rough notes
Think about the 'bird' building a stage for itself in the forest, and the man dancing on the streetcorner.
Man dancing in street, walkman, gyrating on the corner of Santa Monica Blvd & Vine, his arms open, head thrown back in ecstasy
Why is this man dancing here, on a busy street corner, and not by himself?
1. Sharing; making himself 'public.' Opening up the flow, cultivating mixtures, whirlwinds of sensation and movement, thought and affect, etc. - an urban conductor of sorts (Doug Aitken's video/Valery quote), enmeshed in the flows - but one who controls as much as registers, receives as much as sends. He is not a spectator here, he is activating -- opening up -- all of the sensory registers of his body.
He is "losing himself", if only to regain himself. Displace himself, in order to find himself. (Think of experience in dancing in a club)
2. the stage. Self-staging. He is not a spectator here either, but rather is putting himself on display, in order to prove himself, stage his worth, make himself worthy of being seen, mattering, counting. (As is putting up a profile - staging the self).
Process of self-discovery, self-construction: but a sense of self that can only be discovered in the social arena. And so why does he dance on a busy street corner, and not by himself?
Do we know who we really are, when we're alone? We speak of 'finding ourselves' - but does this happen in solitude, or in social space? We are who we are, because we are social beings, and we constantly need to see/feel ourselves in the eyes/apprehensions of others.
new cultures of self-display
think of work using blogs, webcams, profiles, live journals , lifecasting, and so on.
Enabled by networking technology and a DIY ethos -- as well as, of course, eros -- a new culture of erotic exposure and self-display has emerged. We don't just want to watch: we want to show. We want to reveal our most intimate lives.
We want to solicit the attention of others, act for unseen eyes, and develop new forms of connective intensity -- as if this were somehow the very condition of our continued existence, the marker of our worth.
Jennicam (search on web for archives)
In the psychoanalytic tradition, desire is polarized between lack and possession; the activity of desire is what moves one from one to the other..
In Lacan, the subject is imperiled, incomplete, characterized by a primary lack or absence: a lack that compels us to seek fulfillment through the gaze of the other -- an unseen watching presence. The imagined gaze observing us becomes a form of validation, a kind of ontological guarantee of our being. It serves to put us in our place -- to subject us.
In this way subjectivity is built on an anguished interrogation of the other's desire (what does he want of me?). As Laplanche would have it, this is often repressed as a "hidden" psychic logic to be uncovered -- a "secret" that the other knows, but that we don't know. We want to understand the terms of the other's address: in the other, we pursue the secret of our own desirability.
Theories of desire built on lack: The world perceived as inherently hostile to the self (Freud); the world as withholding the "secret" of the subject's sexual being (Laplanche on the enigmatic signifier); the world as containing the subject's future completion as a coordinated form (Lacan's relationally initiating mirror stage): in all these cases the subject is either in danger of being stolen or has already suffered a loss of self.
Relationality is grounded in antagonism and misapprehension, which means that to meet the world is always to see the world as a place where I am not -- or, if I am there, it is as alienated and/or unrecognizable being.
Certainly, these new erotic cultures of exposure and display can be seen as driven by the need to perform for the gaze of the other -- the Big Other, the symbolic order. Through this performance, one is written into existence -- installed in the symbolic order of things.
But we can also consider that these new cultures of self-display are not just about insufficiency or lack, but also abundance. We can shift from a problematic not of reduction but of amplification? Already Bataille would have us do this: to focus on not filling something that we lack but of channeling the surplus energies that we already have.
Consider that these cultures of self-display are less about possessing something from a distance, than the evacuation of this distance: the cultivation of an extreme intimacy, a mingling, a channeling of energies. To explore this terrain, we can, as Leo Bersani has described it, shift from a logic of psychology to one of spatial dissemination: from thinking in terms of analyzable identities to those of unstable, emergent presences. Here there is no longer a hidden psychic logic to be revealed but an extensibility to be traced.
not a reductive self but an amplified or extended self. We don't reveal what's hidden so much as open up an abundant flow -- a conduit, an extensibility. And what we end up with is not a privileging of difference but of a kind of sameness. As Bersani would call it, an im-personal narcissism.
Here desire is constituted less as a differential dance between bodies than a network path: a new geometry of intimacy.
some more thoughts on online profiles:
A profile is both a portal and a facet of an assembling-self that reaches out to presence itself through a dynamics of encounter. It hovers between actual and potential; between diegesis and extension; between story and solicitation. The encounter that it aims for is a real, imaginary, or potential construct that exists both internally and externally, between the internal narrative space (which has its own structured timeframe), the solicitous address (which always exists in the immediate present), and the unrealized potential. It functions between staging, soliciting, and extending: between self-narrative, conductive solicitation, and connective, intensive extensibility. As such, profiles are mechanisms for the "staging of the self" within an encounter; the "pitching of the self" for a desired encounter; and the "amplification of the self" within networks of encounter. They are presencing mechanisms for developing ecologies of self.
screenings
JC video 'Hotel' at http://vimeo.com/7091631
David Lynch, Inland Empire
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
week 5
The emergence of the frame is the condition of ail the arts.
Framing is the means by which 1) objects are delimited and 2) qualities unleashed.
TAMING
The frame is what establishes territory from out of the chaos that is the earth.
It is about the taming -- the territorialization -- of the uncontrollable forces of the earth.
The frame separates. It cuts into a milieu or space. It constitutes a plane of composition -- a provisional ordering of chaos through the laying down of a grid or order that entraps chaotic shards and states, to arrest or slow them down.
This cutting of the space of the earth through the fabrication of the frame is the very gesture that composes both house and territory, inside and outside,
interior and landscape.
LIBERATION
With no frame or boundary there can be no territory, and without territory there may be objects or things but not qualities that can become expressive, that can intensify and transform living bodies. As the frame entraps chaotic shards and states, to arrest or slow them down, it generates a structure and a form where bodies can be affected.
The constitution of territory is the fabrication of a space in which sensations may emerge: a space from which rhythms, tones, coloring, weight, texture, etc. may be extracted.
Qualities are now loosened onto the world, launched into circulation, no longer anchored in their 'natural' place.
Art is first architectural because its cosmic materials require demarcation, enframement, containment in order for qualities as such to emerge, to live, to induce sensation. Framing is the condition under which qualities can live their own life. There is a certain celebratory, excessive quality to this.
---
Christina McPhee
Carrizoprime 2006
HD video
With the frame, then, TAMING and LIBERATION come together.
Here is an example of how they come together:
Every morning a particular bird of the Australian rain forests cuts leaves, makes them fall to the ground, and turns them over so that the paler internal side contrasts with the earth. In this way it constructs a stage for itself like a ready-made. Directly above, on a creeper or branch, while fluffing its feathers beneath its beak to reveal their yellow roots, it sings a complex song made up from its own notes and, at intervals, those of other birds that it imitates. It is a complete artist.
