User:Emily/proposal final draft: Difference between revisions

Latest revision as of 22:35, 28 November 2015

Updated

During the whole proposal phase, my research was a bit scattered around, here I want to clarify my intention with this updated proposal and also lay out my previous research. Please forgive my dyslexia and bad writing skills, a better version will follow up.

Proposal II

Project Description

I propose to make an (impossible) archive of "the Wrong Man/Woman", namely misidentified people, both in films and in reality. The archive accumulates portraits and stories of these misidentified people. "The wrong man/woman" origins from one of the main themes/MacGuffins among Hichcock's films and also ceaselessly happens in real life. The mixed archive becomes an irony of those wrongly mediated situation, as if they all act like the MacGuffin device, playing in between fiction and reality. What happens in real life is no less dramatic than in films. The project will also present as an installation. When spectators stands in front of it, a trained face-recognition camera will search for a most lookalike "wrong man/woman" and bring out his/her information. I found a biometric surveillance algorithm on Github, which is typically used by military look for suspicious. But it doomed to be failed, because none of audiences would make a perfect match. However, it also mimics the situation of the protagonists in films or the suspects in real life whom had been misidentified.

Previous Research

The research started from my interest in "MacGuffin" which is a plot device in films in the form of a goal, desired object, or other motivator that the protagonist pursues and moves the plot forward. It is the functionality of MacGuffin that interests me, which moves us through space and time in a dramatic fashion. What crucial for me to learnt from MacGuffin is that it is not only limited in films, or a fictional environment, but it is playing between fiction and reality.
I had a hard time to figure out the scheme of MacGuffin, because it is always not there, but presented in different ways. I see it as an interesting typology. At initial stage in my research I tried to take it out of cinema and tried to use it to exemplify some phenomenon in reality (pic. a list of MacGuffin). But it didn't work well, because I narrowed it down in order to make strict match, for example I used the letter of transition in Casablanca to link the first spam of Green Card Lottery.
Since "MacGuffin" is popularised by Hitchcock, later on, I made a small collection of "widely accepted" MacGuffin Objects from Hitchcock's film (webpage of MacGuffin), although MacGuffin are not only in physical form. This is for me to take close look at how an object could navigate the story. There is still arbitrary, some may not agree all of them as MacGuffin. My next step was try to remake some shots when the MacGuffin is in the scenario and replace them with my own belongs, since MacGuffin is said to be interchangeable (pic. the lighter in 3d printing and the shot I made replacing the lighter with a timer). Then I could make another story through a single shot. It was set to question the scheme of MacGuffin, but in a loosely constructed way without dive into narration.
During my research I came across Noam Toran's works which are heavily influenced by cinema films. He actually made MacGuffin Library, in which he produced physical objects through rapid prototype and provide each of them a short synopsis. He made the hook of the object for audience to develop the rest of the stories without actually making a film. Some of them I quite like when the object hook both fiction and reality.
It also forces and drives me to think in a different way.

Current phase

I step back to look at the material I already gathered, there is one theme hooked me, which is also repeatedly occurred in Hitchcock's films - the wrong man/woman. In general, it is the misrecognition. In the Poetics, Aristotle defines recognition (anagonirisis) as "a change from ignorance to knowledge, and he conceived it to be at the heart of the tragic plot."^[1]"It is tempting to read into Hitchcock's dramatization of the instability of recognition claims the idea that his films tell us something essential about the nature of knowledge, or about the kind of knowledge claims that can be made in narratives." As Terence Cave claims that, "narrative truth is inherently provisional or unstable, and that Hitchcock’s work therefore dramatises an underlying skepticism towards knowledge claims that depend on inference. Hitchcock’s meditations on the idea of the MacGuffin as a plot pretext have inevitably furthered this kind of speculation." Hitchcock borrowed the parable of MacGuffin from screenwriter Angus MacPhail:"Two gentlemen meet on a train, and the one is struck by the extraordinary package being carried by the other. He asks his companion, 'What is in that unusual package you are carrying there?' The other man replies, 'That is a MacGuffin.' 'What is a MacGuffin?' asks the first. The second says, 'A MacGuffin is a device used for killing leopards in the Scottish highlands.' Naturally the first man says, 'But there are no leopards in the Scottish highlands.' 'Well,' says the second, 'then that's not a MacGuffin, is it?'" "The MacGuffin, in fact, corresponds to our sense that the misrecognition that initially frames the hero of these films as the "wrong man" is something that we should enjoy rather than take seriously. Indeed, in this sense the wrong-man idea in Hitchcock's narratives of romantic renewal is itself the real MacGuffin. Hitchcock and Ernest Lehman acknowledged this when they made the hero of North by Northwest." So what is at stake in the end is the question of believing that one knows and can influence, or get to know, or fail to know the mind of another person".

In Zizek’s book The Sublime Object, he mentioned another version of the MacGuffin story borrowed from MacPhail, 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 MacGuffin, a pure nothing which is none the less efficient. Zizek find this pretext, a Macguffin in the real world. The “Iraqi weapons of mass destruction” fit perfectly the status of MacGuffin. “As such, they(WMD) by definition cannot ever be found, and are therefore all the more dangerous... Now that none were found, we reached the last line of the story of MacGuffin: "'Well,' said President Bush in September 2003, 'then that's not a MacGuffin, is it?'"”

According to Zizek, "the MacGuffin is presented only in a series of effects, but always in a distorted, displaced way. If the Real is the impossible, it is precisely this impossibility which is to be grasped through its effects." This inspired me to take look not only on MacGuffin itself but also its effect. If we tracing back those wrong man/woman story, mis recognition has profound consequences for the lives of the protagonists, even when the criminal is finally apprehended. "The pursuit of knowledge is imbricated in interpersonal relationship and implicated in structures of social hierarchy and power. The same situation like in the Iraq Macguffin, the mass media helped government to provided for the guidance of public opinion.

