anesthetic to the hopeless one.  And you are 
exponentially correct that homemade video has more of the indeterminate, 
unforced realities of life than any mass-audience feature no matter how 
expensive its verisimilitude.  But if people make their own video, distribute 
it via the internet, and movies become like local cuisine, with no 
conglomerate dominating the creation of pasta, there is no more film 
industry.  And apparently, no one can or wants to make the case for 
decentralization.  Under corporate globalism, diversity of production is 
heresy and a dangerous one.  In Italy last month it seemed to be illegal.  In 
Bush USA the only patriotic form of transportation is low-mileage cars.  In 
the USA academy, Genius 2000 is terroristic despotism because it questions 
the Janizaries new clothes.  I find such economic recession in these bloated 
industries necessary to the planet's future, and committment to internalizing 
the externalities the penalty for the moguls.  it's difficult however, 
sometimes--especially when one is depressed--there seem to be no venues for 
dissent.  Like at dinner with my friends, they like to tell jokes and enjoy 
burritos whereas I like to try to see the possibilites of cognitive change.  
Poor me.

>  
>  
>  An Imaginable Technology
>  
>  If we analyze what a screen is and the two sided space it is made up of, we
>  can use this information to create ideas, although not as expensive and
>  time consuming, the ideas can lead to results of high artistic quality and
>  have interesting subject manner. 

Absolutely.  You seem to be on a roll.  Have you always known this stuff?  
When people tell me my video is too rough, I say "no it's not, it's the 
curtain effect;" i.e. when the audio and video are momentarily nonsensical 
the tv on which you're watching the video is just like a kid's painting, a 
curtain of color, you think about the blotches on the tube, it's a curtain 
over a tiny window (not a big proscenium curtain).  I am proud of having 
noticed the curtain effect, accepted it, and not trashed the video because 
it's not an adrenaline thrill ride of virtuosity.  Yes it is cheap to make 
video this way, but that's the thing:  it's got almost limitless DIY 
potential, never seen before on earth, and doesn't need the rigid pro-popcorn 
conditioning of Hollywood convention.  No one makes money off it.  And 
without high profits, the USA hits the skids.  (Biospherically, I think the 
USA does need to hit the skids, but who's benevolent and just enough to 
receive our abdication?  Most of the world is just fighting for management 
salaries in USA inc.  The masses are not a player.)  Yes, low budget video 
can have way better artistic value than blockbusters.  But who gets to judge 
this diy output?  There's no work for critics and museums either.  Work will 
be made and judged locally.  Empowering that decentralized production is a 
poke in the eye not just of Sony but of the arbiters of high culture.  This 
is why nettime doesn't let me post, David Ross plays the heavy with me, Steve 
Dietz at the Walker couldn't find an email review for the video I went to 
such trouble to provide him.  Even DIY video has to move through the 
channels.  Hence conformity, convention, and suppression of imagination in 
creator and viewer dominates the artworld as well as Hollywood.  The disease 
is everywhere.

There are other themes around than those
>  of blood, sex and fake dinosaurs.  Do we really have to exit our world,
>  park ourselves in some germ-infected seat of a shopping center
>  action-only-cinema, to ignore the world in which live, and which  is more
>  interesting and relevant to our lives? No.

We don't have to, but a lot of people a lot of the time think and act as if 
they do have to.  They are the cash cows.  I don't know how to reach them, 
but i know they can be reached.  I also know that the wealth of our time 
doesn't want them reached, and they make it difficult to do so.  Gold star 
for robot boy.

>  
>  We know that there are two sides to a screen. The one side is the viewer's
>  side. He or she sits in his chair and remains there until the film is
>  finished.  Although he or she could change his seat after having bought
>  popcorn, smoked a cigarette, or having gone to the toilette, he would see
>  the same exact thing in the new position as in the old position.  