It defines and unleashes frames: blocs of sensations in the territory -- colors, postures, and sounds -- that sketch out a total work of art. This includes bowing low, straightening up, dancing in a circle; lines of colors; refrains. The whole of this staging is the being of sensation.
Architecture, and all the arts that follow from it, are linked to the bird's song, the olfactory dance of insects, the performative displays of vertebrates, including humans. They are each the constitution of a territory, a space that is one's own -- not just to occupy and control, but a territory that is produced by the elaborate, if apparently useless activity, of "grabbing attention" and conducting display. It is an excessive, sexualized territory -- a territory in which one can enact seduction and extract satisfaction.
There is no one kind of framing -- each form of life, each cultural form, undertakes its own modes of organization its own connections of body and earth.
---
DEFRAMING
Art is not only the movement of territorialization; it is also the converse movement, that of deterritorialization, of cutting through territories, breaking up systems of enclosure and performance, traversing territory in order to retouch chaos, enabling something mad, asystematic, something of the chaotic outside to reassert and restore itself in and through the body, in works and events that impact the body.
And so with framing we have to speak of deframing -- modes of upheaval and transformation.
If framing creates the very condition for planes of composition and thus of any particular works of art, equally art itself is a project that disjars, distends and transforms frames, that focuses on the intervals and conjunctions between frames. In this sense, the history of painting, and of art after painting, can be seen as the action of leaving the frame, of moving beyond, and pressing against the frame, the frame exploding through the movement it can no longer contain.
---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLOWy3ys8Ag
John Cage, Variations V
Choreography: Merce Cunningham
Thirty-seven remarks re an audio-visual performance
Stony Point, September-October 1965
Instrumentation: Any number of musicians with photo-electric cells and at least 13 electronically amplified sound-sources. The sound sources were short-wave radios and tapes with recordings of sounds like a kitchen drain (recorded by Cage).
The frame's most elementary form is the partition, projected downward or forward into a
FLOOR, WALL, WINDOW, SCREEN
FLOOR. a floor 'rarefies' and smoothes over the surface of the earth, creating a first (human) territonallzation. The floor, ever acquiring smoothness, suppleness and consistency makes of the earth and of horizontality a resource for the unleashing of new and more sensations, for the exploration of the excesses of gravity and movement. It is the condition for the emergence of both dance and athletics.
WALL. The wall constitutes an inside and an outside, dividing the inhabitable from the natural (the chaotic), transforming the earth itself into a delimitable space, a shelter or home. The wall divides us from the world on one side, through it provides new connections, new relations, social and interpersonal relations, with those on its other side. The wall is the basis of our co-existence.
WINDOW. The wall's most direct and perceptible function is to separate or divide; however, the wall equally functions to select and bring in. In this case the frame can be converted into the window. The window selectively envisions its natural exterior, now a landscape, no longer beyond its partition but within the enframed space of the room. The wall darkens, keeps out light and natural forces, the window selectively enframes them again to return them to the interior, to bring
illumination inside.
FURNITURE
Within the architectural frame, in miniaturized form, the frame re-enacts itself and its territorializing function through furniture, an architecture on the inside of architecture. Though classified as objects in our everyday language, furniture can be seen as an interior replication of the frame: the closet is a box in the box, the mirror a window onto the outside, the table another floor on the ground.
Because furniture is that which most intimately touches the body, it is links the architectural frame through a direct contiguity with the body and its activities. For our most intimate or most abstract endeavours, whether they occur in bed or on a couch, furniture supplies the immediate physical environment in which our bodies act and react.
Furniture brings the outside in, but only to the extent that it itself comes from, is extracted and transformed from this outside, stripped down, reworked, refined, in short, constructed In this process of territorialization. And within the built frame -- as a frame within a frame within a frame -- our bodies and their bodily supports, (furnishings) co-exist to make of our bodies an abundance of sensations and actions.
The body becomes intimately connected to and informed by the movements, contraction and expansion, of the universe itself. Body and universe, entwined in mutual concavity/ convexity, floating/falling, folding/ unfolding, are directly touched by that outside now enframed.
The real, the outside, nature, matter, force, the cosmos, geography - all terms that we can understand as more or less stable expressions of chaos - are demarcated through the constitution of a calculus of measurement and regulation. The built frame produced through a regulation and partitioning of orientations in the site, divides and selects that which of the territory, now configured as landscape, can be legitimate. The divisions and selections of a community coalesce.
What is the body then but another frame?
ENFRAMING
the framing function of the human body
The image can no longer be restricted to the level of surface appearance, but must be extended to encompass the entire process by which information is made perceivable through embodied experience. The "digital image." Rather than selecting preexistent images, the body now operates by filtering information directly and, through this process, creating images. It enframes something (information) that is originally formless.
When the body acts to enframe digital information (the digital image) what it frames is in effect itself: its own affectively experienced sensation.
Jeffrey Shaw, The Golden Calf, 1994
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paaacEIF6wU
From Mark Hansen's text:
In a Bergsonian sense, agency constitutes itself as a "center of indetermination": a selective processor or filter that selects, from among the universe of images circulating around it, those images or facets of images that are relevant to it. In every case the emphasis is on filtering, converting, modulating, gathering.
For Bergson, the world is composed of an aggregate of images, and a selection of a subset of this aggregate is demarcated through the agency of perception. Rather than understanding perception as internal to the brain, or something added (as it is for idealist positions), Bergson defines it as subtractive: a deduction or dimunition from the universe of images. What distinguishes my perception of a material object from that object as it is in itself is the fact that I can perceive it only by isolating certain of its aspects, leaving the rest aside. One can speak about perception then in terms of discernment: a narrowing of the field, a selection from the boundless aggregate of available material.
My body is, then, in the aggregate of the material world, an image that acts like other images, "receiving and giving back movement, with, perhaps, this difference only, that my body appears to choose, within certain limits, the manner in which it shall restore what it receives."
Christina McPhee
Recipe Evacuee Cake, 2008
HD video
Framing is the means by which 1) objects are delimited and 2) qualities unleashed.
TAMING
The frame is what establishes territory from out of the chaos that is the earth.
It is about the taming -- the territorialization -- of the uncontrollable forces of the earth.
The frame separates. It cuts into a milieu or space. It constitutes a plane of composition -- a provisional ordering of chaos through the laying down of a grid or order that entraps chaotic shards and states, to arrest or slow them down.
This cutting of the space of the earth through the fabrication of the frame is the very gesture that composes both house and territory, inside and outside,
interior and landscape.
LIBERATION
With no frame or boundary there can be no territory, and without territory there may be objects or things but not qualities that can become expressive, that can intensify and transform living bodies. As the frame entraps chaotic shards and states, to arrest or slow them down, it generates a structure and a form where bodies can be affected.
The constitution of territory is the fabrication of a space in which sensations may emerge: a space from which rhythms, tones, coloring, weight, texture, etc. may be extracted.
Qualities are now loosened onto the world, launched into circulation, no longer anchored in their 'natural' place.