Relation to previous practices

In the last academic year, I have been working on manipulation of audiovisual content (mainly cinematic materials), examining how could it alter the way of seeing. My work started in a quite simple manner, in which films are utilised as input to produce books (Photobook, Four-folded Book), videos (Reversed shots), browser-based works(Q&A), and interactive installations(Iterative movies). Through these works, different accessibilities are provided and meanwhile doubts are bought forward on the ability of recognition - namely the ability to recognise time and space, fiction and fact. Since then I went into a mode that harvest pre-existed materials and repurpose them. Cinema becomes my main resource. Particular ways to look at cinema informs my practice, namely to look at cinema in different typologies instead of genres, can be their specific visual languages, physical objects, and devices. It becomes a beautiful landscape for me, when merge them with reality. Assemblage is a strategy of my previous practice. I’ve looked at the works from E.T.A Hoffmann, Tristan Tzara, Oulipo, William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin and their methods to resemble materials following “cut-up technique”, “fold-in technique”, permutation etc. These methods become a system for them to generate works. When Gysin made his sound poetry “I AM THAT I AM”, he stated to combine previous analogue techniques with algorithm to create this permutational poetry based on that simple phrase. Through their work, I experienced the performantivity of materials.

Context

Broadly there are a lot of works dealing with perception, altered perception. Most of the works on artistic reenactment requires people to take a different look what really happened there. "Unlike popular historical re-enactments, artistic re-enactments do not simply affirm what has happened in the past, but question the present by taking recourse to historical (often traumatic) events that have left their traces in collective memory. Because history and memory are seldom directly experienced but more often mediated through media, re-enactments also represent an artistic interrogation of media images."^[2] Although I didn't take the form of reenactment in my practice, I considered to work in the same direction questioning the present by taking recourse to existed materials. Like in Adams' photograph of Nguyễn Ngọc Loan executing Nguyễn Văn Lém on February 1, 1968, the famous photograph with hugely hidden information had mislead people's recognition, made people wrongly accusing a "hero". In The Third Memory (2000) by Pierre Huyghe, he invited a released real robber reenacts the 1972 hold-up of a Brooklyn bank immortalized in Sidney Lumet's acclaimed film Dog Day Afternoon (1975). "Almost 30 years later, Huyghe provides a platform for the heist's charismatic mastermind, John Wojtowicz, to relate his version of that infamous day in a reconstructed set of the bank. However, rather than clarify the personal history that Hollywood wrested from him, Wojtowicz appears to have been heavily influenced by the film, a testament to the inextricable merging of real events, the distortions of memory, and the mediating power of popular culture."^[3] In a later talk, Huyghe pointed out "It’s just to blur certitude. As in the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, where Poe plays with the relation between fiction and reality, if something is too amazing to be believed then you have to put it in the costume of fiction to make it believed. But doing so is a trick because the thing is not even true." Then we can perceive highly contextualised knowledge we receive.

Refference

Recognition: The Poetics of Narrative : Interdisciplinary Studies on Anagnorisis (2008)

Knowledge as a flow and a thing

The Sublime Object of Ideology, p163

How to read Lacan, Zizek p133

Hitchcock's 1962 interview with Francois Truffaut

Proposal I -- Fantasy-Objects

Introduction

A MacGuffin is used as a plot device in fiction films in the form of a goal, desired object, or other motivator that the protagonist pursues and moves the plot forward. I am interested in MacGuffin, precisely the MacGuffin effect. According to Zizek, "the MacGuffin is the purest case of what Lacan calls objet petit a: a pure void which functions as the object - cause of desire. That would be then the precise definition of the real object: a cause which in itself does not exist - which is present only in a series of effects, but always in a distorted, displaced way. If the Real is the impossible, it is precisely this impossibility which is to be grasped through its effects." The effect of MacGuffin in fiction films maybe easier to grasp, however it may be harder to perceive in the representation of our daily commodities, events which are mediated in different ways. In the work, I attempt to exchange the context of the MacGuffin from fiction to reality and vice versa, in order to reveal less visible mechanism of soft control and seeing. MacGuffin plays between fiction and reality, implies "the protagonist is an emblem of the human subject in an abstract representation." MacGuffins are “material metaphors” they have a “reality effect”.

Description of Project(s)

Part I

This part comes from my own obsession with MacGuffin objects which are popularized by Hitchcock. It will comprised in two different parts. On one hand, some of the MacGuffin Objects will be reproduced in a uniform way (3d print), they will be taken out of film and presented in reality. Additionally, I will make a series of short videos replacing the object with my own belongings.

Check gathered material.

Part II

In my research, there will be a parallel collection of MacGuffin both in films and in reality. It serves as extended backup, not only include these physical MacGuffins but also those in an abstract from. The collection consists of moving-images, audio and text, for further study on how the desired are delivered and what patterns are embedded in. What is absent and present is the key to pinpoint the lack. The research will end up with a webpage, with voice guidance narrating the presence and absence information. More thoughts on present the research, check previous proposal.
List of MacGuffin

My concern

What I am interested in is an unstable mix of the real, the unreal, the not-entirely-real and the not-yet-real, maybe even some degree of the surreal. For me, MacGuffin holds features of the unstable mix. Although the film is a single narrative form to be unfolded, macguffin offers hints which can be driven into different directions. For the reenactment part of my work, what I propose here is not exact repetition but to create an interpretation with the means of physical language of films. Then it becomes a testimony of modes of perception that lie in the interstices between reality and its representation. In all, what I want to address by this work is the influence of the images, mediated through media, on our identity and fantasy, and how objects often mediate these fantasies.

