haptic aesthetics

Haptic aesthetics by Chantal Faust. Lead session: Transimage Conference , Plymouth UK 2016

In this lyrical paper, Faust intends to communicate the relationship between haptics and visual arts. She states that haptics pushes the limits of optics, creates a type of non-visual consumption and fuses time ("the touch of an object can travel through time...")

She tries to demonstrate the paradox of haptics in visual arts through examples of artworks. Doubting Thomas by Caravaggio portrays touching and the want to know. Various versions of Noli me tangere show Mary's desire to believe. [1] Piplotti Rist's works depicts touch, skin and pressure. Yet neither the painting nor the photograph is an object meant for touch. between believing and knowing. Although the examples of art pieces evoke a sense of touch, it is the eyes that see the touch, think and try to understand the touch. Faust is aware of the privilege of the sight and writes that art history has "legitimised, certified and ratified" optics. The phrase visual arts indicates the (untouchable) art object.

Even though she claims "the haptic is a kind of bastard uprising against the regime of the visual," as long as she uses visual art examples, it is unclear how haptics create a type of non-visual consumption. Her mention of Duchamp shows the questioning of the (visual) boundary, but she does not go further. And when it comes to the relationship between touch and time, Faust's arguments are even weaker.

She brings up the touch screen as the artifice that reduces the distance between touch and thought. This contradicts her previous paragraphs which argues seeing as the process that represents thinking. With no clear relationship between touching and thinking, the contemplation on touch screen falls hollow. She uses the example of Idris Kahn's Homage to Bernd Becher to illustrate the condensing of images, which, again, has little to do with haptics (at least from what she includes in the paper).

This is a paper with nice quotes, but not enough substance to sustain its own arguments.

//

Takeaway. Read more Laura U Marks and perhaps Goethe:

"Haptic images do not invite identification with a figure so much as they encourage a bodily relationship between the viewer and the image. Thus it is less appropriate to speak of the object of a haptic look than to speak of a dynamic subjectivity between looker and image."

"The hands want to see, the eyes want to caress" - Goethe

Aesthetics of haptics: an experience approach to haptic interaction design

Wendy Dassen & Miguel Bruns Alonso

Although this paper is written for the discipline of interaction design, the topics mentioned by the researchers are relevant to haptic aesthetics in a broader context.

"Touch is the only sense that is reciprocal. Therefore, haptics has the potential to take full advantage of our perceptual-motor skills and fully enable embodied interaction with the digital domain." (255)

To arrive at the definition of haptic aesthetics, the researchers devised a design process. First, they turn experiential knowledge (how does a wooly blanket feel) into material sketches. Then they abstract the sensations and develop prototypes that mimic the "feeling." In the paper they detail their these sketches (e.g. constant force v. gradual force), but the focus is more on the implication of the method. The researchers state that "it seems impossible to think of aesthetics as an inherent quality of haptics, as experiences emerge in context and in use." (257)

It will be interesting to position this way of thinking along side theoretical framework rooted in phenomenology. When it comes to cinema, the question will be, how to transmit the feeling of wool through the film?

An audio-haptic aesthetic framework influenced by visual theory

Angela Chang and Conor O'Sullivan

Another paper for the design field (interface design), but with useful implications for other contexts.

The paper is motivated by the mapping of information to a vibrotectile interface. The researchers use the Munsell color wheel as an analogy, and develops a matrix that measures different combinations of audio-haptic interfaces.

The paper also takes inspiration from audio-visual theories for cinematography, in particular, Michel Chion's theories about the relation of audio to vision. "Synchronization (when audio happens at the same time as visual event), temporal linearization (using audio to create a sense of time for visual effects), masking (using audio to hide or draw attention away from visual information) and the synchresis (use of sound and vision for suggesting or giving illusion to add value onto the moviegoing experience)" interested the researchers.