Art is first architectural because its cosmic materials require demarcation, enframement, containment in order for qualities as such to emerge, to live, to induce sensation. Framing is the condition under which qualities can live their own life. There is a certain celebratory, excessive quality to this.
---
Christina McPhee
Carrizoprime 2006
HD video
With the frame, then, TAMING and LIBERATION come together.
Here is an example of how they come together:
Every morning a particular bird of the Australian rain forests cuts leaves, makes them fall to the ground, and turns them over so that the paler internal side contrasts with the earth. In this way it constructs a stage for itself like a ready-made. Directly above, on a creeper or branch, while fluffing its feathers beneath its beak to reveal their yellow roots, it sings a complex song made up from its own notes and, at intervals, those of other birds that it imitates. It is a complete artist.
It defines and unleashes frames: blocs of sensations in the territory -- colors, postures, and sounds -- that sketch out a total work of art. This includes bowing low, straightening up, dancing in a circle; lines of colors; refrains. The whole of this staging is the being of sensation.
Architecture, and all the arts that follow from it, are linked to the bird's song, the olfactory dance of insects, the performative displays of vertebrates, including humans. They are each the constitution of a territory, a space that is one's own -- not just to occupy and control, but a territory that is produced by the elaborate, if apparently useless activity, of "grabbing attention" and conducting display. It is an excessive, sexualized territory -- a territory in which one can enact seduction and extract satisfaction.
There is no one kind of framing -- each form of life, each cultural form, undertakes its own modes of organization its own connections of body and earth.
---
DEFRAMING
Art is not only the movement of territorialization; it is also the converse movement, that of deterritorialization, of cutting through territories, breaking up systems of enclosure and performance, traversing territory in order to retouch chaos, enabling something mad, asystematic, something of the chaotic outside to reassert and restore itself in and through the body, in works and events that impact the body.
And so with framing we have to speak of deframing -- modes of upheaval and transformation.
If framing creates the very condition for planes of composition and thus of any particular works of art, equally art itself is a project that disjars, distends and transforms frames, that focuses on the intervals and conjunctions between frames. In this sense, the history of painting, and of art after painting, can be seen as the action of leaving the frame, of moving beyond, and pressing against the frame, the frame exploding through the movement it can no longer contain.
---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLOWy3ys8Ag
John Cage, Variations V
Choreography: Merce Cunningham
Thirty-seven remarks re an audio-visual performance
Stony Point, September-October 1965
Instrumentation: Any number of musicians with photo-electric cells and at least 13 electronically amplified sound-sources. The sound sources were short-wave radios and tapes with recordings of sounds like a kitchen drain (recorded by Cage).
The frame's most elementary form is the partition, projected downward or forward into a
FLOOR, WALL, WINDOW, SCREEN
FLOOR. a floor 'rarefies' and smoothes over the surface of the earth, creating a first (human) territonallzation. The floor, ever acquiring smoothness, suppleness and consistency makes of the earth and of horizontality a resource for the unleashing of new and more sensations, for the exploration of the excesses of gravity and movement. It is the condition for the emergence of both dance and athletics.
WALL. The wall constitutes an inside and an outside, dividing the inhabitable from the natural (the chaotic), transforming the earth itself into a delimitable space, a shelter or home. The wall divides us from the world on one side, through it provides new connections, new relations, social and interpersonal relations, with those on its other side. The wall is the basis of our co-existence.
WINDOW. The wall's most direct and perceptible function is to separate or divide; however, the wall equally functions to select and bring in. In this case the frame can be converted into the window. The window selectively envisions its natural exterior, now a landscape, no longer beyond its partition but within the enframed space of the room. The wall darkens, keeps out light and natural forces, the window selectively enframes them again to return them to the interior, to bring
illumination inside.
FURNITURE
Within the architectural frame, in miniaturized form, the frame re-enacts itself and its territorializing function through furniture, an architecture on the inside of architecture. Though classified as objects in our everyday language, furniture can be seen as an interior replication of the frame: the closet is a box in the box, the mirror a window onto the outside, the table another floor on the ground.
Because furniture is that which most intimately touches the body, it is links the architectural frame through a direct contiguity with the body and its activities. For our most intimate or most abstract endeavours, whether they occur in bed or on a couch, furniture supplies the immediate physical environment in which our bodies act and react.
Furniture brings the outside in, but only to the extent that it itself comes from, is extracted and transformed from this outside, stripped down, reworked, refined, in short, constructed In this process of territorialization. And within the built frame -- as a frame within a frame within a frame -- our bodies and their bodily supports, (furnishings) co-exist to make of our bodies an abundance of sensations and actions.
The body becomes intimately connected to and informed by the movements, contraction and expansion, of the universe itself. Body and universe, entwined in mutual concavity/ convexity, floating/falling, folding/ unfolding, are directly touched by that outside now enframed.
The real, the outside, nature, matter, force, the cosmos, geography - all terms that we can understand as more or less stable expressions of chaos - are demarcated through the constitution of a calculus of measurement and regulation. The built frame produced through a regulation and partitioning of orientations in the site, divides and selects that which of the territory, now configured as landscape, can be legitimate. The divisions and selections of a community coalesce.
What is the body then but another frame?
ENFRAMING
the framing function of the human body
The image can no longer be restricted to the level of surface appearance, but must be extended to encompass the entire process by which information is made perceivable through embodied experience. The "digital image." Rather than selecting preexistent images, the body now operates by filtering information directly and, through this process, creating images. It enframes something (information) that is originally formless.
When the body acts to enframe digital information (the digital image) what it frames is in effect itself: its own affectively experienced sensation.
Jeffrey Shaw, The Golden Calf, 1994
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paaacEIF6wU
From Mark Hansen's text:
In a Bergsonian sense, agency constitutes itself as a "center of indetermination": a selective processor or filter that selects, from among the universe of images circulating around it, those images or facets of images that are relevant to it. In every case the emphasis is on filtering, converting, modulating, gathering.
For Bergson, the world is composed of an aggregate of images, and a selection of a subset of this aggregate is demarcated through the agency of perception. Rather than understanding perception as internal to the brain, or something added (as it is for idealist positions), Bergson defines it as subtractive: a deduction or dimunition from the universe of images. What distinguishes my perception of a material object from that object as it is in itself is the fact that I can perceive it only by isolating certain of its aspects, leaving the rest aside. One can speak about perception then in terms of discernment: a narrowing of the field, a selection from the boundless aggregate of available material.
My body is, then, in the aggregate of the material world, an image that acts like other images, "receiving and giving back movement, with, perhaps, this difference only, that my body appears to choose, within certain limits, the manner in which it shall restore what it receives."
Christina McPhee
Recipe Evacuee Cake, 2008
HD video
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
week 4
Where is Stephen Hawking?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFjwXe-pXvM
SANDY STONE QUOTE:
“Sitting, as he always does, in his wheelchair, utterly motionless, except for his fingers on the joystick of the laptop; and on the floor to one side of him is the PA system microphone, nuzzling into the Votrax's tiny loudspeaker...