Relation to Previous Works

In the last academic year, I have been working on manipulation of audiovisual content (mainly cinematic materials), examining how could it alter the way of seeing. My work started in a quite simple manner, in which films are utilised as input to produce books (Photobook, Four-folded Book), videos (Reversed shots), browser-based works(Q&A), and interactive installations(Iterative movies). Through these works, different accessibilities are provided and meanwhile doubts are bought forward on the ability of recognition - namely the ability to recognise time and space, fiction and fact. Starting from my interest in video editing, the practice and research brought me back to think about montage, but in a much broader and freer manner. I started to research the “cut-up” techniques through different times, from literature to cinema works and data manipulations. All these works are more or less leave a space for the “performativity” inherited from their original materials. However the performantivity is controlled in another way. For instance, the liberated words from Gysin, are highly controlled by the algorithm he utilised instead of language syntax. Interestingly, the conceptual framework are hardwired to the mechanics in technologies, which later on may translate to be (standard) code. The materials feed perception, and become layered and less visible. It brings the question of how this control would affect on cognition, from both human level and machine level (or the architecture of technology).

Relation to larger context

The name "MacGuffin" appears to originate in 20th-century filmmaking, and was popularized by Alfred Hitchcock in the 1930s. He often quoted the following story to illustrate its nothingness: "Two gentlemen meet on a train, and the one is struck by the extraordinary package being carried by the other. He asks his companion, 'What is in that unusual package you are carrying there?' The other man replies, 'That is a MacGuffin.' 'What is a MacGuffin?' asks the first. The second says, 'A MacGuffin is a device used for killing leopards in the Scottish highlands.' Naturally the first man says, 'But there are no leopards in the Scottish highlands.' 'Well,' says the second, 'then that's not a MacGuffin, is it?’” In Zizek’s book The Sublime Object, he mentioned another version of the story, 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 MacGuffin, a pure nothing which is none the less efficient. Donald Spoto, who is an American biographer and theologian, once pointed out that “There’s a blot to look for in Hitchcock’s film, but watch out for the MacGuffin. It will lead you to nowhere.” The MacGuffin is in itself, a pure void, but it is the pure void that holds the “big Other”. Zizek find this pretext, a Macguffin in the real world. The “Iraqi weapons of mass destruction” fit perfectly the status of MacGuffin. “As such, they(WMD) by definition cannot ever be found, and are therefore all the more dangerous... Now that none were found, we reached the last line of the story of MacGuffin: "'Well,' said President Bush in September 2003, 'then that's not a MacGuffin, is it?'"”

In reality, that might sound be the most dramatized scenario in reality. The government controlled the discourse; we all are like the actors in that performance. The only difference is a real war, people are dying. The “pure void” is represented only in a series of effects. “Not its symbolic interpretation but the experience of the fact that the fantasy-object, by its fascinating presence, is merely filling out a lack, a void in the Other. “ The fantasy is a construction whose function is to hide this void.

Reference

The Prisoner's Dilemma
Knowledge as a flow and a thing
The Sublime Object of Ideology, p163
http://www.lacan.com/iraq1.htm
How to read Lacan, Zizek p133
Hitchcock's 1962 interview with Francois Truffaut
Hitchcock's June 8, 1972 appearance on the Dick Cavett Show
Johan Grimonprez on Hitchcock and Television
The Purloined Letter (the letter is hidden in the open)

↑ Recognition: The Poetics of Narrative : Interdisciplinary Studies on Anagnorisis (2008)
↑ History will repeat itself: http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/history-will-repeat-itself/
↑ http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/artwork/10460

[1] Recognition: The Poetics of Narrative : Interdisciplinary Studies on Anagnorisis (2008)

[2] History will repeat itself: http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/history-will-repeat-itself/

[3] ttp://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/artwork/10460

[1]

[2]

[3]

