User:Emily/proposal final draft

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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)

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