Exactly where, I say to myself, is Hawking?...
In an important sense, Hawking doesn't stop being Hawking at the edge of his visible body. There is the obvious physical Hawking, vividly outlined by the way our social conditioning teaches us to see a person as a person. But a serious part of Hawking extends into the box in his lap… A serious part of that silicon and plastic assemblage in his lap extends into him as well...
No box, no discourse...
Where does he stop? Where are his edges?”
DONNA HARAWAY CYBORG QUOTE
A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction…
Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs…who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted…
By the late twentieth century… we are all [cyborgs], theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism…
The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality...
JODI My Desktop OS X 10.4.7 (2007)
http://www.ubu.com/film/jodi_osx.html
Simon Penny petit mal 1993
http://ace.uci.edu/penny/works/petitmal.html
Survival Research Laboratories
Virtues of Negative Fascination 1985 - 1986
http://www.ubu.com/film/srl_virtues.html
drone video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0gY17O1MwI
One can immediately picture a peculiar kind of armed couch potato, caught somewhere between a videogame and the news. We hold our own remote devices that give us the fictions of instant command, and sitting in front of our television sets or computer screens, we are oddly enough about as close to the action as the actual pilots get -- as well as those secret teams who have their fingers on the triggers.
Part of a distributed mass with no fixed contours, with no one person to locate at the helm, the unmanned system is no ONE yet everyone.
Its projectile: the extension of some inner combative state?
A distributed, armed intent?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFjwXe-pXvM
SANDY STONE QUOTE:
“Sitting, as he always does, in his wheelchair, utterly motionless, except for his fingers on the joystick of the laptop; and on the floor to one side of him is the PA system microphone, nuzzling into the Votrax's tiny loudspeaker...
Exactly where, I say to myself, is Hawking?...
In an important sense, Hawking doesn't stop being Hawking at the edge of his visible body. There is the obvious physical Hawking, vividly outlined by the way our social conditioning teaches us to see a person as a person. But a serious part of Hawking extends into the box in his lap… A serious part of that silicon and plastic assemblage in his lap extends into him as well...
No box, no discourse...
Where does he stop? Where are his edges?”
DONNA HARAWAY CYBORG QUOTE
A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction…
Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs…who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted…
By the late twentieth century… we are all [cyborgs], theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism…
The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality...
JODI My Desktop OS X 10.4.7 (2007)
http://www.ubu.com/film/jodi_osx.html
Simon Penny petit mal 1993
http://ace.uci.edu/penny/works/petitmal.html
Survival Research Laboratories
Virtues of Negative Fascination 1985 - 1986
http://www.ubu.com/film/srl_virtues.html
drone video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0gY17O1MwI
One can immediately picture a peculiar kind of armed couch potato, caught somewhere between a videogame and the news. We hold our own remote devices that give us the fictions of instant command, and sitting in front of our television sets or computer screens, we are oddly enough about as close to the action as the actual pilots get -- as well as those secret teams who have their fingers on the triggers.
Part of a distributed mass with no fixed contours, with no one person to locate at the helm, the unmanned system is no ONE yet everyone.
Its projectile: the extension of some inner combative state?
A distributed, armed intent?
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
week 3
Kustom Kar Kommandos
Kenneth Anger 1965
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_28AhRynu0A
Stelarc exoskeleton 1999
Leg movements controlled by arm gestures & controller.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuzGraK_ldI&feature=related
Ballet mechanique 1924
Fernand Leger, dir, with cinematography by Man Ray
http://www.ubu.com/film/leger.html
Modern Times, 1936
Charlie Chaplin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjarLbD9r30
Micha Cardenas
Becoming Dragon
http://secondloop.wordpress.com/
What ever happened to the couch potato?
Not so very long ago, in America, we were in danger of becoming embalmed by the image. The specter of the “couch potato,” propped up in front of the television set, haunted what seemed to be an increasingly sedentary culture. Fused with the image in a mind-meld, the body became a fulfillment vehicle for the desire-creating machine that is television. But it very often just became fat.
In the early days of cyberspace, this figure morphed into a “meatself” parked at the computer monitor -- a viewer who, released from the restraints of the body, frolicked gleefully in the matrix. In both cases, we had a nearly inert lump of flesh whose only life signs were tiny eye and finger flickers. With television, the body was immobilized; with early cyberspace, there was the premonition of its abandonment -- in a “lifestyled” culture increasingly at odds with the reality of its flesh. We wondered: what would become of the body rendered obsolete in the playgrounds of virtuality?
Those days, for better or worse, were soon over. The rallying cry became: Time to get in shape! Wrested from the chair and launched into circulation within new mobile communications landscapes, we were to get our asses in gear, outfitted with arrays of portable devices. Mobile phones that were Web-enabled. Palm PCs outfitted with modems. Wearable GPS systems. Internet-enhanced eyegoggles. Smart shoes. Personal satellites. Implants.
It made one long for the days when one could just sit there.
--
--
what the vehicle (metaphor) alludes to regarding to the history of art
The vehicle metaphor
allows us to look at almost anything in terms of how
technology - art - perception - body
come together in one 'cluster'
it allows us to look at how this 'cluster' has come to exist in different times and places
it allows us to look at changing forms of identity, movement, forces, objects, rhythms, desires, etc.
it allows us to look at how it effects & registers societal & personal change
through the vehicle, people, of various time periods, changed their view of the world and, thus, art itself. technology changed
their perception of the world (and being in the world) and as their perception changed so to did the technology (its being in the world).
Kenneth Anger 1965
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_28AhRynu0A
Stelarc exoskeleton 1999
Leg movements controlled by arm gestures & controller.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuzGraK_ldI&feature=related
Ballet mechanique 1924
Fernand Leger, dir, with cinematography by Man Ray
http://www.ubu.com/film/leger.html
Modern Times, 1936
Charlie Chaplin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjarLbD9r30
Micha Cardenas
Becoming Dragon
http://secondloop.wordpress.com/
What ever happened to the couch potato?
Not so very long ago, in America, we were in danger of becoming embalmed by the image. The specter of the “couch potato,” propped up in front of the television set, haunted what seemed to be an increasingly sedentary culture. Fused with the image in a mind-meld, the body became a fulfillment vehicle for the desire-creating machine that is television. But it very often just became fat.
In the early days of cyberspace, this figure morphed into a “meatself” parked at the computer monitor -- a viewer who, released from the restraints of the body, frolicked gleefully in the matrix. In both cases, we had a nearly inert lump of flesh whose only life signs were tiny eye and finger flickers. With television, the body was immobilized; with early cyberspace, there was the premonition of its abandonment -- in a “lifestyled” culture increasingly at odds with the reality of its flesh. We wondered: what would become of the body rendered obsolete in the playgrounds of virtuality?