I never really insisted that people watch my video all at one sitting, though 
it works that way too.  I thought people could watch it during commercials, 
or for a few minutes to jumpstart their own critical social-thinking 
sessions, perhaps with friends over some pasta, reading brief passages from 
preferred books, discussing objections and tangents, crying, sharing and 
allaying fears.  Very optimistic of me, but there is no other way.  This is a 
corny reference but in Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield says 
he likes the museum because every time you go back, it's the same but you're 
different.  Corporate experience-providers today aim for lifestyle streaming, 
where the consumer changes not a jot as they move from work to clothing 
purchase to movie selection to hair products to soda, in effect, never 
leaving their seat (figuratively speaking).  In malls they call it "themeing" 
or "threading" or something.  Instead of leaving the venue and returning 
different, the culture industry wants you never to leave.  They build the 
seat in your head.  I applaud your insight, however, that using the 
information of the physical reality of the 2-d screen we can get out of the 
forced path.  The facts are on our side.  People only discuss the "art" on 
the screen, and rarely think of the mere physicality of it.  (To do so would 
be what, uncivilized?  Tasteless?  Ignorant?  Anti-filmic?  A party-pooper?  
I call it freedom.)

This is
>  one of the downfalls of the two dimensional screen.  When considering the
>  other side of the screen, the actor's side, we hardly notice that it
>  contains a similar and more extreme limitation. 

Bravo.  the limitation on them is equal and opposite.  They think, however, 
these robots who get to be stars, that they have finally come to life:  they 
are now connected to the people through art.  competition for acting jobs 
filter out any doubters.  I first realized how insane Ronald Reagan was when 
I read his thoughts on first being filmed.  he said "The light was all around 
me, surrounding me, then filling me, and then I could feel it shining through 
and out of me and carrying the performance out of me.  the feeling was 
miraculous."  Before acting Reagan was a lifeguard, a wannabe, a disgruntled 
unknown.  Malnourished.  It's hard to see people like Josh Hartnett as 
slaves, or cops, because they look so attractive and have so much money and 
attention, and we fear our doubt is only envy.  Just ask any US resident.  
It's a big mindfuck.  I advise not giving in to that fear, not donning the 
scarlet robe of Envy, and keep doubting josh Hartnett.  A little egoism can 
help; Josh Hartnett went to my high school (Minneapolis MN South) so I 
deserve to compete with him with relish.  I'm glad to be what I am, and not 
him.  I love that fact dearly even though it hurts sometimes, at reunions for 
example.  

The actor must stay in his
>  or her position in order to be seen by the camera. 

Again this seems obvious and trivial at first, but it tells us so fucking 
much!  I think I'm going to have to be a fan of you as long as you don't have 
some precious half-measure of a solution, a personal theory of style.  If you 
really want to help free the planet from our gilded cage, I will back you all 
the way.  You don't have to like me, my video, or Genius 2000 either.  If you 
have the fortitude to forswear half-measures and patent-medicine solutions, I 
am very glad to meet you.

The camera moves and not
>  the actor and because of this, movement is expressed in film by camera
>  technique.  So like the screen itself, the audience and actors remain on
>  fixed points and form another similarity to many ancient cathedrals:
>  Slavery and bondage in modern times.
>  
>  
>  The Dream Screen
>  
>  Perhaps there are other parallels we can draw. The idea that we go to the
>  cinema to dream is a curious idea.  A dream is screenless. 

You are right, and the idea that we dream in 2d is more than curious, it's 
fascist.

It takes place
>  in the mind in a three dimensional space. We can enter our dreams by
>  penetrating them in their spaces. We have the feeling of depth sensation.
>  This sensation we can't get from film. If we want to stick or finger in the
>  proverbial apple pie in a film, we just get shadows. If we do this with a
>  dream, we put a whole into the apple pie.
>  
>  If we were to remove the screen and still be able to view the actors we
>  would find ourselves in the theater.  If we then continued in this manner
>  and removed the dividing line between stage and public, we would find
>  ourselves in a single three dimensional space.  Within this space many
>  conceptual ideas associated with virtual reality technique are possible.

I'm lukewarm on VR, and at times I fear it will denature the kind of spatial 
freedom we need.  I think regular reality will work just as fine.  Brecht 
said to make images that keep the viewer alienated, out of the art, so as to 
go into reality and feel a burning need to change it, and feeling the power 
to change it.  The ruling class has always said that humans cannot live in 
orderly large groups unless they have a shared art-system, so it has been 
taken for granted that we need social imagery to function.  the alienation 
effect, we fear, creates only anger, rioting, pale ire envy and despair, 
boredom, expressive sterility.  I do not agree with this.  We simply haven't 
learned to make art in the jetztzeit that is peaceful, adequately 
stimulating, conducive to peace and co-operation, satisfying, etc.  2000 
years of war has made such a worthy project possible.  but i know VR is here, 
I don't want to be a cynic about it, but I have my fears.  Just so you know.  
I won't be dogmatic about it however, just skeptical.