The audio-haptic media design process consists of choosing the interface and the vibration frequencies. The interface used in this study are multifunction transducers (MFTs) in the form of a puff or a Motorola A1000 phone; the frequencies are 20Hz-20kHz, aka the audio-haptic spectrum. The researchers chose 75 audio-haptic sounds from available sound libraries but find them difficult to categorize.

After comparing prior frameworks, such as plotting amplitude over duration, and classifying sounds as "warm" or "cool" (based on user's qualitative feedback),the researchers tried to map audio-haptic information to the color wheel. They organised the stimuli with the ADSR (attack-decay-sustain-release) envelope and observed several aesthetic trends:

Amplitude corresponds to saturation. The higher the amplitude, the more noticeable it is.

Attack/decay corresponds to intensity or haptic attention. Faster (sharper) attack.decays are more noticeable than smoother attack/decays.

Longer events, such as rhythmic or sustained stimuli, are also more noticeable (audibly "warmer").

The researchers further inferred two main compositional effects regarding balance and textural variation.

TBC TBC TBC

affect & emotion

Feelings, Emotion, Affect

Eric Shouse

In this article Shouse differentiates feelings, emotion and affect, not as a psychologist but as a scholar of media culture. The vocabularies and theories hinge on psychology, anthropology, sociology and cultural studies, as Shouse states that feelings develop through language and personal biography, while emotions are projections of them. In his words, affect is "the most abstract because affect cannot be fully realised in language, and because affect is always prior to and/or outside of consciousness." I don't fully agree with this definition. Having read about and experienced accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy (AEDP) or the similar, affect is what some therapists might call "core emotions", i.e. fundamental complex physiological mechanisms that have been named grief, joy, fear, anger, disgust, excitement, etc, more or less products of evolution for survival. (Hilary Jacobs Hendel LCSW) My comparison may put affect in a different body of knowledge and would require more thorough research if I were to write a paper about it, but equating affect to core emotions suffice the current stage of articulation in my opinion.

What enlightens me from this article is not the technicality of terms, but the connections between feelings/emotions and their respective developmental and social context. The theories around affect can be useful when articulating emotional content in a piece of work and, hence allows room for elaboration when the terms emotion/feelings are misused.

A Cultural History of Causality | Chapter 5: Emotion

Stephen Kern

Kern starts by situating the readers in the history of emotions in existential philosophy. He recounts thoughts from Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre. Nietzsche sees emotions as "the heart of the Dionysian spirit" (189) while Heidegger and Sartre attribute "uncanniness and uncertainty" to emotions (190). (The literature cited: The Birth of Tragedy (N), Being and Time(H) and Being and Nothingness (S).) The emergences of existentialism and psychoanalysis mark the differences between Victorian and modernist novelists, especially in their rationales for their characters' behaviours.

The majority of the chapter focuses on the role of jealousy, revenge and greed in murder novels. In Victorian novels, jealousy from a love affair usually result in a murder. Kern observes a correlation: the more emotional responsibility one has towards oneself, the less satisfaction one gets from killing. Responsibility here means the ability to discover and acknowledge one's "own deficiencies." Authors such as Dickens , Hugo and Tolstoy, in writing their novels, were able "to understand and reconstruct the destructive potential of their character's ignorance about jealousy and inability to accept responsibility for it." (194) However, while they demonstrated "the destructive potential" they did not reveal the insight of the jealousy: the Victorian authors made excuses for their characters' lack of emotional responsibility, be it from their upbringing, so-called destiny or current difficult situations.

In Sartre's view, jealousy involves obsession with another and the inability to resolve deficiencies within oneself. (I don't know if it is the author's or Sartre's preference to call the inner needs and wants deficiencies; it certainly has a negative association, which is biased.) Kern uses Lolita to illustrate the incorporation of theories of psychoanalysis in modern novels. "The deeper Humbert digs, the more unfocused and unjustified his jealousy becomes."(197) Kern uses White Noise as an example where technology "deforms and diffuses" jealousy (198). The modern authors (Sartre, Nabokov and Delillo) created characters whose motives and actions were not linked by a generalised emotion, jealousy, but who were effected by the increasingly more complex causalities.

