Annotations & Notes

NOTES

ART & ARTIFACE – Rob Irving (http://www.circlemakers.org/art_and_artifice.html)

The indivisible, insoluble bond between reality and illusion, between those who believe mystery should be adored and those who would play with it, between art (divinely inspired) and artifice (man-made simulacra of the divine). The distinction between art and artifice is easily lost or obscured. In this territory, common language, usually a guarantee of meaning, becomes a useful means of misinterpretation. Crucially, the word ‘genuine’ implies a single and identifiable origin, but anything supernatural is, by definition, unverifiable. Testing for genuineness, as opposed to falsifying is like using an oracle to determine truth. In our virtual reality, genuine is whatever we believe or agree it to be.

The super real must be always just out of reach and continually reinvented to maintain his distance. In the absence of any definitive image of ‘out there’, all we have are our own constructions, driven by a yearning for new experience. To understand this is to appreciate the power of imagination. Art inspires precisely this kind of experience of discontinuity. Their playful interest in ‘the supernatural’, like the subject it self, creates elaborate forms out of disconnected myths, from which new truths may emerge. It is a theatre of interactive creativity in which to escape convention. Metaphor is the key: we don’t necessarily have to either believe in, or reject, the phenomena to gain from the vision. By presenting us with unexpected novelty which threatens, cajoles and ultimately ridicules blind belief and its mirrored twin, blind scepticism, we learn new ways to perceive it.

HALF TRUTHS – Review, Susan Schuppli, 10 January 2013

Change would be impossible if we could not mentally remove ourselves from where we are physically located and imagine that things might as well be different from what they actually are. In other words, the ability to lie, the deliberate denial of factual truth, and the capacity to change facts, the ability to act, are interconnected; they owe their existence to the same source, imagination. - Hannah Arendt, ‘Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers’, The New York Review of Books, 1971,p.2

These new truths, as Michel Foucault has taught us, always operate as a limit condition governing what can be known at any given time and in turn what might be said. Are facts thus only ever half-truths conditioned by what we might empirically know about the world at a particular time?

While spent years trying to detect the real prejudices hidden behind the appearance of objective statements, do we now have to reveal the real objective and inconvertible facts hidden behind the illusion of prejudices? - Bruno Latour, ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam: From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry 30. Winter 2004, pp.226-227.

Art’s political potential is, in this instance, an indictment of a techno-scientific imagination aimed at covering over, rather than revealing the complex nature of speech understood as a materially encoded object in which debates between truth and deception, fact versus fiction, all become contretemps over the future of the new or unknown — the migrant or asylum seeker who arrives ‘unannounced’ at the borders of the nation state.

THE EXPERIENCE MACHINE – Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, Utopia. 1974

Consider the following thought experiment.

Suppose there was an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Super-duper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, pre-programming your life experiences? [...] Of course, while in the tank you won't know that you're there; you'll think that it's all actually happening [...] Would you plug in?

Nozick provides the following suggestions: 1. We want to do certain things and not just have the experience of having done them. 2. We want to be certain people – to plug in is to commit a form of “suicide” (613). 3. We are limited to a human-created reality.

We thus learn according to Nozick that there are things which matter to us more than simply having certain experiences. Presumably, Nozick’s argument is as follows: 1. If all that mattered to us was pleasure, then we would want to plug into the experience machine. 2. However, we would not want plug-in. 3. Hence, there are things which matter to us besides pleasure.

THE BUTTERFLY DREAM – Zhuang Zhou, Zhuangzi. c.3rd century BC

Once upon a time, I, Zhuangzi, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of following my fancies as a butterfly, and was unconscious of my individuality as a man. Sud¬denly, I awaked, and there I lay, myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man. Between a man and butterfly there is necessarily a barrier. The tran¬sition is called Metempsychosis. (Giles 1926: 47; Moeller 2006: 44)

Zhuang Zou wakes up and remembers his dream, then he understands he was dreaming starts to doubt if his perception is right and raises a question about illusion and reality. Doubt is essentially connected to memory, because Zhuang Zou has to remember his dream in order to doubt about its reality. The fitting of shoes, as fitting of everything else, is confirmed by for¬getting. Such forgetting that itself is forgotten means detachment and in¬dependence from memory as activity of our consciousness, but not its extension.