>  
>  It can therefore be said that the human mind possesses more cinematic
>  quality than film itself.  

Absolutely it does, and more musical quality than music, more verbal majesty 
than any book.  

I don't think any one is even arguing this
>  point, but then why go through all the trouble and expense to get something
>  of less quality?

To create false scarcity, aggregate profit, centralize media participation, 
subjugate the poor and discontented.

By using the concepts of cinema it is possible to develop
>  ideas of multi-dimensional space, which unlike their cinema counterparts
>  are easily within the reach of a modern artist possibilities.
>  
>  
>  
>  Perhaps a comparison of dreams and film is not a fair one, but the
>  important point being made here, is that we would like to have three
>  dimensional space using new media and can have it without the expense and
>  all those computer geeks and without giving up our lives to a computer
>  keyboard. We obtain this with the use of the mind and this remains the main
>  element of art, whether it is film, painting, theater or whatever. We use
>  our mind to create and that what we create invokes a similar response in
>  the viewers mind. 

I'd put it slightly differently:  by being healthy geniuses we can make the 
world healthier for other geniuses.  by using our faculties in an outwardly 
apparent way, we help others to find the same faculties in themselves.  Our 
thoughts, dreams, insights, and expressions--our personal experience of 
mind--will not be shared.  Everyone's dreams are distinct phenomena.  
nn/integer says it this way more or less:  "When I touch fire and my hand 
feels hot, that feeling is mine."  Some people will like my video and some 
won't, but my main confidence in its worth is the message it sends that being 
a genius is not what our history tells us it is.  I don't strictly object to 
traditional media like painting, but I fear a normalization of the status 
quo.  After all, painting led to the photograph, which in turn made film seem 
manifest destiny.  All of these media partake of the degraded audience, even 
contemporary painting.  Again the problem arises, how to foster healthy 
genius in all people?  by showing them the products of our own genius, or 
allowing them to doubt the elect elite and derive healthy genius through 
their own DIY?  I think our whole history of art will need to be devalued.  

The artist  invokes a third dimension  by including it
>  while conceiving his art. Though the abilities as an artist he or she can
>  then coax the viewer into new dimensions by having the viewer fabricate
>  that which is not present by engaging his or her imagination.  A truly
>  virtual reality system and in this way we can compete with George Lucas
>  easily by just simply thinking again.

OK, you're not a VR booster, now that I read closer.  May I add that genius 
is actually four dimensional, the fourth being time?  I like to hope we can, 
many of us, think again, or have cognition again, full cognition that I like 
to call genius, a personal, nuanced, lovely, joyous, shared, social, and 
intimate subtle numena.

>  
>  
>  Conclusion
>  
>  We don't need the screen to create a virtual reality. The concept of
>  immersion can therefore be  based on the mental state of the viewer.  We
>  can use our minds to move in and out of both sides of the artist-viewer
>  screen in order to accomplish this. We are no longer fixed to a single
>  point in space. When we change locations we obtain a different perspective,
>  see something new and thereby change scenes.  The 'actor' is also free to
>  change his perspective, or even more than one actor may do this without
>  demanding that the camera to zoom out to catch the changes in position.
>  The only borders here are the imagination of the viewer or his willingness
>  to immerse himself into the happenings around him, and of course the
>  abilities of the artist to invoke a media space which can be considered to
>  have a cinematic effect. The four walls which contain both actor and viewer
>  can be seen as the inside of the media space containing, scenery, actors,
>  layers and the effects we are subjected to by engaging the mind. Here it
>  can be said, that  most movie viewers would rather be in the film acting
>  than sitting outside it and just passively watching.

In "Masculin/Feminin," there's a line that says "we never see the movie we 
want to see, we are never in the movie we want to be in."  From this I 
consider that the expressive environment, a swirling unfathomable expanse, is 
greater and more real than any artwork or movie can be.  there is a nice 
paper from the Genius 2000 conference 1999 (at 
http://www.geocities.com/genius-2000) by Ian Allen, the first line of which 
is "Every life can be flown as a movie."

>  
>  In this manner we can experience three dimensional space  described above
>  as media space, which includes both sides of the screen and extrapolating
>  beyond it by the employment of the imaginative skills of the artists and
>  viewers.
>  
>  Art Clay
>  Basle 4.9.2001


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