Those days, for better or worse, were soon over. The rallying cry became: Time to get in shape! Wrested from the chair and launched into circulation within new mobile communications landscapes, we were to get our asses in gear, outfitted with arrays of portable devices. Mobile phones that were Web-enabled. Palm PCs outfitted with modems. Wearable GPS systems. Internet-enhanced eyegoggles. Smart shoes. Personal satellites. Implants.
It made one long for the days when one could just sit there.
--
--
what the vehicle (metaphor) alludes to regarding to the history of art
The vehicle metaphor
allows us to look at almost anything in terms of how
technology - art - perception - body
come together in one 'cluster'
it allows us to look at how this 'cluster' has come to exist in different times and places
it allows us to look at changing forms of identity, movement, forces, objects, rhythms, desires, etc.
it allows us to look at how it effects & registers societal & personal change
through the vehicle, people, of various time periods, changed their view of the world and, thus, art itself. technology changed
their perception of the world (and being in the world) and as their perception changed so to did the technology (its being in the world).
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
week 2
The Margaret Morse reading, "An Ontology of Everyday Distraction" will be put on Reserve in the library. It is in the book Virtualities: Television, Media Art, and Cyberculture.
The two videos that we looked at today, along with descriptive texts, can be found here:
http://www.ubu.com/film/snow_wavelength.html
http://www.ubu.com/film/aitken_electricearth.html
here are the notes on the cinema/car:
The cinematic image has movement, different kinds of movements. But these movements could only be perceived because people were once put into theaters, locked into place before the screen and held in a situation of "blocked vision." These immobile people, held in "seat arrest" and slowly trained how to behave and see, became sensitive to the mobility of the world through the mediation of the screen.
They became sensitive to the technologically-fabricated illusion of movement, but also an even more complicated movement, which might be called the language or grammar of cinema: the jump from one element to the next, with the underlying theory of editing that "ensured" the transition.
Immobilized and spellbound before the screen, viewers internalize the conditions of the representational apparatus, the behaviors that it represents on its screen, and its grammar.
Think of the way Charlie Chaplin internalized the jerky pace of silent movies in his walking style, and the rapid speech patterns of early films.) Viewers and representations perform and corporealize themselves in response to what they "see" and "know" through technological and visual mediations.
Technological conditions, media norms, and represented actions are identified with, routed through the body, and used to determine acceptable parameters of movement, gesture, and behavior.
When enacted repeatedly, as in routines and rituals, these "stored" movements and gestures often no longer occupy conscious awareness: they are performed more or less automatically, as if the knowledge resided in a body part (e.g. fingers), or in physical mobility itself (dancing), rather than in the mind. As Katherine Hayles points out, it becomes difficult to intellectualize or change such habitualized practice: even if one's conscious beliefs might suggest otherwise, one is compelled to accept that which one is repeatedly compelled to perform.
This "realm of routine" therefore has political implications. Bourdieu comments that all societies wishing to make a "new man" approach the task through processes of "deculturation" and "reculturation" focused on bodily practices; hence, revolutionaries place great emphasis "on the seemingly most insignificant details of dress, bearing, physical and verbal manners," because "they entrust to [the body] in abbreviated and practical, or mnemonic, form the fundamental principles of the arbitrary content of the culture."
On the other "side," so to speak, the representation undergoes its own process of internalization. It incorporates the changing perceptual modes and activities of its viewer, as well as the changing conditions of its viewing environment. It does so by harnessing routines in interactive and analytical form. The representation "gets to know you" by opening itself up to realtime intervention, by connecting itself up to forms of surveillance, and by annexing procedures of analysis -- extending both its form and its purview. Gathering information through interactive interfaces and demographic, sociological, or market studies, including technologies of surveillance that make forms of observation and analysis increasingly precise, the image "enacts" statistics, incorporating the behaviors, conditions, and norms of both its viewers and its viewing "theater." It performs and corporealizes itself by reading its lines off the audience. It then helps to produce, modify, and mobilize that audience.
The more representations are able to mobilize and align elements in a network of heterogeneous allies the more they become, the more they "act." (In advertising, the more they "have legs.") The image, then, increases its "acting power" to the extent that it annexes routines, which are translated into useful patterns and profiles that can be sorted according to changing conditions and needs. A matrix of information flow is determined -- advancing toward realtime -- in which bodies are mobilized, oriented, and adjusted.
The viewer-navigator internalizes the routines of the image through the agency of a vehicle and is trained to "drive" as such. The image internalizes the routines of the viewer-navigator through the monitoring agency of a vehicle (GPS etc). ("The image" here of course is a frame within the "globalized cinema" of interconnecting visual media.)
In strengthening its analytical matrix, the image "learns" what the driver does, how it moves, what it wants, down to the smallest increments, eventually the tiniest eye flickers, the tiniest vacillations of desire. Armed with this knowledge, the vehicle mobilizes or "transports" an occupant through a landscape and normalizes this procedure.
It's where technology rises up to meet the body and the body pushes back, the surface in between molded by this interaction, the tension painted over in the guise of choice, comfort, convenience. Acclimating subject and representation within a technology of transport, it is a routined network of co-determining currents, cycles, codes, and channels,
This sense of enclosure need not be material, but can be induced through insertion or implantation. Think of the remote control device, the wireless communicator, or the augmented reality headgear as part of a vehicular apparatus. This protective enclosure, a "bubble" of subjectivity, becomes the condition for presence itself -- defining (and resolving) an "in here" versus an "out there," a here against a there, or a now against a later, between which its occupant is physically, mentally, or virtually transported. This "vehicle" is a figure for a condition of protected intimacy cast against a larger condition of the urban. It is a figure for technologically-mediated mobilization, as it encapsulates the body in a bubble of immediacy and shuttles it about.
Fredric Jameson writes that we read our subjectivity off the things outside. The urban is what compels one to move and to invent new forms of movement to "keep up" with its demands.
----
below is the story I gave about landing in the airplane:
Landing
We placed our tray tables, seats, and bodies in an upright and locked position in preparation for landing. We were silent, all eyes transfixed on the hypnotic images of parting clouds that filled the cabin’s projection screens, compliments of a camera mounted on the nose cone, affording us the spectacle of the very sky through which we speed. We are inside the plane's own movie. Spellbound in the eye of the projectile.
Suddenly, over the roar of the airplane, and in synchronization with the rumble of the landing gear lowering into place, a shriek cut through the calm. One man was emitting this piercing scream. His hands clenched the armrest with an iron grip; his head was thrown back, eyes closed and mouth agape. He seemed to be suspended within a fire of pleasurable danger, of the orgasmic/roller coaster/horror film variety. Was it the erotic charge of death that surged through his body? Fellow passengers shifted nervously. The screech ended. An empty plastic cup rolled up the aisle.
Needless to say, the atmosphere of the cabin has now radically changed. Passengers shift nervously in their seats. Yet, strapped into our seats, subject to the regulatory agency of air travel and of the social contract, there are only three acceptable positions.
Our heads turned sideways, we look out the window.
Our heads aimed straight ahead, we look at the monitors.