@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
 <div style="width:65%;">
-===Proposal I===
+Updated
-====Fantasy-Objects ====
+During the whole proposal phase, my research was a bit scattered around, here I want to clarify my intention with this updated proposal and also lay out my previous research. Please forgive my dyslexia and bad writing skills, a better version will follow up.<br>
+===Proposal II===
+====Project Description====
+I propose to make an (impossible) archive of "the Wrong Man/Woman", namely misidentified people, both in films and in reality. The archive accumulates portraits and stories of these misidentified people. "The wrong man/woman" origins from one of the main themes/MacGuffins among Hichcock's films and also ceaselessly happens in real life. The mixed archive becomes an irony of those wrongly mediated situation, as if they all act like the MacGuffin device, playing in between fiction and reality. What happens in real life is no less dramatic than in films. The project will also present as an installation. When spectators stands in front of it, a trained face-recognition camera will search for a most lookalike "wrong man/woman" and bring out his/her information. I found a biometric surveillance algorithm on Github, which is typically used by military look for suspicious. But it doomed to be failed, because none of audiences would make a perfect match. However, it also mimics the situation of the protagonists in films or the suspects in real life whom had been misidentified.
+====Previous Research====
+The research started from my interest in "MacGuffin" which is a plot device in films in the form of a goal, desired object, or other motivator that the protagonist pursues and moves the plot forward. It is the functionality of MacGuffin that interests me, which moves us through space and time in a dramatic fashion. What crucial for me to learnt from MacGuffin is that it is not only limited in films, or a fictional environment, but it is playing between fiction and reality. <br>
+I had a hard time to figure out the scheme of MacGuffin, because it is always not there, but presented in different ways. I see it as an interesting typology. At initial stage in my research I tried to take it out of cinema and tried to use it to exemplify some phenomenon in reality (pic. a list of MacGuffin). But it didn't work well, because I narrowed it down in order to make strict match, for example I used the letter of transition in Casablanca to link the first spam of Green Card Lottery. <br>
+Since "MacGuffin" is popularised by Hitchcock, later on, I made a small collection of "widely accepted" MacGuffin Objects from Hitchcock's film (webpage of MacGuffin), although MacGuffin are not only in physical form. This is for me to take close look at how an object could navigate the story. There is still arbitrary, some may not agree all of them as MacGuffin. My next step was try to remake some shots when the MacGuffin is in the scenario and replace them with my own belongs, since MacGuffin is said to be interchangeable (pic. the lighter in 3d printing and the shot I made replacing the lighter with a timer). Then I could make another story through a single shot. It was set to question the scheme of MacGuffin, but in a loosely constructed way without dive into narration.<br>
+During my research I came across Noam Toran's works which are heavily influenced by cinema films. He actually made ''MacGuffin Library'', in which he produced physical objects through rapid prototype and provide each of them a short synopsis. He made the hook of the object for audience to develop the rest of the stories without actually making a film. Some of them I quite like when the object hook both fiction and reality.<br> It also forces and drives me to think in a different way.
+====Current phase====
+I step back to look at the material I already gathered, there is one theme hooked me, which is also repeatedly occurred in Hitchcock's films - the wrong man/woman. In general, it is the misrecognition. In the Poetics, Aristotle defines recognition (anagonirisis) as "a change from ignorance to knowledge, and he conceived it to be at the heart of the tragic plot."<ref>Recognition: The Poetics of Narrative : Interdisciplinary Studies on Anagnorisis (2008)</ref>"It is tempting to read into Hitchcock's dramatization of the instability of recognition claims the idea that his films tell us something essential about the nature of knowledge, or about the kind of knowledge claims that can be made in narratives." As Terence Cave claims that, "narrative truth is inherently provisional or unstable, and that Hitchcock’s work therefore dramatises an underlying skepticism towards knowledge claims that depend on inference. Hitchcock’s meditations on the idea of the MacGuffin as a plot pretext have inevitably furthered this kind of speculation." Hitchcock borrowed the parable of MacGuffin from screenwriter Angus MacPhail:"Two gentlemen meet on a train, and the one is struck by the extraordinary package being carried by the other. He asks his companion, 'What is in that unusual package you are carrying there?' The other man replies, 'That is a MacGuffin.' 'What is a MacGuffin?' asks the first. The second says, 'A MacGuffin is a device used for killing leopards in the Scottish highlands.' Naturally the first man says, 'But there are no leopards in the Scottish highlands.' 'Well,' says the second, 'then that's not a MacGuffin, is it?'" "The MacGuffin, in fact, corresponds to our sense that the misrecognition that initially frames the hero of these films as the "wrong man" is something that we should enjoy rather than take seriously. Indeed, in this sense the wrong-man idea in Hitchcock's narratives of romantic renewal is itself the real MacGuffin. Hitchcock and Ernest Lehman acknowledged this when they made the hero of North by Northwest." So what is at stake in the end is the question of believing that one knows and can influence, or get to know, or fail to know the mind of another person". <br>
+In Zizek’s book The Sublime Object, he mentioned another version of the MacGuffin story borrowed from MacPhail, 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 MacGuffin, a pure nothing which is none the less efficient. Zizek find this pretext, a Macguffin in the real world. The “Iraqi weapons of mass destruction” fit perfectly the status of MacGuffin. “As such, they(WMD) by definition cannot ever be found, and are therefore all the more dangerous... Now that none were found, we reached the last line of the story of MacGuffin: "'Well,' said President Bush in September 2003, 'then that's not a MacGuffin, is it?'"”<br>
+According to Zizek, "the MacGuffin <!--is the purest case of what Lacan calls objet petit a: a pure void which functions as the object - cause of desire. That would be then the precise definition of the real object: a cause which in itself does not exist - which -->is presented only in a series of effects, but always in a distorted, displaced way. If the Real is the impossible, it is precisely this impossibility which is to be grasped through its effects." This inspired me to take look not only on MacGuffin itself but also its effect. If we tracing back those wrong man/woman story, mis recognition has profound consequences for the lives of the protagonists, even when the criminal is finally apprehended. "The pursuit of knowledge is imbricated in interpersonal relationship and implicated in structures of social hierarchy and power. The same situation like in the Iraq Macguffin, the mass media helped government to provided for the guidance of public opinion.
