Week 2 Sound and Vision - Responses

As Radical as Reality Itself
Part 2: Responses

Friday, 28 September 2012

New Forms
ipod, Wi fi, wii, internet, web
2.0, virtual reality, bit
torrents, Limewire, Spotify,
simulations, gaming, mobile
technology, Skype, online
cloud storage, flickr, the
external hard drive, digital
tvs (big and small), cgi, final
cut,logic,photoshop ipod,
iphone, pdf’s, Second life.......


The smog of data
The number of images uploaded to Flickr every week is likely to be larger
than all objects contained in all art museums in the world.Today more
video is uploaded to YouTube in 60 days than all three U.S. television
networks created in 60 years. Flickr July 2007: 600 million images.
Flickr February 2008: 1.2 billion images (100 million / month).
Facebook: (June 2010): 500 million users 14,000,000 photo uploads
daily (2009). October 2009: 2 billion media items uploaded monthly;
1 billion messages exchanged daily; 20 billion photos on the site. May
2010: users share 25 billion pieces of information per month; 48
billion photos on site. MySpace: 300 million users (2009).


“If you add up all the hours that
gamers across the globe have
spent playing World of Warcraft
since the multiplayer online role
playing game ﬁrst launched in
2004, you get a grand total of
just over 50 billion collective
hours or 5.93 million years - to
put that in perspective 5.93
million years is almost exactly
the moment in history that our
earliest human ancestors ﬁrst
stood upright”
Reality is Broken -why games make us better
and how they can change the world, Janet
McGonigal


an image of the earth wrapped in a dense,
enveloping web of interweaving, interconnecting,
crisscrossing, seemingly inﬁnite
lines of communication and exchange.


• “Chaos (i.e. a degree of
complexity which is
beyond the ability of
human understanding)
now rules the world.
Chaos means a reality
which is too complex to
be reduced to our
current paradigms of
understanding.

• Franco Beradi, Pg. 212
•


“There is chaos when the world
starts spinning too fast for our
mind to appreciate its forms and
meaning. There is chaos once the
ﬂows are too intense for our
capacity to elaborate emotionally.
Overwhelmed by this velocity, the
mind drifts towards panic, the
uncontrolled subversion of psychic
energies premise to a depressive
deactivation”

Franco Bifo Beradi, The Soul at
Work , pg. 125


The Filters can’t ﬁlter


Visualisation


The Beast has many names

Consumerist entertainment
network
Network Society
Information society
Media ecology
Knowledge economy
Globalisation
Neo liberalism aka Capitalist
Realism aka casino capitalism
aka crack capitalism


Affects
Compression of time and
space
A culture with a need for
speed
Flux, impermanence -upgrade
culture
Blurring of real and virtual
(the virtual is real?)
New social networks
information overload (ﬁltering
becomes our chief activity)
the smog of data....


Pathologies and Symptoms?

Hedonia (inability to be bored)
Hysteria
Denial
Chronic instability
Inertia
A.D.D.
Homogenisation
A Culture of Narcissism
Option Paralysis


Possibilities
Democratisation of culture
at level production and
distribution (long tail)
Reinvigorated public sphere
via online communities (see
arab spring etc. ) - space for
countercultures to grow(?)
The replacement of passive,
centralised, one way
transmission media to
decentralised, active,
interactive media forms.


the paradoxes of change....


Cognitive
Mapping, the
absence
of stable
meaning and the
collapse of
critical distance


‘achieve a breakthrough
to some as yet
unimaginable new mode
of representing [..], in
which we may again
begin to grasp our
positioning as individual
and collective subjects
and regain a capacity to
act and struggle which is
at present neutralised by
our spatial as well as our
social confusion.
(Jameson, 1991)


“McCarthy
eliminates the
possibility of
psychological
distancing oneself
from what is taking
place; the viewer
laughs and recoils
at the same time”

Dan Cameron


“The point is that we are within
the culture of postmodernism to
the point where its facile
repudiation is as impossible as
any equally facile celebration of
it is complacent and corrupt.
Ideological judgement on
postmodernism today necessarily
implies, one would think, a
judgement on ourselves as well
as on the artefacts in question.”

Fredric jameson
‘The Politics of theory:Ideological
Positions
In the Postmodernism Debate’,
New German Critique, 33 (Fall, 1984), p. 63


I find art's ability to guide,
direct, and manipulate to be
exciting. The only direction I
see for art is as a tool for
manipulating it public on
every level - a political tool. I
don't know if this places art
above, below or parallel with
advertising. [...] The
techniques are the same. The
audience is the same. I can
never tell the difference
between them and us. We
are them. I am mass as much
as I am I.