Our heads lowered, we avert our eyes -- unsure of how to deal politely with the outburst. (How strange that in such situations -- when a fellow traveler becomes drastically unmoored, his only recourse a primal screech -- one cannot be "caught" looking. Decorum requires a furtive, sidelong glance.)
We are caught in some kind of elaborate choreography combining body, technology, and perception -- body, machine, and social environment.
They involve the overlapping of image and actuality, pleasure and fear, fixity and mobility.
This choreography is a regulatory domain whose materialization is the plane.
In one sense, it's a choreography of power. There is a machinery and institution that makes us adequate to see. There is a machinery and institution that shapes the legitimacy of our perspective. There is a machinery and institution that positions us as subjects.
There is the machinery producing this view, and the more intimate machinery that is making one adequate to see it.
And there are the ways in which one squirms within these machineries, which may result in the emission of something as grand as a shriek or as faint as a blush.
I am thinking of parallels to the screech: the outcry that erupts, that shoots upward, within a tectonics of descent. The resistance, the counterbalance, the rising against the falling.
I am thinking of that moment when the ordering forces that maintain a body’s coherency are, however briefly, overcome by its urges, as it slips out of its own bounds.
The two videos that we looked at today, along with descriptive texts, can be found here:
http://www.ubu.com/film/snow_wavelength.html
http://www.ubu.com/film/aitken_electricearth.html
here are the notes on the cinema/car:
The cinematic image has movement, different kinds of movements. But these movements could only be perceived because people were once put into theaters, locked into place before the screen and held in a situation of "blocked vision." These immobile people, held in "seat arrest" and slowly trained how to behave and see, became sensitive to the mobility of the world through the mediation of the screen.
They became sensitive to the technologically-fabricated illusion of movement, but also an even more complicated movement, which might be called the language or grammar of cinema: the jump from one element to the next, with the underlying theory of editing that "ensured" the transition.
Immobilized and spellbound before the screen, viewers internalize the conditions of the representational apparatus, the behaviors that it represents on its screen, and its grammar.
Think of the way Charlie Chaplin internalized the jerky pace of silent movies in his walking style, and the rapid speech patterns of early films.) Viewers and representations perform and corporealize themselves in response to what they "see" and "know" through technological and visual mediations.
Technological conditions, media norms, and represented actions are identified with, routed through the body, and used to determine acceptable parameters of movement, gesture, and behavior.
When enacted repeatedly, as in routines and rituals, these "stored" movements and gestures often no longer occupy conscious awareness: they are performed more or less automatically, as if the knowledge resided in a body part (e.g. fingers), or in physical mobility itself (dancing), rather than in the mind. As Katherine Hayles points out, it becomes difficult to intellectualize or change such habitualized practice: even if one's conscious beliefs might suggest otherwise, one is compelled to accept that which one is repeatedly compelled to perform.
This "realm of routine" therefore has political implications. Bourdieu comments that all societies wishing to make a "new man" approach the task through processes of "deculturation" and "reculturation" focused on bodily practices; hence, revolutionaries place great emphasis "on the seemingly most insignificant details of dress, bearing, physical and verbal manners," because "they entrust to [the body] in abbreviated and practical, or mnemonic, form the fundamental principles of the arbitrary content of the culture."
On the other "side," so to speak, the representation undergoes its own process of internalization. It incorporates the changing perceptual modes and activities of its viewer, as well as the changing conditions of its viewing environment. It does so by harnessing routines in interactive and analytical form. The representation "gets to know you" by opening itself up to realtime intervention, by connecting itself up to forms of surveillance, and by annexing procedures of analysis -- extending both its form and its purview. Gathering information through interactive interfaces and demographic, sociological, or market studies, including technologies of surveillance that make forms of observation and analysis increasingly precise, the image "enacts" statistics, incorporating the behaviors, conditions, and norms of both its viewers and its viewing "theater." It performs and corporealizes itself by reading its lines off the audience. It then helps to produce, modify, and mobilize that audience.
The more representations are able to mobilize and align elements in a network of heterogeneous allies the more they become, the more they "act." (In advertising, the more they "have legs.") The image, then, increases its "acting power" to the extent that it annexes routines, which are translated into useful patterns and profiles that can be sorted according to changing conditions and needs. A matrix of information flow is determined -- advancing toward realtime -- in which bodies are mobilized, oriented, and adjusted.
The viewer-navigator internalizes the routines of the image through the agency of a vehicle and is trained to "drive" as such. The image internalizes the routines of the viewer-navigator through the monitoring agency of a vehicle (GPS etc). ("The image" here of course is a frame within the "globalized cinema" of interconnecting visual media.)
In strengthening its analytical matrix, the image "learns" what the driver does, how it moves, what it wants, down to the smallest increments, eventually the tiniest eye flickers, the tiniest vacillations of desire. Armed with this knowledge, the vehicle mobilizes or "transports" an occupant through a landscape and normalizes this procedure.
It's where technology rises up to meet the body and the body pushes back, the surface in between molded by this interaction, the tension painted over in the guise of choice, comfort, convenience. Acclimating subject and representation within a technology of transport, it is a routined network of co-determining currents, cycles, codes, and channels,
This sense of enclosure need not be material, but can be induced through insertion or implantation. Think of the remote control device, the wireless communicator, or the augmented reality headgear as part of a vehicular apparatus. This protective enclosure, a "bubble" of subjectivity, becomes the condition for presence itself -- defining (and resolving) an "in here" versus an "out there," a here against a there, or a now against a later, between which its occupant is physically, mentally, or virtually transported. This "vehicle" is a figure for a condition of protected intimacy cast against a larger condition of the urban. It is a figure for technologically-mediated mobilization, as it encapsulates the body in a bubble of immediacy and shuttles it about.
Fredric Jameson writes that we read our subjectivity off the things outside. The urban is what compels one to move and to invent new forms of movement to "keep up" with its demands.
----
below is the story I gave about landing in the airplane:
Landing
We placed our tray tables, seats, and bodies in an upright and locked position in preparation for landing. We were silent, all eyes transfixed on the hypnotic images of parting clouds that filled the cabin’s projection screens, compliments of a camera mounted on the nose cone, affording us the spectacle of the very sky through which we speed. We are inside the plane's own movie. Spellbound in the eye of the projectile.
Suddenly, over the roar of the airplane, and in synchronization with the rumble of the landing gear lowering into place, a shriek cut through the calm. One man was emitting this piercing scream. His hands clenched the armrest with an iron grip; his head was thrown back, eyes closed and mouth agape. He seemed to be suspended within a fire of pleasurable danger, of the orgasmic/roller coaster/horror film variety. Was it the erotic charge of death that surged through his body? Fellow passengers shifted nervously. The screech ended. An empty plastic cup rolled up the aisle.
Needless to say, the atmosphere of the cabin has now radically changed. Passengers shift nervously in their seats. Yet, strapped into our seats, subject to the regulatory agency of air travel and of the social contract, there are only three acceptable positions.