The same shift appears in revenge and greed. The moral certainties from God (201) dominated Victorian novels and dramas. Yet modernists were unable to experience or rationalise revenge the same way. Revenge became detached from its function of "restoring honour" and unjustifiable like its manifestations: dueling, lynching, wars and capital punishment. (206) With greed, desire ended with "a paramount gain" (207) with Victorian novels. Modernists, in trying to understand the underlying motivation of greed, discovered more complexities and revealed materialistic value as a superficial reason for murders (208) as the world changed into a less deterministic one.

In the end of the chapter, Kern includes the subject of physiology of emotions. He traces the history of studying emotions. The studies of emotions correspond to the development of science: first comes measuring and collecting, then comes systems of weighing the knowledge. The 19th-century methods included kymograph that measured changes of blood pressure in 1847, to Darwin's The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), to the invention of polygraph in 1865. (217-220) More recent scientific studies use methods at a molecular level (e.g. the role of neurotransmitters). From "an electrical model to a more precise electrical and chemical model," the studies reveal "ever more precise casual determinations." (221)

What is an emotion is not a new topic, only a question that has been answered differently. In a famous article in 1884, "James argued emotions originate in the body and visceral experience and are subsequently conceptualised and named by the mind."(222) The recent studies from MIT suggest "emotions do not originate exclusively in either the body or the brain but in both together and are a manifestation of a simultaneous interaction of brain function, neurological transmission and 'information substances' including peptides." (223)

The key point Kern reaches is that modernists understand emotions from the perspective of self-identity instead of peptides (224). (He did not recount the developments in psychoanalysis and psycho therapy at all, which made this conclusion a bit of a jolt. I do find the approach of self-identity a more relevant one to my work, so will continue reading articles in that regard.)

Emotions and the Structuring of Narrative Responses

David S. Miall

the Cinematic

Campany, D. (2007) Documents of Contemporary Art

Michael Tarantino: A Few Brief Moments of Cinematic Time, 1999

Tarantino annotates the following moments of cinematic time with case studies.

suddenly in Potemkin (1925)

[B]efore Eisenstein film progressed in "logical" development of shots from beginning to end. The new film-rhythm introduced by Eisenstein through cutting and editing reflects his interest in psychological research...

The combination of events renders images not "chronologically" but "associatively."

out of the blue in Psycho

The film starts with a slow pace and speeds up out of the blue, "brutally direct." The violence is the moment of change, dividing the film into pre- and post-moment, . "The rest of the film's narrative [is] a voyage through a kind of dream landscape, in which time is always measured by the possibility of another violent eruption of shots."

When Hitchcock talks about the viewer's sensation of time passing being conditioned by memory, i.e. the shock of experiencing speed (usually communicated by montage) or the pleasure of experiencing slowness (the long take, the moving camera), he is really talking about a kind of anticipation. We expect a rhythm based on what we have seen.

When the scenes in Psycho are drawn out and in a way, deconstructed in Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho (1993), the rhythm from the original film is re-defined and does not have the same effect on the viewer.

anxiety and reality in Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

"Jeanne taking abath, Jeanne washingthe dishes, cleaning the house... these events, normally excised from film narratives or greatly reduced, seem totake place in real time."

During its initial screen at MOMA in 1975, the 3 hour 20 minute film made many viewers "unable to deal with" what the film "demands" on them. "Perhaps they were uable to see where the narrative was leading. Perhaps they could not make sesne of why these ' non-narrative' events were elevated to such an important level." Those who stayed till the end of the film "let out a collective scream at the climax of the film." The real-time-like appearance of the film built up real anxiety.

blind spots in La tache aveugle (1978/90) via The Invisible Man(1933)

By drawing out that moment, that establishing shot, the artist renders the very act of seeing to be problematic. It is a moment which is almost 'out of time'. The artist fetishizes it by making us regard an image we cannot read, cannot... describe.

a few moments in time

Willie Doherty, Somewhere Else (installation)
Sergio Leone, Once Upon a Time in the West
Michelangelo Antonioni, L'Aventura - "Here once's sense of time passing is that it is endless. The film's version of 'real time ' seems almost hallucinogenic."
Andy Warhol, Empire
Michael Snow, Wavelength
Marguerite Dura, Le Camion
Gena Rowlands, Woman under the Influence
Wim Wenders, Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter

The author recalls going to the movies with his father and, having missed the start, staying until the second play reached his arrival point. "Time was predictable and it was on our side."

