Author: ke$hav

Time is a consequence of subjectivity. Human consciousness, circumscribed from space and the cosmos, conceptualizes nature’s rhythms as elapsed time. If time is a subjective perception, then it follows that there are a several different ways to perceive time dependent on individual or cultural experiences.

Modernized western society, for example, sees time as teleological progression – as if time progresses towards an end goal. Eastern civilizations such as the Hindus of the Indus Valley society, on the other hand, have argued time is a cyclical process of creation, dissolution, and reformation.

 

You posses a preconceived notion of how time passes, but this isn’t something you picked up in grade school, was it? Far more likely that this perspectival interface with the environment was gradually internalized by the cultural milieu.

Take architecture, for example. Its very omnipresence, ironically, obscures the determined intention to physically erect the ideological underpinnings of dominant social structures. Exemplary architectural works such as the skyscrapers of Chicago illustrate the telos of reaching for the sky by focusing traversed space to a singular, upward zenith of progress.

We cannot experience a building without being it affecting our perception of time- the distance we stand from the skyscraper’s foot draws our attention to the upward goal that attracts, or inside the stairwells beckon us to move forward. The skyscraper is a beacon towards teleogical progress – every second is an opportunity to step onward and upward.

Film, often deemed a plastic art because of its ability to mould reality, recreates physical phenomena over elapsed time. Yet unlike the natural, film explodes time, offering opportunities to dilate, through slow motion, accelerate via elliptical editing, or synchronize through montage.

Film scholar Gilles Deleuze notes a paradigm shift in film technique after World War 2: an ontological response to the over-industrialization brought about by late capitalism, the excessive telos attached to technological idealism, all coalesce into the “time image” – rather than progress stories in real-time, many films pause to breathe for a moment and represent time itself as the object of the image.

Take Godrey Reggio’s film “Koyaanisqatsi”, for example – a film which combines long shots of cityscapes with rapid time-lapse effects over-simulating the frenetic pace of city life. Time imagism does not confine itself to a particular lens or strategy other than reflexivity – the self-conscious statement that imagery is secondary to the temporal means through which the imagery is being conveyed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PirH8PADDgQ

Reggio’s film demonstrates that cultural paradigms can be challenged – he uses shots of skyscrapers and city life directed by telos, and through cinematic technique highlights the underlying cyclical essence within. Whether resistant, subversive, or hypothetical, “Koyaanisqatsi” is a film worthy of consideration because it breaks from standard cultural procedure into a new mode of experiencing time. This film is not just reflexive – referring to its own time-altering techniques, but meta-reflexive – highlighting a cultural logic of progress encoded through the art which the film depicts.

“I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement…There is no accident, just as there is no beginning and no end.” ~Jackson Pollock

The digital age complicates the very basis for determining not only what constitutes “Art”, but also threatens complete destabilization of the current mediums which exist.
I reference a classic Jackson Pollock painting, Autumn Rhythm, I need not assume you have visited the museum in which it is displayed, or even have access to a book that reprints it. I can digitally reproduce Pollock’s work before your eyes:

So, as digital technology transmutes physical artistic labor into easily consumable packets of information, what then is the task of an artist? What experiences to convey to a spectator? And where can we find a stable medium for this exchange?

Digital artist and new media theorist Lev Manovich argues the first step forward is to reformulate the conditions for how art and audience connect. Rather than a medium-by-medium theory, Manovich posits a totalizing theory of “interactive art” – the advent of the software interface allows an active exchange between viewer and artist mediated through software interfaces. For example, my ability to take a Pollock painting, throw it in a program, and mess with it.

From the perspective that art is a strategy for organizing data, the artist’s cultural prerogative, according to Manovich, has always been devising a novel algorithm for data implementation. So, montage filmmakers such as Eisenstein developed techniques which “coordinate data in different media tracks to achieve maximum affect on the user.”