Our heads turned sideways, we look out the window.
Our heads aimed straight ahead, we look at the monitors.
Our heads lowered, we avert our eyes -- unsure of how to deal politely with the outburst. (How strange that in such situations -- when a fellow traveler becomes drastically unmoored, his only recourse a primal screech -- one cannot be "caught" looking. Decorum requires a furtive, sidelong glance.)
We are caught in some kind of elaborate choreography combining body, technology, and perception -- body, machine, and social environment.
They involve the overlapping of image and actuality, pleasure and fear, fixity and mobility.
This choreography is a regulatory domain whose materialization is the plane.
In one sense, it's a choreography of power. There is a machinery and institution that makes us adequate to see. There is a machinery and institution that shapes the legitimacy of our perspective. There is a machinery and institution that positions us as subjects.
There is the machinery producing this view, and the more intimate machinery that is making one adequate to see it.
And there are the ways in which one squirms within these machineries, which may result in the emission of something as grand as a shriek or as faint as a blush.
I am thinking of parallels to the screech: the outcry that erupts, that shoots upward, within a tectonics of descent. The resistance, the counterbalance, the rising against the falling.
I am thinking of that moment when the ordering forces that maintain a body’s coherency are, however briefly, overcome by its urges, as it slips out of its own bounds.
Monday, January 4, 2010
VIS159/ICAM150
Summary
The course will provide an analytical background for thinking about the history of technology and artistic practice. The course is not structured as a chronological survey; rather, it is structured as a series of seven "nodes" anchored in the present day, which are unravelled to reveal important historical patterns and connections. Each of these seven "nodes" is oriented around three "vehicle" metaphors. We will use the metaphor of the vehicle as an aid to understanding art and technology in terms of their embeddedness in processes of embodiment, movement, and subjectivity. Through readings, screenings, stories, media projects, and discussions, we will aim for a broader understanding of both technology and art, exploring the nature of technology and the changes it has brought in the realms of communication, desire, imagination, ideology, and cultural life.
Grading and Requirements
Attendance and participation: 20%
Mid-term essay: 40%
Final essay: 40%
Labs will provide an opportunity to discuss class material with your TA in a smaller group. It is important that you attend every lecture and every assigned lab session. You are expected to complete all readings before the meeting, and to participate fully in the discussions. Both the mid-term and the final have in-class components, in response to questions that will be unknown until the day of the exam. For the take-home component, you will have the option of either writing a essay, or doing a combination of an essay and an interactive video project using Korsakow.
2 pages in-class + 1000 words take-home essay + nonlinear interactive video in Korsakow
-OR-
2 pages in-class + 2500 words take-home essay
For the take-home mid-term, you will be asked to analyze and operate your own "vehicle" (whether preexisting or invented) in accordance with all 10 items in the "Vehicle User's Manual." It is very important that you understand these 10 items and respond to all 10 in your essay -- otherwise, you will fail to handle your vehicle successfully and arrive at your destination. For the final exam, you will again be asked to analyze and operate your own "vehicle"; however this time you will be asked to position your vehicle in four ways: as a frame; a stage; an apparatus; and a network.
Schedule
JAN 5: INTRODUCTION
Review of Vehicle User's Manual
JAN 12: THE VEHICLE AS ENCLOSURE
Reading: Jordan Crandall, "Convertible Vehicles"
Margaret Morse, "An Ontology of Everyday Distraction"
JAN 19: THE VEHICLE AS OPTIMIZER
Reading: Jordan Crandall, "Tech Ass in Gear"
Jordan Crandall, "Bodies on the Circuit"
JAN 26: THE VEHICLE AS BODILY RELOCATOR
Reading: Lev Manovich, "The Automation of Sight"
Jonathan Crary Suspensions of Perception (Chapter One)
Jordan Crandall, "Unmanned"
FEB 2: Screenings and MID TERM
FEB 9: THE VEHICLE AS FRAME
Reading: Elizabeth Grosz, "Chaos, Territory, and Art" ("Architecture and the Frame" section)
Mark Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Introduction)
FEB 16: THE VEHICLE AS STAGE
Readings: Victor Burgin, "Jenni's Room: Exhibitionism and Solitude"
Jordan Crandall, "An Actor Prepares"
FEB 23: THE VEHICLE AS APPARATUS
Reading: Gilles Deleuze, "Societies of Control"
Giorgio Agamben, "What is An Apparatus?"
Vilem Flusser, "Towards a Philosophy of Photography (The Apparatus section)
MAR 2: THE VEHICLE AS NETWORK
Reading: Alexander Galloway, "Protocol"
Graham Harman, Prince of Networks
MAR 9: CONCLUSION
The course will provide an analytical background for thinking about the history of technology and artistic practice. The course is not structured as a chronological survey; rather, it is structured as a series of seven "nodes" anchored in the present day, which are unravelled to reveal important historical patterns and connections. Each of these seven "nodes" is oriented around three "vehicle" metaphors. We will use the metaphor of the vehicle as an aid to understanding art and technology in terms of their embeddedness in processes of embodiment, movement, and subjectivity. Through readings, screenings, stories, media projects, and discussions, we will aim for a broader understanding of both technology and art, exploring the nature of technology and the changes it has brought in the realms of communication, desire, imagination, ideology, and cultural life.
Grading and Requirements
Attendance and participation: 20%
Mid-term essay: 40%
Final essay: 40%
Labs will provide an opportunity to discuss class material with your TA in a smaller group. It is important that you attend every lecture and every assigned lab session. You are expected to complete all readings before the meeting, and to participate fully in the discussions. Both the mid-term and the final have in-class components, in response to questions that will be unknown until the day of the exam. For the take-home component, you will have the option of either writing a essay, or doing a combination of an essay and an interactive video project using Korsakow.
2 pages in-class + 1000 words take-home essay + nonlinear interactive video in Korsakow
-OR-
2 pages in-class + 2500 words take-home essay
For the take-home mid-term, you will be asked to analyze and operate your own "vehicle" (whether preexisting or invented) in accordance with all 10 items in the "Vehicle User's Manual." It is very important that you understand these 10 items and respond to all 10 in your essay -- otherwise, you will fail to handle your vehicle successfully and arrive at your destination. For the final exam, you will again be asked to analyze and operate your own "vehicle"; however this time you will be asked to position your vehicle in four ways: as a frame; a stage; an apparatus; and a network.