Susanne Gaensheimer: Moments in Time, 1999 (the same exhibition appears in Michael Tarantino)

The author connects art works at the exhibition, Moments in Time (1999), with theory from Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. Slowless manifests in two ways (via two groups of art). The first type of slowness is produced in the work itself by certain technical means (reduced frame speed, or shot at a higher speed and play at normal 24FPS). The second type is not so much from the work itself (its mechanism) but "in the observer's cognitive process of perception."

Notice how the author describes the art work (these are reference to concrete description of an image and/or a mechanism, helpful in art writing).

James Coleman, La tache aveugle

In 1978 James Coleman created the first version of his slide projection La tache aveugle, in which thirteen frames from a sequence of about half a second from the 1933 film The Invisible Man by James Whale are projected onto a large wall for a period of more than eight hours... By extending this brief sequence of about half a second over a duration of more than eight hours, the intervals between the individual frames are stretched to more than 36 minutes.

Douglas Gordon, 24 hour psycho

Douglas Gordon projects a video copy of Alfred Hitchcock's film Psycho in extreme slow motion and without sound onto a freestanding 3x4 metre screen. The otherwise unaltered tape is played at the greatly reduced speed of about two frames per second, so that the projection of the whole film lasts 24 hours. The screen is visible from the front and the back.

Bill Viola, The Greeting

This 1995 installation is a large-format projection showing the encounter of three women. The scene was originally shot on 35 mm film and then transferred to a laser disk. A wind-like sound is added to the scene... Viola himself has filmed a staged scene at 300 frames per second. Thus it was possible to produce extreme slow motion and at the same time maintain the pristine pictorial quality of a film made at the normal speed of 24 frames per second. The scene's real time of about 45 seconds is drawn out in the video to last ten minutes.

Steve McQueen, Bear

This 16mm film, transferred to a laser disc and projected onto a large wall, shows a scene that is formally reminiscent of the classical boxing match in popular films: From a mostly low angle, which simulates the perspective of a fictional observer 'close to the ring', the camera focuses on two naked men in a match-like situation. What one initially perceives as the beginning of a fight soon becomes an ambiguous game of desire, intimacy and aggression. The men circle and approach one another, finally falling into an intimate embrace that suddenly turns into a wrestling match..."

"This issue [of the act of making], as far of [Steve McQueen] is concerned, is always one of narrative intelligibility. Not [...] packaged Hollywood-style as a form of story-telling, but narrative which is pursued in and through the act of making, almost as a form of tactile, psycho-visual enquiry. Every decision is made as a part of a process, and the process is itself evidence of the presence of narrative." (Jon Thompson, It's the way you tell'em)

Theory:

"With reference to Henri Bergson, who in Creative Evolution (1907) describes perception as a cinematographic process whereby we take 'snapshots' from the 'passing' reality and 'string them on a becoming, abstract, uniform and invisible, situated at the back of the apparatus section.' Deleuze elaborates on Bergson, defining "the medium of film as number of snap shots (as opposed to the long-exposure photograph), which are transferred to a framework (that is, the film) at an equal distance from one another and transported by a mechanism for moving the images."

"Deleuze defines duration in terms of relations. Reducing the movement means dissolving the relations; the meaning-giving link between the actions disintegrates."

Wim Wenders: Time Sequences, Continuity of Movement, 1971

Wenders is intrigued by the act of watching. He marvels at the simplicity of early cinema, in which something is simply recorded with few possibilities of "directing." The message of the film is not interesting to him as he prefers the process of revealing: films with images that "don't come complete with their interpretations."

