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.

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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.

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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.

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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