+====Relation to previous practices====
+In the last academic year, I have been working on manipulation of audiovisual content (mainly cinematic materials), examining how could it alter the way of seeing. My work started in a quite simple manner, in which films are utilised as input to produce books ([[User:Emily/Thematic_Project/Trimester_02/04|Photobook]], [[User:Emily/Thematic_Project/Trimester_02/01#Movie_book|Four-folded Book]]), videos ([https://vimeo.com/123562022 Reversed shots]), browser-based works([http://pzwart1.wdka.hro.nl/~yuzhen/work_conversation/ Q&A]), and interactive installations([https://vimeo.com/123513119 Iterative movies]). Through these works, different accessibilities are provided and meanwhile doubts are bought forward on the ability of recognition - namely the ability to recognise time and space, fiction and fact. Since then I went into a mode that harvest pre-existed materials and repurpose them. Cinema becomes my main resource. Particular ways to look at cinema informs my practice, namely to look at cinema in different typologies instead of genres, can be their specific visual languages, physical objects, and devices. It becomes a beautiful landscape for me, when merge them with reality. Assemblage is a strategy of my previous practice. I’ve looked at the works from E.T.A Hoffmann, Tristan Tzara, Oulipo, William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin and their methods to resemble materials following “cut-up technique”, “fold-in technique”, permutation etc. These methods become a system for them to generate works. When Gysin made his sound poetry “I AM THAT I AM”, he stated to combine previous analogue techniques with algorithm to create this permutational poetry based on that simple phrase. Through their work, I experienced the performantivity of materials.
+====Context====
+Broadly there are a lot of works dealing with perception, altered perception. Most of the works on artistic reenactment requires people to take a different look what really happened there. "Unlike popular historical re-enactments, artistic re-enactments do not simply affirm what has happened in the past, but question the present by taking recourse to historical (often traumatic) events that have left their traces in collective memory. Because history and memory are seldom directly experienced but more often mediated through media, re-enactments also represent an artistic interrogation of media images."<ref>History will repeat itself: http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/history-will-repeat-itself/ </ref> Although I didn't take the form of reenactment in my practice, I considered to work in the same direction questioning the present by taking recourse to existed materials. Like in Adams' photograph of Nguyễn Ngọc Loan executing Nguyễn Văn Lém on February 1, 1968, the famous photograph with hugely hidden information had mislead people's recognition, made people wrongly accusing a "hero".  In ''The Third Memory (2000)'' by Pierre Huyghe, he invited a released real robber reenacts the 1972 hold-up of a Brooklyn bank immortalized in Sidney Lumet's acclaimed film Dog Day Afternoon (1975). "Almost 30 years later, Huyghe provides a platform for the heist's charismatic mastermind, John Wojtowicz, to relate his version of that infamous day in a reconstructed set of the bank. However, rather than clarify the personal history that Hollywood wrested from him, Wojtowicz appears to have been heavily influenced by the film, a testament to the inextricable merging of real events, the distortions of memory, and the mediating power of popular culture."<ref>http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/artwork/10460</ref> In a later talk, Huyghe pointed out "It’s just to blur certitude. As in the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, where Poe plays with the relation between fiction and reality, if something is too amazing to be believed then you have to put it in the costume of fiction to make it believed. But doing so is a trick because the thing is not even true." Then we can perceive highly contextualised knowledge we receive.
+==== Refference====
+:Recognition: The Poetics of Narrative : Interdisciplinary Studies on Anagnorisis (2008)
+:Knowledge as a flow and a thing
+:The Sublime Object of Ideology, p163
+:How to read Lacan, Zizek p133
+:Hitchcock's 1962 interview with Francois Truffaut
+:
+<br>
+----
+<br>
+<br>
+===Proposal I -- Fantasy-Objects ===
 ===== Introduction=====
-A MacGuffin is used as a plot device in fiction films in the form of a goal, desired object, or other motivator that the protagonist pursues and moves the plot forward. I am interested in MacGuffin, precisely the MacGuffin effect. According to Zizek, "the MacGuffin is the purest case of what Lacan calls objet petit a: a pure void which functions as the object - cause of desire. That would be then the precise definition of the real object: a cause which in itself does not exist - which is present only in a series of effects, but always in a distorted, displaced way. If the Real is the impossible, it is precisely this impossibility which is to be grasped through its effects." The effect of MacGuffin in fiction films maybe easier to grasp, however it may be harder to perceive in the representation of our daily commodities, events which are mediated in different ways. In the work, I attempt to exchange the context of the MacGuffin from fiction to reality and vice versa, in order to reveal less visible mechanism of soft control. MacGuffin plays between fiction and reality, implies "the protagonist is an emblem of the human subject in an abstract representation." MacGuffins are “material metaphors” they have a “reality effect”.
+A MacGuffin is used as a plot device in fiction films in the form of a goal, desired object, or other motivator that the protagonist pursues and moves the plot forward. I am interested in MacGuffin, precisely the MacGuffin effect. According to Zizek, "the MacGuffin is the purest case of what Lacan calls objet petit a: a pure void which functions as the object - cause of desire. That would be then the precise definition of the real object: a cause which in itself does not exist - which is present only in a series of effects, but always in a distorted, displaced way. If the Real is the impossible, it is precisely this impossibility which is to be grasped through its effects." The effect of MacGuffin in fiction films maybe easier to grasp, however it may be harder to perceive in the representation of our daily commodities, events which are mediated in different ways. In the work, I attempt to exchange the context of the MacGuffin from fiction to reality and vice versa, in order to reveal less visible mechanism of soft control and seeing. MacGuffin plays between fiction and reality, implies "the protagonist is an emblem of the human subject in an abstract representation." MacGuffins are “material metaphors” they have a “reality effect”.
 ===== Description of Project(s)=====
@@ Line 11: / Line 48: @@
 [http://pzwart1.wdka.hro.nl/~yuzhen/web-guffin/guffin-1.html Check gathered material]. <br>
-For a further practice: I plan to make a video installation. (live cinema?)
+<!--
+For a further practice: I plan to make a video installation. (live cinema, still under consideration)
 Please refer to the [http://pzwart1.wdka.hro.nl/~yuzhen/img/sketch.jpg sketch]
@@ Line 17: / Line 55: @@