In this essay he wrote about two of his works. In Summer in the City, he and his colleague loosely followed a script, leaving a part of the film to chance. He described one two-minute shot in Urania, a Berlin cinema where nothing happened and another eight-minute shot driving through the Kudamm tunnel, which was the time it took to pass the tunnel. His observation: when people think they've seen enough of something, but there's more, and change of shot, then they react in a curiously livid way.

He has an unwillingness to modify cinema time, which in his view should "should keep faith with the passage of time". It is worth noting that the article was written in 1971 and he shot with 16mm film in black and white. With today's digital tools, an eight-minute footage (or something longer) would be inexpensive to shoot. But with film, there was a certain sense of being economic, and in my opinion the choice to let the film run for eight-minutes was more deliberate.

In his other work, The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty, he kept shooting with continuity of the movement, which anchored events in real time. To Wenders, "films are congruent time-sequences, not congruent ideas." He had trouble viewing changes through editing (from change to locations to close-up shots that showed different characters in one conversation) and writing ("cutting off an action that you know is actually continuing").

He never mentioned the word "montage" in his essay. Perhaps he hated it so much that even the thought of it was unbearable...

Bearumont Newhall: Moving Pictures, 1937

Peter Wollen: Fire and Ice, 1984

In this essay Wollen started with a recount on Roland Barthes' "antipathy towards cinema," in which images followed "an imposed reading time" and narrative. Wollen suggested a more nuanced relationship between the concept of time and narrative.

He used the concept of Aspect (Bernard Comrie) to dissect the functions of duration, creating semantic categories for photographs based on whether they represented states, processes, or events. News photographs signify events, some documentary photographs and Muybridge's series: processes, art and some other documentary photographs: states. Wollen modeled the "minimal story-form" on the sequence of "process, event, state," which could take the form of the series of a documentary photo, a news photo and an art photo. He found this structure parallel to the early film minimal narrative: someone is doing something, another person provokes a situation, now someone has fallen to the ground and is upset.

Wollen acknowledged this sequencing would be the result of editing and affirmed that individual still photographs would be elements of narrative. The time in each photograph itself "endures". A photography suggesting an event would imply state changes before or after the event, for example, which made the "enduring" a paradoxical one. Wollen called that "a frozen tongue of fire."

He used La Jetée" by Chris Marker to demonstrate a narrative created with still images. Still photographs can "order and demarcate time". Depending on how the story was told, still images could inherit different tenses, "set in the future/in the present as past-of-the-future/in between near-future."

Could a still photographic image contain a whole narrative, and yet still be without tense? In Wollen's analysis, the Capa photograph of the Spanish Civil War soldier which captured the moment as he is felled, would be an example for that narrative: a complete action with beginning and end. "The subject is split into an observer of himself."

With the semantic categories and the tense created for the images (in fiction, mostly), Wollen concluded his essay reiterating his difference from Barthe. "Unlike him, I am not always longing for a way of bringing the flow to a stop." Wollen's introduction to the semantics of time (and how narrative and time could be combined and created at different levels) is worth considering, especially when creating works around memory, fictional memory.

Constance Penley: The Imaginary of the Photograph in Film Theory, 1984

Christian Metz: Photography and Fetish, 1985

The first difference is the "spatio-temporal size" of the lexis (defined by Danish semiotician Louis Hjelmslev as "a socialized unit of reading"). The cinematic lexis (a screen in the movie theater) is larger than that of a photography (e.g. a print on the wall); the cinematic lexis involves a fixed duration while the photographic one does not. Metz proposes that the "smallness" and "possibility of lingering look" make photography more likely to become a fetish.^

The second difference lies in the connection between cinema and collectivity and that between photograph and privacy. Metz suggests the reasons of this is the lack of accessibility to film production and the availability of photos, though both film (collective entertainment) and photography (record of a family birthday party) in certain ways are considered as art. He brings in sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to confirm the meaning of photography as souvenir. Metz uses theories from Charles Sanders Peirce and Philippe Dubois and suggests that both film and photography are indexical. The shared qualities of film and photography are that they are both "prints of real objects." But they differ when film starts to have narrative, creating the "unreal," while photography stays close to the index.