Manovich’s theoretical position offers a universalizing paradigm for what constitutes an artist – a savvy architect of data structures. But this definition, in conflating data manipulation and creative expression, has some truly problematic implications. Essentially, this means any and all works of art are a set of instructions which program us to reach a pattern of feelings or thoughts. The data-reception model not only compresses the flow of creative possibilities through a single channel of data, but also re-entrenches the viewer’s passivity under the false guise of software-based interactivity .

I’d like to issue a different project for the digital artist. The project of smashing the code. Or, to use digital vernaculars, glitching the interface.

The glitch aesthetic is a postmodern digital technique implemented by DJs and VJs alike, who reformulate and manipulate broken code into a new sequence.

Digital information exchange is a syntagtic model which interpolates the viewer into a preordained mode of interpretation which precludes an ambivalent and reciprocal exchange of ideas. The glitch is a broken artifact in an otherwise smooth stream. A relic of imprecision. An accident.

As Digital Artist and Scholar Michael Betancourt notes, in breaking the smooth flow of information, the glitch exposes the materiality of digital code. Rather than perpetuating a sequence of references to information, the glitch ruptures into a recursive signifier which highlights not only its own unintended presence, but the facile construction of the very code it dismantles. The glitch inflects authenticity into the code by virtue of its indeterminate significance.

Beyond resisting the hegemonic communication model of digital capitalism, I contend glitch art is new media’s cultural link back to the origins of creative impulse. Art Historian John Onians presents a methodological twist on art history he terms neuroarchaelogy – linking neuropsychology to art history – in order to consider the origins of artistic representation in the cave paintings in Grotte de Chavet.

The inhabitants of Grotte de Chavet had developed sufficient mental capacity to recognize and recall images of the animals which they hunted. Archaelogical investigation suggests the first markings in these caves were those of a bear’s claws. The neanderthals in the cave, seeing the bear’s markings, registered the bear marks as icons of the bear’s presence, drawing it on cave walls themselves as a means of symbolic communication. At some point, however, one member mis-drew the markings, creating an accidental symbol lacking a referent – a glitch in his collective’s symbolic code.

This accident, reproduced unintentionally, developed a life of its own due to a phenomenon known as neural plasticity – repetitive actions become increasingly pleasurable until they form a new habit. First, other neanderthals tried to understand the accident-symbol’s meaning. Unable to see meaning, they reproduced it for no other purpose than study. Finally, they developed a new means of communication outside the bounds of normal behavior patterns. Hence, the original glitch incited the creative impulse – an entirely new method of communication based around expression rather than illustration.

Art, whether in pre-civilized cultures, early modern cities rejecting photographic representation, or our own age, can be seen as a means of rupturing the fixed-fast rhythms of society. It is an explosion into new means of expression. And in rewriting the dictates for symbolic communication with ambivalence, Art symbolizes new patterns of communication, behavior, and consequently of experiencing reality.

Here’s a glitch GIF I threw together from a silly picture I found on the internet.

Media devices of contemporary society constantly tread towards an ideal of transparency and immersion. We want the artifice of our tablet or phone devices to act as physical extensions of our own limbs and perceptual faculties –
just look at touch-screen, voice-command, and the visual interfaces which simulate tangible objects such as loose leaf paper or sticky notes.

In addition to practical tools, our entertainment media too progress towards an ever more immersive experience.

48 fps films such as the new Hobbit series,

3-dimensional cameras for films such as Avatar which attempt to transmute its audience to an alternate universe,

or videogames such as Call of Duty which simulate battlefield experiences with point-of-view perspective and high-definition graphics.

The above media exemplify a cultural push for virtual reality – the simulation, perhaps even the electronic accentuation of immediate physical experience with the environment.

Historically, prominent schools of intellectuals and social theorists have expressed anxiety towards virtual reality, arguing such technology obfuscates reality. Some of the founders of the field of Communications, picking up a line of discourse formulated by early 20th century sociologists, argue our very state of existence is so highly contrived by a phenomena of perpetual imagery

from billboards

to neon lights

to street-side advertising signs

that our psychological state has been fractured. The modern individual subject is interpolated by the ideological agendas imagery which populates physical artifacts around him or her to the point of a distantiation from material, or perhaps even spiritual reality.