Schedule
JAN 5: INTRODUCTION
Review of Vehicle User's Manual
JAN 12: THE VEHICLE AS ENCLOSURE
Reading: Jordan Crandall, "Convertible Vehicles"
Margaret Morse, "An Ontology of Everyday Distraction"
JAN 19: THE VEHICLE AS OPTIMIZER
Reading: Jordan Crandall, "Tech Ass in Gear"
Jordan Crandall, "Bodies on the Circuit"
JAN 26: THE VEHICLE AS BODILY RELOCATOR
Reading: Lev Manovich, "The Automation of Sight"
Jonathan Crary Suspensions of Perception (Chapter One)
Jordan Crandall, "Unmanned"
FEB 2: Screenings and MID TERM
FEB 9: THE VEHICLE AS FRAME
Reading: Elizabeth Grosz, "Chaos, Territory, and Art" ("Architecture and the Frame" section)
Mark Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Introduction)
FEB 16: THE VEHICLE AS STAGE
Readings: Victor Burgin, "Jenni's Room: Exhibitionism and Solitude"
Jordan Crandall, "An Actor Prepares"
FEB 23: THE VEHICLE AS APPARATUS
Reading: Gilles Deleuze, "Societies of Control"
Giorgio Agamben, "What is An Apparatus?"
Vilem Flusser, "Towards a Philosophy of Photography (The Apparatus section)
MAR 2: THE VEHICLE AS NETWORK
Reading: Alexander Galloway, "Protocol"
Graham Harman, Prince of Networks
MAR 9: CONCLUSION
VEHICLE USER'S MANUAL
Important: Read this information before operating the vehicle.
1. Vehicles enable the presence of interiority, whether it involves an actual enclosure or an intimate proximity to the body. This interiority is a model for subjectivity: a here-and-now of immediate presence. It helps to institute a self against an other; a here against a there; a now against a later.
2. Such an interiority or intimacy must be sustained over time. The vehicle acts as a "coherency device" that allows the occupant to be stabilized, held, and moved from one place to another. At times this requires a degree of destabilization or productive friction.
3. Vehicles help to structure articulation, apprehension, and attention in ways that are always intertwined with material structure and practice. They sometimes employ representations -- screens, windows, signs -- but they also work non-representationally through sensation and rhythm. Vehicles are connected not only through language but through protocols and standards, working through sameness as much as difference.
4. The vehicle is means of transport and convertibility, movement and mutation. Vehicles drive the transition between places, between moments, or between states of being. Vehicles translate between language and embodiment; form and process; movement and stillness; and signification, sensation and rhythm.
5. Vehicles are controlled by small, repetitive, semi-automatic bodily motions while the spaces across which they transport and the systems that bind them are gigantic in scale. These tiny motions can generate enormous changes in an "outside" world. The vehicle attempts to materially bridge these disjunctions of scale.
6. Vehicles trace and adjust parameters in ways that engender embodied forms. The vehicle's molded parts and components restrict and contour ranges of movements, disciplining the bodily faculties, orientations, behaviors, and perceptions of their inhabitants. They condition the their occupants by compelling them to adjust to the demands of the movements, locations, and relations that they enable.
7. Vehicles are themselves embodied through practices: in order to endure, they must adjust themselves according to the changing use-patterns and values of their users. Their form is linked to their relation to the human body as well as with other vehicles with whom they intersect, along with the means of production from which they stem.
8. When leaving the vehicle, the body is equipped with an array of access modes and "mobile peripherals" and a drive to be continually plugged in through them. In this sense occupants do not really leave vehicles but move from one vehicle to another in the places where they overlap. The occupant of a vehicle may not be located inside it, or may not be visible in a conventional sense -- though its patterns and forms can be interpolated as a function of the vehicle's operation.
9. Vehicles do not work in terms of conventional distinctions between interior and exterior, inside and outside, embodied or disembodied, so much as through zones of transition, networks of linkage, and thresholds of emergence or mutation. Often the vehicle is only "revealed" in a crisis. The mutational moment can be glimpsed in the crashing of vehicles -- the moment when interior and exterior, flesh and code interpenetrate and the vehicle becomes something radically other.
10. Vehicles are embedded in, and constituted by, historically specific sets of technologies, code-structures, materials, and bodily capacities, ensconced in a normalizing mode of transport. The vehicle attempts to generate and register a fit between societal conditions and the conditions of the occupant: it helps to "optimize" routines and forms according to social and economic demands, often in the name of progress, fitness, self-improvement, and adequacy. The vehicle is an engine of optimization. It transports that which matters. One inhabits it in order to matter.
1
Vehicles enable the presence of interiority, whether it involves an actual enclosure or an intimate proximity to the body. This interiority is a model for subjectivity: a here-and-now of immediate presence. It helps to institute a self against an other; a here against a there; a now against a later.
2
Such an interiority or intimacy must be sustained over time. The vehicle acts as a "coherency device" that allows the occupant to be stabilized, held, and moved from one place to another. At times this requires a degree of destabilization or productive friction.
3
Vehicles help to structure articulation, apprehension, and attention in ways that are always intertwined with material structure and practice. They sometimes employ representations -- screens, windows, signs -- but they also work non-representationally through sensation and rhythm. Vehicles are connected not only through language but through protocols and standards, working through sameness as much as difference.
4
The vehicle is means of transport and convertibility, movement and mutation. Vehicles drive the transition between places, between moments, or between states of being. Vehicles translate between language and embodiment; form and process; movement and stillness; and signification, sensation and rhythm.
5
Vehicles are controlled by small, repetitive, semi-automatic bodily motions while the spaces across which they transport and the systems that bind them are gigantic in scale. These tiny motions can generate enormous changes in an "outside" world. The vehicle attempts to materially bridge these disjunctions of scale.
6
Vehicles trace and adjust parameters in ways that engender embodied forms. The vehicle's molded parts and components restrict and contour ranges of movements, disciplining the bodily faculties, orientations, behaviors, and perceptions of their inhabitants. They condition the their occupants by compelling them to adjust to the demands of the movements, locations, and relations that they enable.
7
Vehicles are themselves embodied through practices: in order to endure, they must adjust themselves according to the changing use-patterns and values of their users. Their form is linked to their relation to the human body as well as with other vehicles with whom they intersect, along with the means of production from which they stem.
8
When leaving the vehicle, the body is equipped with an array of access modes and "mobile peripherals" and a drive to be continually plugged in through them. In this sense occupants do not really leave vehicles but move from one vehicle to another in the places where they overlap. The occupant of a vehicle may not be located inside it, or may not be visible in a conventional sense -- though its patterns and forms can be interpolated as a function of the vehicle's operation.
9
Vehicles do not work in terms of conventional distinctions between interior and exterior, inside and outside, embodied or disembodied, so much as through zones of transition, networks of linkage, and thresholds of emergence or mutation. Often the vehicle is only "revealed" in a crisis. The mutational moment can be glimpsed in the crashing of vehicles -- the moment when interior and exterior, flesh and code interpenetrate and the vehicle becomes something radically other.
10
Vehicles are embedded in, and constituted by, historically specific sets of technologies, code-structures, materials, and bodily capacities, ensconced in a normalizing mode of transport. The vehicle attempts to generate and register a fit between societal conditions and the conditions of the occupant: it helps to "optimize" routines and forms according to social and economic demands, often in the name of progress, fitness, self-improvement, and adequacy. The vehicle is an engine of optimization. It transports that which matters. One inhabits it in order to matter.
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