The third difference is a result from the physical nature of the two medium. Films are a plurality of images that often convey movement. Even when images are still in a film, the immobilities create an "ideal movement."^^"Movement and plurality both imply time, as opposed to the timelessness of photography which is comparable to the timelessness of the unconscious and of memory." Metz further distinguishes cinema from photography from a technical standpoint: films are made of images and sound, whereas photography is silent.

Metz elaborates the relationship between photography and death. The most immediate connection is the social practice of keeping a photo of a deceased, loved one. But even when the person is still alive, the moment the photo is taken is gone, vanished. The snapshot presents another connection to death: the optical registration "abduct[s] the object out of the world into another world [...and] time." In this sense, cinema unfolds time similar to that of life, a process that enables "forgetting." Photography takes a fragment of time and space and preserves the memory as the rest of the world "continues to change."

The next part of the essay analyze fetish based on Freud's theory. [He also makes observations about the place of psychoanalysis in the reading of film, photography, literature, etc. But I find it less relevant to the quality of the medium from a perspective of 2019.]

One things worth noting from Metz's analysis is the off-frame space of the two medium. The filmic off-frame space is "substantial" in the sense that the viewers can expect the happenings or return of a character, whereas the photographic off-frame space is "subtle": nothing returns, and absence prevails.

A few descriptions from Metz are illuminating. "A fetish has to be kept, mastered, held like the photography in the pocket" while "[in film] things are too unstable" with movements and different sensorial engagements.

"Where film lets us believe in more things, photography lets us believe more in one thing."

^ "A fetish...is an object believed to have supernatural powers, or in particular, a human-made object that has power over others... In common parlance, the word fetish is used to refer to any sexually arousing stimuli, not all of which meet the medical criteria for fetishism."[2][3])

^^ Consider the mechanical movement during projection.

Laura Mulvey: Stillness in the Moving Image, 2003

In this essay, Mulvey articulates stillness in cinema where electronic/digital technologies have prevailed. She suggests that new technologies bring out the property of the celluloid (a term that she uses "advisedly," as a frame of reference rather than the actual material). (New technologies at that time was the DVD player. However, the analysis still applies at the age of internet streaming.)

She writes from three points of departure: spectatorship, indexical sign and narrative. "As narrative coherence fragments, as the indexical moment suddenly finds visibility in the slowed or stilled image, so spectatorship finds new forms." (134, The Cinematic)

Compared to her earlier writings (i.e. the female star, visual pleasure, etc.) her new interest lies in "the presence of time itself...behind the mask of storytelling." (135, ibid) New technologies allow the spectator time to stop, which creates a possibility that connects photographic theories to the moving image.

Mulvey writes that movement exists on three levels for (celluloid) film: the machine that drives celluloid (thus creating the illusion of movement), the camera itself, and the "conceptual and ideological properties" of storytelling. She uses the phrase "obsession with movement" to capture the discourse about cinema in its early days and cites Roland Barthes (Camera Lucida) who draws a hard line between photography and cinema as demonstration.

She continues to analyze the "conflicting temporalities" in narrative cinema: between the moment of registration (i.e. when the image is created via a lens onto photosensitive materials, "there-and-then-ness") and the presence of a narrative ("here-and-now-ness"). The different properties of cinema emerge because of the "objective alliances" between the narrative and the camera/projector.

Mulvey adapts Raymond Bellour's concept of the pensive spectator. In his essay, Bellour contrasts photography ("immobility, the past, a certain absence") and cinema ("illusion", "movement, the present, presence"). In his argument, direct reference to photography in a film is a confrontation to the spectator, blending two kinds of time. Mulvey suggests that the pensive becomes the curious (who are also intellectual and informed about feminism), as new technologies enable the pause/break of a moving image with the simple push of a button. The new spectator is also "fetishistic". "Certain privileged moments can become fetishized moments for endless and obsessive repetition," freed from their original narrative. (From the point of a critic/theorist, this "fragmentation of narrative" did exist before new technologies via textual analysis, but it was difficult to realize because of limited access to flatbed editing tables.)