I would like to complicate this common fear of virtuality. I agree that the transparency and immersive capacity of our surrounding media has grown exponentially. Rather than seeing this increased virtualization of the social landscape as a shift away from reality, however, I posit a bolder claim – that increasing virtuality offers deeper insight into the glimmering reality behind the virtual.

For one thing, let us consider Hollywood films such as The Matrix and Inception. Both are big-budget special effects movies which draw audiences with the promise of immersive spectacle, yet simultaneously function as convincing demystifications of immersion.

The Matrix is about an ideal society which is, in fact, simulated by an apparatus of robots conspiring to oppress the human civilization. The film suggests the possibility that social organization and modern luxury are false freedoms in exchange for mental agency. This is not just an entertaining story, but a self-reflexive depiction of the Hollywood image manufacturing process – which sells utopian visions in exchange for our time, money, and subservience to consumer ideals.

Inception tells a suspenseful story about invading an individual’s dreams and planting ideas that had yet not existed within their subconscious. As the film’s complex narrative web unfolds, the ambiguous layers of dream-consciousness seem to fold over one another, leaving the audience unsure of which dream each character currrently resides in, or whether there is any real in the first place, or whether each plane of existence the protagonists inhabit is in fact a dream. Inception too propagates a message of false consciousness – that aspects of material existence may be manufactured projections rather than self-evident material reality. Moreover, Inception articulates a theory of ideological interpolation – that the artifacts of simulation which surround us may be sowing the seeds of ideas in our minds.

At the point where seemingly neutral objects of social organization are always-already manipulating our psyches, perhaps the way to resist is through a recursive act of hypersimulation. In other words, rather than attempting to disengage from the contrived advertising culture which permeates every thread of the social fabric, a strategy of inflecting an entertainment culture of virtual reality with visceral encounters of authentic reality becomes possible.

For example, how might an immersive, psychological identification with a soldier in Call of Duty not only simulate a fictional war-time experience, but also demonstrate the real and horrible effects of war and militarization? Or how might the fantasy-land of Naavi in Avatar serve as a serious critique of technological overconsumption of natural resources.

Friedrich Nietzsche once said,

We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.

Dancing is one of the most universal forms of self expression and artistry – native to cultures old and new across the globe and across the ages.

Some cultures hold dance as a highly elite and sacred art form. For example, Premodern Indian cultures have used dance as a religious spiritual observance, in which the body performs a series of motions representative of the abstract divinity of the elements which make up the universe.

Modern Indian dancing is a fusion of classical, folk, and modern dance steps, which are often combined on-screen for Bollywood film song-and-dance sequences.

In a similar vein, yet completely different style, the Whirling Dervishes of Istanbul practice devotional Sufi tradition of the Mevlevi order, and a source of inspiration for many famous poets, musicians, and other devotional artsts.

Ballet is a dance which has maintained a reputation in contemporary society, but in fact dates back all the way to the Italian Renaissance, and has managed to maintain popularity over centuries by adapting to and absorbing elements of more contemporary dance forms.

Ballet is still part of popular culture today, the subject of Oscar-nominated film Black Swan

Despite the increasingly insular nature of contemporary, technologically wired society, one of the recent musical phenomenons, EDM, is music designated for dancing to. Rave culture is a big deal for teens and young adults. (doandroidsdance.com)

What is it about dance that is so universal to human culture? Beyond the obvious benefits of physical activity, psychological studies posit correlations between dance-like movements and elevation of mood. Moreover, dancing is a way of training coordination, memory, and self-expression.

I believe the explanation is simple: dancing is universal because it is the most accessible art form – requiring only a will to move rhythmically with affect. More than any film, article, or documentary about dance that I have seen, a moment from the movie Wall-E drives this point home most for me.