 Audiences are invited to put their own objects (any objects that they have with themselves at that moment, namely keys, phones, glasses, purses, rings, pens) inside of the installation. This will trigger a sequence of moving images shown in the screen/computer in front. A camera is mounted on the back of the screen in order to take photos of the objects, which will also be present in the sequence of moving images on the screen together with protagonists' reactions. The moving images are extracted from Hitchcock’s typical shots, namely, vertigo shots, montage sequence of some intense scenario, close-up emotion shots. The backside will be a light box for capturing better images of the objects.<br>
 The installation will focus on their core feature which is the void. They can only be presented in a series of effects. Here I will simplify them as a sequence of typical shots. MacGuffins are interchangeable in films. To capture this feature, and to get spectators involved in the work, I want to dramatize the objects we possess in an ironic and playful way. It is a reflection of how our mundane objects can be mediated in daily media and invite people to think what is presence and absence here.
+-->
 :'''Part II'''
 In my research, there will be a parallel collection of MacGuffin both in films and in reality. It serves as extended backup, not only include these physical MacGuffins but also those in an abstract from. The collection consists of moving-images, audio and text, for further study on how the desired are delivered and what patterns are embedded in. What is absent and present is the key to pinpoint the lack. The research will end up with a webpage, with voice guidance narrating the presence and absence information. More thoughts on present the research, check [[User:Emily/proposal_0.02 | previous proposal]].<br>
 [http://pzwart1.wdka.hro.nl/~yuzhen/img/list%20of%20macgufins.png List of MacGuffin]
+=====My concern=====
+What I am interested in is an unstable mix of the real, the unreal, the not-entirely-real and the not-yet-real, maybe even some degree of the surreal. For me, MacGuffin holds features of the unstable mix. Although the film is a single narrative form to be unfolded, macguffin offers hints which can be driven into different directions. For the reenactment part of my work, what I propose here is not exact repetition but to create an interpretation with the means of physical language of films. Then it becomes a testimony of modes of perception that lie in the interstices between reality and its representation. In all, what I want to address by this work is the influence of the images, mediated through media, on our identity and fantasy, and how objects often mediate these fantasies.
+<!--
+There are two art works I want to mention dealing with re-enactment but in a different way. One is a series of photography works, Positives (2002-2003) by Zbigniew Libera, in which he created positive versions of famous historical press photos. He commented "we are always dealing with memorized objects, not the objects themselves. I wanted to employ this mechanism of seeing ...". <br>
+[[File:Positives 1.png|700px]] <br>
+The other one is the documentary ''The Third Memory (2000) by Pierre Huyghe. "It retraces the episodes of the film Dog Day Afternoon (1975), by Sydney Lumet, in the presence of the real bank robber, who freed from prison and much older and unhappy with the reconstitution done by Lumet, reenacts, remembers and analyzes, in the movie location, some moments of the famous assault on the Brooklyn bank in New York city, in 1972." In a later talk, Huyghe pointed out "It’s just to blur certitude. As in the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, where Poe plays with the relation between fiction and reality, if something is too amazing to be believed then you have to put it in the costume of fiction to make it believed. But doing so is a trick because the thing is not even true."<br>
+I am fascinated in repetition and repeated actions, and heard about a novel from McCarthy, ''Remainder''. Although I haven't read it, but the synopsis sounds quite tempting. It tells the story of a traumatized protagonist who spend his time and money to reconstruct and re-enact vaguely remembered scenes and situations from his past. "These re-enactments are driven by a need to inhabit the world "authentically" rather than in the "second-hand" manner that his traumatic situation has bequeathed him."
+:cognitive estrangement
+:consumer society is lulling us into a state of satiation by making us hungry for things we can easily purchase
+:demystify the process
+:sarcastically tear at the structure of "everyday life"
+:"if something is too amazing to be believed then you have to put it in the costume of fiction to make it believed. But doing so is a trick because the thing is not even true."
+-->
 ==== Relation to Previous Works====
-In the last academic year, I have been working on manipulation of audiovisual content (mainly cinematic materials), examining how could it alter the way of seeing. My work started in a quite simple manner, in which films are utilised as input to produce books (link), videos (link), browser- based works(link), and interactive installations(link). Through these works, different accessibilities are provided and meanwhile doubts are bought forward on the ability of recognition - namely the ability to recognise time and space, fiction and fact. ! Starting from my interest in video editing, the practice and research brought me back to think about montage, but in a much broader and freer manner. I started to research the “cut-up” techniques through different times, from literature to cinema works and data manipulations. All these works are more or less leave a space for the “performativity” inherited from their original materials. ! Departing from the exploration of performativity, I considered about the control on the works like for example from Gysin, which I thought at first, were freedom. Interestingly, the control mechanism is to hardwire conceptual frame with technologies, which later on may translate to be (standard) code. The materials to feed perception become layered and less visible. It brings the question on what this control would affect on cognition, from both human level and machine level (or the architecture of technology).
+In the last academic year, I have been working on manipulation of audiovisual content (mainly cinematic materials), examining how could it alter the way of seeing. My work started in a quite simple manner, in which films are utilised as input to produce books ([[User:Emily/Thematic_Project/Trimester_02/04|Photobook]], [[User:Emily/Thematic_Project/Trimester_02/01#Movie_book|Four-folded Book]]), videos ([https://vimeo.com/123562022 Reversed shots]), browser-based works([http://pzwart1.wdka.hro.nl/~yuzhen/work_conversation/ Q&A]), and interactive installations([https://vimeo.com/123513119 Iterative movies]). Through these works, different accessibilities are provided and meanwhile doubts are bought forward on the ability of recognition - namely the ability to recognise time and space, fiction and fact. Starting from my interest in video editing, the practice and research brought me back to think about montage, but in a much broader and freer manner. I started to research the “cut-up” techniques through different times, from literature to cinema works and data manipulations. All these works are more or less leave a space for the “performativity” inherited from their original materials. However the performantivity is controlled in another way. For instance, the liberated words from Gysin, are highly controlled by the algorithm he utilised instead of language syntax. Interestingly, the conceptual framework are hardwired to  the mechanics in technologies, which later on may translate to be (standard) code. The materials feed perception, and become layered and less visible. It brings the question of how this control would affect on cognition, from both human level and machine level (or the architecture of technology).