Stilling (as a verb) the moving image reverses the conflicting temporality in the narrative, and gives the the spectator agency to fetishize any moment. (Think meme.)

Catherine David: Photography and Cinema, 1989

In this article (lecture transcript) David analyzes the difference and cross-overs between photography and cinema from two perspectives: historical and structural.

From the historical point of view: photography was invented around 1826, and cinema 1895. The cinema from a photographic origin is not the same as the origin of the cinema, observed by the French theorist Alain Jobert, who finds the concept of movement already present in photography (so as to argue that movement, or narrative did not start with cinema). He continues: some early photographers are influenced by conventions from painting, sculpture, theatre, which lead to "a certain mode of choice, scope, cutting and editing (pictorialism, monumentality, the picturesque)" while others find a logic in the succession of images, producing what was "strongly narrative, such as the series, the sequence, or reportage." Jobert illustrates these two ways of image creation by comparing documentary photography by Felice Beato (ambiguous, "beginning of narration") and John Thompson ("picturesque register").

The discourse in which photography pertains to stillness and cinema, to motion is "too neat and organized." In David's view, "it's more legitimate to make a history of viewpoints than a history of forms, in terms of certain bodies of work in both photography and cinema." She refers to Paul Virilio, who describes the end of the 20th century as "the era of logic" and a "privileged moment of collaboration between art and artists." Avant-garde artists made photography and cinema side by side. The high point of the photography and cinema parallel was the 1920s. In the case of the Russian avant-gardes, photography and cinema were made with the same goal to make art accessible for the masses with art forms that connects to "the real."

David quotes Jeff Wall, cinema is a paradigmatic form of modern art. Cinema is defined by its relationship with the institution and with industrial production. A 1929 exhibition, "Film und Foto", in Stuttgart captured the tight-knit relationship between photographers and film producers, featuring Dziga Vertov, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Sergei Eisenstein, László Moholy-Nagy. A new edition of the catalogue of the exhibition was published in 1979, with an eclectic collection of works.^ The exhibition would be impossible with the abundance of video and synthesized images, which has since pulled apart photography and cinema. In the 20's and 30's there is both aesthetical bleed over from photography to film, as shown in Robert Siodmak's film Menschen am Sonntag, and "complex, photo-type montage" such as Moholy-Nagy's Dynamic of the Big City.

This close relationship between photography and cinema fizzled out with the rise of fascism in the 30's, as artist communities dispersed and independent cinema suffered from economic difficulties. In the 1950's, André Bazin brought the photographic aesthetic back to film (neo-realism), in which "cinema is a photographic act of the recording and the representation of the real."

David perceives a gap between Bazin and the present and phrases the current state of images as "the crisi of images," "the unfurling of images, the proliferation, the haemorrhaging of images" with TV, advertising and entertainment. These images constantly "lose their meanings" and become invisible, abstract, replaceable ("like merchandise.") She quotes a film critic "the only thing left for us to do is to free the cinema from the image" and notes that here the word choice is image rather than photography. (Image as in body image, for example.) Synthesized images lose analogous relationship to the real. (At this point David associates all digital image as synthesized and unreal... The line between real and unreal, and the mediums associated with them seem rather simplistic. But bear in mind that was pre-internet in 1989.)

David brings up a kind of resistance in photography and cinema against publicity and synthesized images. Here she articulates what she means by the photographic image (different from the two), "images that mediate subjects." She uses Jeff Wall's images to illustrate the cinematic, which are also images possible post the invention of the cinema experience ("a point of no return, a historical moment"). "When Wall says that these pictures arrest and make dense that which cinema lets pass by or obscures, I think that he is really making a choice."