The forgetting – not the memory – is relevant here because forgetting means process of emptying our memory. It could be understood as all¬-embracing ‘forgetting’ and being unattached to any opposition and to the very oppositional thinking. There is the temptation to find oneself ‘understanding everything correctly.’

THE SUBLIEME OBJECT OF IDEOLOGY – Slavoj Zizek

This other possibility is that offered by fantasy: equating the subject to an object of fantasy. When he was thinking that he was a butterfly dreaming of being Zhuang Zi, Zhuang Zi was in a way correct. The butterfly was the object which constituted the frame, the backbone, of his fantasy-identity. In the symbolic reality he was Zhuang Zi, but in the Real of his desire he was a butterfly. Being a butterfly was the whole consistency of his positive being outside the symbolic network. (page 46)

THE MATRIX AS METAPHYSICS - David J. Chalmers

The brain in a vat, the brain is connected to a giant computer simulation of a world. The simulation determines which inputs the brain receives. When the brain produces outputs, these are fed back into the simulation. The brain is massively deluded, it seems. It has all sorts of false beliefs about the world.

For example in the Matrix, Neo is a brain in a vat. Let's say that a matrix is an artificially-designed computer simulation of a world. So the Matrix in the movie is one example of a matrix. And let's say that someone is envatted, or that they are in a matrix, if they have a cognitive system which receives its inputs from and sends its outputs to a matrix. Then the brain at the beginning is envatted, and so is Neo. A connection is arranged so that whenever this body receives sensory inputs inside the simulation, the envatted cognitive system will receive sensory inputs of the same sort.

How do I know that I am not in a matrix? Whether this is right or not, it certainly seems that we cannot be certain that we are not in a matrix. It seems that if I am envatted, my own corresponding beliefs are false. It makes a claim about the reality underlying physics, about the nature of our minds, and about the creation of the world.

The Creation Hypothesis says: Physical space-time and its contents were created by beings outside physical space-time.

A version of it is believed by many people in our society, and perhaps by the majority of the people in the world. If one believes that God created the world, and if one believes that God is outside physical space-time, then one believes the Creation Hypothesis. One needn't believe in God to believe the Creation Hypothesis, though. Perhaps our world was created by a relatively ordinary being in the "next universe up", using the latest world-making technology in that universe. If so, the Creation Hypothesis is true.

Recall that the Matrix Hypothesis says: I have (and have always had) a cognitive system that receives its inputs from and sends its outputs to an artificially-designed computer simulation of a world.

It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says “What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?”, and the other answers “Oh that’s a McGuffin”. The first one asks “What’s a McGuffin?”. “Well”, the other man says, “It’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands”. The first man says “But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands”, and the other one answers “Well, then that’s no McGuffin!”. So you see, a McGuffin is nothing at all.- Hitchcock

THE SUBLIEME OBJECT OF IDEOLOGY – Slavoj Zizek

The things (commodities) themselves believe in their place, instead of the subjects: it is as if all their beliefs, superstitions and metaphysical mystifications, supposedly surmounted by the rational, utilitarian personality, are embodied in the ‘social relations between things’. They no longer believe, but the things themselves believe for them. (page 31)

This problem must be approached from the Lacanian thesis that it is only in the dream that we come close to the real awakening – that is, to the Real of our desire. When Lacan says that the last support of what we call ‘reality’ is a fantasy, this is definitely not to be understood in the sense pf ‘life is just a dream’, ‘what we call reality is just an illusion’, and so forth. The only way to break the power of our ideological dream is to confront the Real of our desire which announces itself in this dream. (page 47-48)

It is not the real object which guarantees as the point of reference the unity and identity of a certain ideological experience - on the contrary, it is the reference to a 'pure' signifier which gives unity and identity to our experience of historical reality itself Historical reality is of course always symbolized; the way we experience it is always mediated through different modes of symbolization: all Lacan adds to this phenomenological common wisdom is the fact that the unity of a given 'experience of meaning', itself the horizon of an ideological field of meaning, is supported by some 'pure', meaningless 'signifier without the signified’. (page 108)

