User:Emily/proposal final draft

Proposal I

Fantasy-Objects

Introduction

A MacGuffin is said as a plot device in fiction films in the form of some goal, desired object, or other motivator that the protagonist pursues and moves the plot forward. Following my interest 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, on the contrary it may be harder to perceive in the representation of our daily commodities, events. In the work, I attempt to reveal less visible mechanism of control in our daily life through MacGuffin, playing between fiction and reality, and imply "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

Part I

In my research there will be a parallel collection of MacGuffin objects and our commodities mediated in mass media. The collection consists of moving-images, scripts(both in text and audio form), for further study on how the information are delivered and what patterns are embedded in. The research serves as an extended backup. In a way, two types of cultural media utilised similar strategy dramatize the desire, which is pure void in the thing/object. The research will end up with a webpage with moving-image, text and audio. More thoughts on present the research, check previous proposal. [List of MacGuffins]

Part II

An video installation will be made to show human subjects’ reaction to MacGuffins. Please refer to the [| sketch]

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. There is a screen/computer in front, a camera is mounted on the back of the screen in order to take photos of the objects, which will be present in a sequence of moving images on the screen together with people’s reactions. The reaction moving images are (or mimic) from Hitchcock’s typical shots, namely, camera movement (vertigo shots), montage technique (some intense scenario), emotion shots. The backside will be a light box for capturing better images of the objects. The installation focus on their core feature, which is the void, so that they can only be present in a series of effects, here I simplify them as a sequence of typical shots. Besides, MacGuffins are said interchangeable in films. To capture this feature, and get spectators involve 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 be mediated in daily media. It also invites people to think what is presence and absence here.

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).

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 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. There is nothing 'behind' the fantasy; the fantasy is a construction whose function is to hide this void, this 'nothing' - that is, the lack in the Other.” Let’s put ourselves in a smokeless battlefield, the market-driven media. What serves our eyes, ears everyday, what are commonly shown on our daily media, and what are the patterns in them…

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)

Proposal II

Seeing Double

Project Abstract

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.
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."
It interests me not only to highlight the arbitrary of grouping flows but also how these flow varies when put them together. A simple example, in flickr image tags, when I search for "tiger" I actually found mostly cats. The falsifying and magnifying are actually our cultural features.

Practical Steps

1. Examine the tag lists in order to come up with a sequence of words as basis narration.

tags in image platform: [in Instagram]

tags in music platform:

tags in bookmark(web documents) platform:

2. Closely look at several platforms:

image platform: flickr.com; unsplash.com(offer API)

3. Parallel viewing

Other Practices I have done
Comparing the similarities and differences in videos.

Same actor acting as two distinct personalities

Relation to Previous Works

Index to my previous practices: Check here
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.