Jeff Koons


The absence of stable meaning


‘Over the top’.....
delirious aestheticism......
accelerationism............


How to respond
“I am interested in the ways that
recent ﬁlm and video works are
expressive: that is to say, in the
ways that they give voice (or
better sound and images ) to a
kind of free ﬂoating sensibility
that permeates our society
today...[..]By the term expressive
I mean both symptomatic and
productive. These works are
symptomatic , in that they
provide indices of complex social
processes, which they transduce,
condense and rearticulate in the
form of what can be called [..]
blocs of affect”
Steven Shaviro,pg2.


“For as Jameson insists, the ‘global
world system is strictly speaking
“unrepresentable”, since its ﬂows
and metamorphoses continually
elude our existential
grasp...because of this it is
necessary to proceed by
abstraction :to “diagram” the
space of globalised capital, by
entering into it, and forging a path
through, its complex web of
exchanges, displacements and
transfers”
Steven Shaviro, pg.36


Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales

a "strange hybrid of the
sensibilities of Andy Warhol
and Philip K. Dick"

“Southland Tales, like
most science ﬁction, is
not about predicting the
future. Rather it is about
capturing and depicting
the latent futurity that
already haunts us in the
present”
Steven Shaviro, pg. 66


An heroic failure?


Key features
• A hyperbolic, accelerated, exaggerated
‘map’ of (a) ‘now’.

• A channel surfing aesthetic toamimic to
information overload. There’s flatness
the constant stream of images, an
equivalence between them. Distinct from
traditional montage. In Southland Tales
images are assembled together in a single
smooth space.

• Sound, specifically the voiceweightedkey in
Southland Tales (the film is
over is

more to the ‘sonic than to the optical’
Shavirio)


“Digital compositing implies a
continuity and equality among
its elements. The assembled
images and sounds all belong
to a single smooth space as
opposed to the hierarchically
organised striated space of
montage. However, this does
not mean that the result of
compositing is always
seamless’.
(Shavirio, 2010, pg.77)


• Michel on howinsound works
books
Chion his numerous

in cinema talks of sound
providing added value to the
image.

• In contrast Shavirofar more
that now sound is
argues

overtly used (it is
‘foregrounded’). Sound,
narration for example begins
to tie together disparate
seemingly unconnected
images in ﬁlms.


‘in the ﬁlm just as in television news, speech guides us though
an otherwise incomprehensible labyrinth of proliferating
images…[…]Justin Timberlake’s neutral all encompassing voice
accounts for and thereby makes possible, the apparent visual
clash of different spaces’ Steven Shavirio


Being in touch with the
world as it is……

Critique of decadence and
denial of art house
protocols (its aloofness or
separation from the world
as it is or as it seems or
‘feels’)


‘Assayas’ difficult task,
therefore, is to translate
the impalpable flows and
forces of finance into
images and sounds that
we can apprehend on
screen.’ Shavirio, S, Post Cinematic
Effect, Zero Books, pg. 37


Gamers Logic. Levels and
objectives.

A fractured, disconnected, violent, lurid
plot of murder, sex, transnational ﬂows
of people , money and drugs.
Demonlover and Boarding Gate
feature female protagonists, who are
caught within a bewildering electronic
landscape of surveillance, omnipresent
screens and beeps, where the clear line
between the virtual and real is
dissolved. They can only make sense of
their environment piece by piece , bit
by bit, as they move from one
disconnected space to another (every
space seems to contain another space
within it)


Rhizome
Deleuze and Guattari introduce A
Thousand Plateaus by outlining the
concept of the rhizome

Connection and heterogeneity: any
point of a rhizome can be connected
to anything other.

Ruptures: a rhizome may be broken,
but it will start up again on one of its
old lines, or on new lines

A rhizome is not reducible to any
structure; it is a "map and not a
tracing"


On a formal level Assayas
attempts to capture the
typography of this electronic
landscape, our media ecology by
dispensing with classical
cinematic perspective and
depth. The camera is frequently
close up, constantly moving
around or closely focused on
the main characters; the
background spaces are ‘poorly
rendered’ ﬂat, homogenous.


‘The market forces traversing our
world are so intense and so
disruptive that one’s very identity
is continually under threat. In a
world of affective labour and real
subsumption , one is always being
called upon to reconﬁgure one’s
being into new forms –from one
identity to another.’

Shavirio, S


The waning of effect


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