 ==== Relation to larger context====
-The name "MacGuffin" appears to originate in 20th-century filmmaking, and was popularized by Alfred Hitchcock in the 1930s. He often quoted the following story to illustrate its nothingness: "Two gentlemen meet on a train, and the one is struck by the extraordinary package being carried by the other. He asks his companion, 'What is in that unusual package you are carrying there?' The other man replies, 'That is a MacGuffin.' 'What is a MacGuffin?' asks the first. The second says, 'A MacGuffin is a device used for killing leopards in the Scottish highlands.' Naturally the first man says, 'But there are no leopards in the Scottish highlands.' 'Well,' says the second, 'then that's not a MacGuffin, is it?’”
+The name "MacGuffin" appears to originate in 20th-century filmmaking, and was popularized by Alfred Hitchcock in the 1930s. He often quoted the following story to illustrate its nothingness: "Two gentlemen meet on a train, and the one is struck by the extraordinary package being carried by the other. He asks his companion, 'What is in that unusual package you are carrying there?' The other man replies, 'That is a MacGuffin.' 'What is a MacGuffin?' asks the first. The second says, 'A MacGuffin is a device used for killing leopards in the Scottish highlands.' Naturally the first man says, 'But there are no leopards in the Scottish highlands.' 'Well,' says the second, 'then that's not a MacGuffin, is it?’” In Zizek’s book The Sublime Object, he mentioned another version of the story, 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 MacGuffin, a pure nothing which is none the less efficient. Donald Spoto, who is an American biographer and theologian, once pointed out that “There’s a blot to look for in Hitchcock’s film, but watch out for the MacGuffin. It will lead you to nowhere.” The MacGuffin is in itself,  a pure void, but it is the pure void that holds the “big Other”.  Zizek find this pretext, a Macguffin in the real world. The “Iraqi weapons of mass destruction” fit perfectly the status of MacGuffin. “As such, they(WMD) by definition cannot ever be found, and are therefore all the more dangerous... Now that none were found, we reached the last line of the story of MacGuffin: "'Well,' said President Bush in September 2003, 'then that's not a MacGuffin, is it?'"”
-In Zizek’s book The Sublime Object, he mentioned another version of the story, 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 MacGuffin, a pure nothing which is none the less efficient. Donald Spoto who is an American biographer and theologian, once pointed out that “There’s a blot to look for in Hitchcock’s film, but watch out for the MacGuffin. It will lead you to nowhere.” The MacGuffin in itself is a pure void, but it is the pure void that holds the “big Other”.
-Zizek find this pretext, a Macguffin in the real world. The “Iraqi weapons of mass destruction” fit perfectly the status of MacGuffin. “As such, they(WMD) by definition cannot ever be found, and are therefore all the more dangerous... Now that none were found, we reached the last line of the story of MacGuffin: "'Well,' said President Bush in September 2003, 'then that's not a MacGuffin, is it?'"”
-That sounds might be the most dramatized scenario in reality. The government controlled the discourse; we all are like the actors in that performance. The only difference is there were real war, people died. The pure void presents only in a serious of effects. “Not its symbolic interpretation but the experience of the fact that the fantasy-object, by its fascinating presence, is merely filling out a lack, a void in the Other. The fantasy is a construction whose function is to hide this void.
+In reality, that might sound be the most dramatized scenario in reality. The government controlled the discourse; we all are like the actors in that performance. The only difference is a real war, people are dying. The “pure void”  is represented only in a series of effects. “Not its symbolic interpretation but the experience of the fact that the fantasy-object, by its fascinating presence, is merely filling out a lack, a void in the Other. “ The fantasy is a construction whose function is to hide this void.
 ====Reference====
@@ Line 58: / Line 111: @@
 <!--
-===Proposal II===
+===Doppelgänger===
-====Seeing Double====
+====Introduction====
-=====Project Abstract=====
+Doppelgänger, "double-walker", originally meant a ghost or shadow of a person. In wikipedia, it's said as a look-alike or double of a living person. It is an age-old drama theme but still so attractive. Doppelgängers appears in mythologies, literature, cinema and even in real life. Those resources offer me to take closer look at how them be depicted visually, especially from 1940s to nowadays cinema language. So in my research, I will examine the relationship between the self and the doppelgänger, specifically in which visual representation that signal audience about the protagonist versus the doppelgänger, and create my interpretation with the means of physical language of films.
-An moving-image generation system, assembling found materials that are based on labelling and tagging information. Different versions using a same sequence of words, would be shown simultaneously as each other’s double.
-====Motivation & Interets====
-Assemblage is one of my main interests. In last academic year, I worked mainly on found materials, reassemble them following “cut-up technique”, “fold-in technique”, permutation etc. I’ve looked at the works from E.T.A Hoffmann, Tristan Tzara, Oulipo, William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin. The permutation becomes a research method and a system for them to generate works. When Gysin made his sound poetry “I AM THAT I AM”, he stated to combine previous analogue techniques with algorithm to create this permutational poetry based on that simple phrase. Through his work, I experienced the performantivity of permutation. Later on, I got interested in the double both in literature works like Borges's stories in which he meet his younger self and and films like Johan Grimonprez's Double Take in which Hitchcock meets himself. These two interests lead me to examine some online phenomena in a certain perspective.<br>
-On the internet, our digital informations are gathered based on similarities. “They comprise discrete flows of an essentially limitless range of other phenomena such as people, signs, chemicals, knowledge and institutions.”
-This ubiquitous online phenomena that assemblage operates by abstracting the bits of information from
-their territorial settings and separating them into a series of discrete flows. That's how the digital double has been made, "not as ab entity but a different discrete assemblages which are themselves multiple." “The result is a decorporealized body, a ‘data double’ of pure virtuality."<br>
-It interests me not only due to highlight the arbitrary of  grouping flows but also how these flow varies when put them together. The falsifying and magnifying are actually our cultural features.
-====Practical Steps====
+====Project description====
-. Examine the tag lists in order to come up with a sequence of words as basis narration.
