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.