Fantasy appears, then, as an answer to ' Che yuoi?', to the unbearable enigma of the desire of the Other, of the lack in the Other, but it is at the same time fantasy itself which, so to speak, provides the co-ordinates of our desire - which constructs the frame enabling us to desire something. The usual definition of fantasy ('an imagined scenario representing the realization of desire') is therefore somewhat misleading, or at least ambiguous: in the fantasy-scene the desire is not fulfilled, 'satisfied', but constituted (given its objects, and so on) - through fantasy, we learn 'how to desire’. In this intermediate position lies the paradox of fantasy: it is the frame co-ordinating our desire, but at the same time a defence against ' che yuoi?', a screen concealing the gap, the abyss of the desire of the Other. Sharpening the paradox to its utmost - to tautology - we could say that desire itself is a defence against desire: the desire structured through fantasy is a defence against the desire of the Other, against this 'pure', trans-phantasmic desire (i.e. the 'death drive' in its pure form). (page 132)

The famous MacGuffin, the Hitchcockian object, the pure pretext whose sole role is to set the story in motion but which is in itself' nothing at all' - the only significance of the MacGuffin lies in the fact that it has some significance for the characters - that it must seem to be of vital importance to them. The original anecdote is well known: two men are sitting in a train; one of them asks: 'What's that package up there in the luggage rack?' 'Oh, that's a MacGuffin.' 'What's a MacGuffin?' 'Well, it's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.' 'But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands.' 'Well, then, that's not a MacGuffin.' There is another version which is much more to the point: it is the same as the other, with the exception of the last answer: 'Well, you see how efficient it is!' - that's a MacGuffin, a pure nothing which is none the less efficient. Needless to add, the MacGuffin is the purest case of what Lacan calls objet petit a: a pure void which functions as the object cause of desire. (page 183)

THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION - Arthur Schopenhauer, Volume II, translated by E.F.J. Payne (New York: Harper & Row, 1966)

The act of willing arises from a need or desire for something, and it is therefore a manifestation of deprivation or suffering. The fulfilment of a wish terminates the act of willing. However, no object of desire that is obtained by a subject can provide lasting satisfaction. Thus, the conditions that are necessary for knowledge of the Platonic Idea include pure contemplation, extinction of desire, transcendence of the subject-object relation, and freedom from being confined by individuality.

Schopenhauer describes the gratification of a wish or desire as a negative condition, because it provides only temporary deliverance from deprivation or suffering. Happiness is negative, because it never provides lasting satisfaction. Because happiness is never lasting or complete, only the absence of happiness can become the true subject of art.

The will desires everything for itself, says Schopenhauer, and it manifests itself as a source of egoism. Egoism concentrates the self-interest of each individual in the individuality of his or her own willing. Thus, the voluntary renunciation of egoism must be achieved by a denial of the "will-to-live." Ethical action consists of denying one's own will-to-live, and it consists of not denying the will-to-live of other individuals. Ethical action also consists of not compelling other individuals to deny their own will-to-live. Justice may be achieved when the affirmation of the will-to-live of one individual does not conflict with the affirmation of the will-to-live of other individuals.

ARTIST

BOMBS – Petro Sefstathiadis Undermining the concept of bombs, Greek artist Petros Efstathiadis created a series of sculptural assemblages made from consumer packaging, soap, flowers, light bulbs or sponges. The series titled “Bombs”, reveals how even common everyday objects can appear menacing when we are conditioned to be frightened by terrorism. Via his website, "There was a period of tension and despair in Greek society as the result of the economic crisis – and in a period of global confusion in general – Petros Efstathiadis’ bombs are a powerful and pacific answer to the absurdity we got ourselves into." - http://petrosefstathiadis.com/index.php?/root/bombs/

SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF – Elin Hansdottir The site-specific new production uses the institution’s architecture as a starting point for a spatial and filmic installation, which encompasses two complementary floors. The enviroment on this level was used before the exhibition opened as a location for shooting an experimental film, presented on the floor above. While the installation looks at the space and its properties through various constellations of objects and perspectival shifts, in the film a further dimension of perception is superimposed through the use of the camera and editing techniques. The film’s sound connects both spaces, which together interweave present, past, surface, depth, and movement. The piece emerges upon entrance, as ties between its individual elements are produced.

The term Suspension of Disbelief was coined at the beginning of the nineteenth century by Samuel Taylor Coleridge to justify the success of artistic fiction: since we derive such a great pleasure from observing it, we “believe” the artistic illusion even against our better judgment. Early cinema’s special effects also employ this phenomenon, and were often – as here – simply simulated with glass painting, but nonetheless have the power to spur the imagination. http://www.elinhansdottir.net/project/45

Gabriel Lester - http://gabriellester.com/