+The work will contain both physical objects and a video. The series of objects are taken from the physical language of a series of films which I will explain in details. They will be reproduced via rapid prototype and presented together with the video work in which they help my protagonists to gain access to her doppelgänger. In the video, it always contains two perspectives - the first person angle, depicting when the protagonist deal with the object/apparatus; and a second person as the protagonists/spectators watching the "self".
-:tags in image platform: [[http://websta.me/hot|hashtag in Instagram]]
-:tags in music platform:
-:tags in bookmark(web documents) platform:
-. Closely look at several platforms:
-:image platform: flickr.com; unsplash.com(offer API)
-. Parallel viewing
-'''Other Practices I have done'''<br>
+====Resources(updating)====
-Comparing the similarities and differences in videos.<br>
+:In films/TV series
-{{#widget:YouTube|id=miaHQN8ySg4}}<br>
+*The Cookie
-Same actor acting as two distinct personalities<br>
+In White Chrisitmas (Black Mirror),a Cookie(depicted a virtual body) is a digital copy of a person. In the second part of the episode, the cookie, a copy of protagonist's consciousness, is designed to control the smart house and ensure everything is perfect for the real protagonist. The cookie suffered a seriese of torture, which break its will power and makes her submit to a life of servitude to her real counterparts. In a later part, the cookie of a suspect is used to force a confession from his copy.
-{{#widget:Vimeo|id=145439781|width=500}}
+*a drug that could separate the dark element of consciousness
+Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (2003) based on Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1886 novel from Robert Louis Stevenson. The novel has a large amount of adaptations.
-====Relation to Previous Works====
+*a medical instrument
-Index to my previous practices: [[User:Emily/Self-Evaluation trimester II#My prototype:|Check here]]<br>
+In David Cronenberg's film Dead Ringers(1988), Beverly, one of the identical twins, seeks out metallurgical artist Anders Wolleck and commissions a set of bizarre "gynecological instruments" for operating on these mutant women. It represents his psychosis。 And in the operating table he used this NO.5 instrument, and killed the other twin with this instrument.
-In the last academic year, I have been working on manipulation of audiovisual content (mainly cinematic materials), examining how could it alter the way of seeing. My work started in a quite simple manner, in which films are utilised as input to produce books (link), videos(link), browser- based works(link), and interactive installations(link). Through these works, different accessibilities are provided and meanwhile doubts are bought forward on the ability of recognition - namely the ability to recognise time and space, fiction and fact. ! Starting from my interest in video editing, the practice and research brought me back to think about montage, but in a much broader and freer manner. I started to research the “cut-up” techniques through different times, from literature to cinema works and data manipulations. All these works are more or less leave a space for the “performativity” inherited from their original materials. ! Departing from the exploration of performativity, I considered about the control on the works like for example from Gysin which I thought at first were freedom. Interestingly, the control mechanism is to hardwire conceptual frame with technologies which later on may translate to be (standard) code. The materials to feed perception become layered and less visible. It brings the question on what this control would affect on cognition, from both human level and machine level (or the architecture of technology).
-==== Larger Context====
-“In the West, from the 17th century onwards, the idea of double is in a close connection with the thought of subjectivity,” regulating the binary subject-object relationship. Until then, a unitary conception of the world prevailed (BRAVO, 1998); that is, from the late 16th century onwards, if there was any tendency to unity, even when it came to doubles, “the double starts representing heterogeneity” (BRAVO, 1998, p.264).” As what I understood this also implies the tendency to understand a subject or self not as an undivided entity but according to its heterogeneity. When it comes to digital entity, the deconstructed information serves as the basis for retrieving the entity. "In 1997, the collaborative portal "A Description of the Equator and Some Other Lands" produced by documenta X, Germany, coined the folksonomic term Tag for its co-authors and guest authors on its Upload page. In "The Equator" the term Tag for user-input was described as an abstract literal or keyword to aid the user. Turned out in Web 1.0 days, all "Otherlands" users defined singular Tags, and did not share Tags at that point." Deconstruction triggers reconstruction. Since 2003, the social bookmarking website Delicious provided a way for its users to add "tags" to their bookmarks (as a way to help find them later);  Later on social websites such as YouTube, Technorati, and Last.fm – also implemented tagging. Those keywords work as part of an identification and classification serve search engines,  and then are further developed as a form of linking other items, which shared the same tag. This is when their performantivity starts, those shared features are rather personal and arbitrary. They can't serve as knowledge tags without any pre-filter, but they are a reflection contemporary social scenarios.
-<!--
-====Refference====
-. http://people.brunel.ac.uk/bst/vol1001/danielploeger/danielploeger.pdf<br>
-Dixon distinguishes four types of digital doubles, In performance or installation work where the image of the beholder plays an active role in a digital environment, or where it is used as a (technological) mirror, the double is considered as a ‘reflection’. As an example of such work, Dixon describes Dan Graham’s Present Continuous Past (1974), where the spectator is confronted with delayed video recordings of herself inside a cube lined with mirrors. Another example is Blast Theory’s 10 Backwards (1999), in which the main character Niki exactly reflects and copies the actions of a video recording of herself. In the second category, the double functions as the performer’s ‘alter-ego’. Most prominent example here is Chameleons Group’s Chameleon’s 4: the Doors of Serenity (2002), in which Dixon himself plays the role of a cyborg who has a discussion with two digital Doppelgängers, both having distinct personalities.
+====Reference====
+*Origins:
+:ka, in Ancient Egyptian mythology; Trojan War vs Helen
+:vardøger, in Norse mythology
+:having an etiäinen, in Finnish mythology
+:Ankou, in Breton mythology as well as in Cornish and Norman French folklore
+*Literature:
+:a counter part to the self: Edgar Allan Poe's story "William Wilson";
+:duality of human nature: George Gordon Byron
+:doppelganger through all her life: Charles Williams Descent Into Hell (1939)
+:stample of Gothic fiction: Clive Barker's story "Human Remains" in his Books of Blood
+:''The Double'' by Fyodor Dostoyevsky(Rusian)1846: https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/d/dostoyevsky/d72d/
+:''The Double'' by  José Saramago(Portuguese) 2002
+*Doppelgänger in films/tv series:
+:"White Chrisitmas (Black Mirror)"(Produce the double, manipulate the double, be manipulated by the double)
+:"The Double Life of Veronique" (1991); Sister
+:“Vertigo”(1958); “Obsession” (1976);
+:“Dead Ringers” (1988) by David Cronenberg
+:"Enemy" (2013) based on Saramago's novel; The double(2014) based on DOstoyevsky's novel;
+:“The Great Dictator” (1940); “Kagemusha” (1980);
+:"Face off"; "Mirrormask"
 -->
 </div>