In the linked scene, a human captain of a spaceship who has never visited Earth asks his computer’s database to explain dancing to him. The computer replies:

A series of movements involving two partners, where speed and rhythm match harmoniously with music.

The definition voices over robots Wall-E and EVE playfully flying through the starry void of space with a synergy that feels more human than mechanical. Within the context of the film, this is a strategy to help promote audience identification with an inorganic protagonist and robot love story – but read more broadly, is a statement on how essentially human the act of dancing is.

 

I’ve started writing my next screenplay. So I’d like to devote a post to some reflections I’ve had on dialogue. Playwrighting and screenwriting are two means of creative expression which present the majority of their plot and action through dialogue. At the level of the manuscript, at least, the writer lacks the psychological interiority writing a novel might provide – the only insight into character is through the words they speak. Moreover, the writer cannot rely on narration as a means of progressing the plot – plot in plays and movies is dialogue driven.

Therefore, writing good dialogue is essential to writing a memorable script. Yet doing so is easier said than done, because writing dialogue is the ultimate balancing act. The writer must oscillate between the poles of contradictory demands. On one hand, each character needs to sound unique, but on the other, every character’s dialogue must reflect the overarching style of the film. Characters must sound natural, but all the boring details of real life conversations must be truncated and stylized. I’d like to study some iconic examples, new and old, of impressive writing which meets the challenge posed by dialogue.

I have revisited Shakespeare, despite his archaic language, because his technique still presents valuable lessons. Looking at the opening lines from the three witches:

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the caldron boil and bake;

This dialogue at once establishes the witches as twisted, perverse characters, present a compelling metaphor – the contamination of boiling water with adulterants. Moreover, the use of a tight meter develops a distinct rhythm to their speech while also establishing a pace for the overall story.

 

Paul Schrader’s Taxi Driver is often cited as one of the best uses of voice over, and a rare case of extreme interiority into the protagonist’s tortured mind. ItThe stark contrast between DeNiro’s repetitive speech patterns diary-like monologues and his staccato, incomprehensible attempts to strike conversations with other characters which develop an interpersonal chasm and sense of isolation which capture the mood of the film and create an iconoclastic and memorable character.

 

Recent independent film sensation Whiplash gained critical appeal for its passionate and compelling protagonist and his perpetual conflict with an unusual cruel and unforgiving mentor. Protagonist Andrew’s anti-social, obsessive banter about legendary success pits against the demeaning, volatile verbal assault from an unrelenting Professor Fletcher.

Whether through imperial propaganda

religious iconography,

consumer advertising,

or subversive graffiti,

 

societies have attempted to influence mass culture through images.

 

British Art Historian Norman Bryson writes about the two sides of a picture: its purely visual elements and its textual elements. In other words, pictures on one hand provide an immersive, pure experience, and on the other hand attempt to express specific meaning through the logical relationships they present.

Let’s look at the sprite ad more closely as an example:

The Sprite advertisement presents the experience members of our society recognize as a crispy can of Sprite – and also the blatant textual command “obey”. This example presents a very strong dichotomy between visual and textual elements. But maybe that’s the point of the ad.

By presenting an overt dichotomy, the ad creates a strategic sleight-of-hand that buries a subtler array of visual and textual codes within the frame.

For example, the refreshing and comforting cool colors, the iridescent flecks of liquid indicate soothing satisfaction. The onomatopoeic burst of color indicates energy upon cracking open a bottle.

The Sprite commercial plays on the interesting relationship between both word and image and the suspension of disbelief that occurs when a spectator focuses on either end of the visual-textual spectrum through implicit meaning.

On the other end is a subversive graffiti work:

Which focuses on textual strategy to convey a paradoxical statement. However, this is a highly medium-reflexive piece which recognizes the act of painting anything on a wall is spectacular in and of itself- the hidden visual meaning lies behind the pure text, and redefines the textual statement through self-conscious irony.

 

Hence, whether commercial or subversive, acts of persuasion begin at the margins of textual and visual communication, on the liminal ends of our cognitive capacities.