She compares him to some contemporary filmmakers (i.e. Wim Wenders, Straub-Huillet) as they have a similar relationship with time, fixation and distortion. Wenders makes photographic cinema: he favors the accidental and works as a photographer waiting for the captive moment. Straub-Huillet works in real time with a fixed plan and fixed shots, establishing a process similar to that of photography. "My last comment on these pictures [by Wall] is that they rely on a condensation of all the phenomena, all the transactions which are at stake in the interior of a film in order to five all the immobility, the weight, the density of a kind of photographic image back to the cinema."^^

David shows extracts of Persona by Ingmar Bergman (attention to photography, with the photographic image) and The Power of the Word by Jean-Luc Godard (attention to the real, with "the contemporary image").

^The list includes:

Jeanne d'Arc (Carl Dreyer) 1928
Secrets of a Soul (G.W. Pabst) 1926
Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (Walter Ruttmann) 1927
Ten Days That Shook the World (Sergei Eisenstein) 1927
The Cabinet of Dr Caligari(Robert Wiene) 1920
The Circus (Charlie Chaplin) 1928
Ballet mécanique (Fernand Léger) 1924
L'Étoile de mer (Man Ray) 1928

This part concerns film history. For someone unfamiliar with these names/films, the connections or significance are not visible. But based on the what the author argues in the article these films illustrate the close relationship between film and photography in the 20's among the avant-garde artists. Perhaps read a bit more about the art history from that period.

^^David goes on to show photos of Susanne Lafont - a different kind of cinematic photography ("conscious of the passage of time").

contemporary art (writing)

International Art English

article [4] by Alix Rule & David Levine

In International Art English (acronym IAE), the authors present a linguistic study of the anglophone language surrounding contemporary art, and illustrate the discourse development of contemporary art through the adoption of this language. For this purpose, the authors analyze 13 years of e-flux announcements, the most widely-read listserv by an increasingly global contemporary art field through algorithms from Sketch Engine, a linguistic analysis tool.

They investigate the vocabulary, syntax, semantics and genealogy of the text (referred to as the corpus). They suggest that IAE originates from the highbrow criticism journal October from 1976, where editors changed the discourse of art criticism and translated French post-structuralist texts from Barthes, Baudrillard and Deleuze as well as the Germany's Frankfurt School. This editorial bias gave the language lexical peculiarities from French (e.g. the suffixes -ion, -ity, -ality, and -ization) and German (e.g. the prefixes para-, proto-, post-, hyper-).

The authors thus summarize the traits of IAE, such as: the acquisition of alien functions by ordinary words, the emphasis of otherwise redundant pairings and the fondness towards using more words instead of fewer. They thus demonstrate IAE as a distinctive language circulated in contemporary art, proliferated by the spread of biennials and the enabling of the internet.

The authors place the IAE in its own categories similar to that of a technical language (such as that shared among academics or car mechanics). They observe that although old users of the IAE came from academia and formal art criticism, new users are from increasingly diverse origin: notably, gallerists, curators and the artists themselves (for writing press releases, grant proposals and artist statements). These new users perpetuate the language and stylize the discourse with ever-changing trend.

The authors conclude that art criticism is in crisis and the future of IAE will be an implosion.

How to write about contemporary art

Williams, G. (2014)

In this opinionated manual of art-writing, Gilda Williams brings insights to contemporary art. She is well aware of the fallacies of International Art English, and offers readers well-selected examples to illustrate good art-writing.

The advice she offers is based on her argument: that both the viewer and the artwork need the art-words. The viewer needs a "steady framework" to under stand the work while the work is "completed by criticism." (P25) She believes art-writers should establish themselves as trustworthy, not only having impartial views (P26) but also possessing the knowledge about the work (scholarship in art history, ability to appraise artwork, technical knowledge of media, familiarity of the artist, "an instinctive sensibility for quality, code-name 'taste'") and the risk-taking ability to express original ideas . (P26, 33, 165)

She emphasizes the importance of choosing an idea well and communicating it "through unclichéd and thoughtful words,"(68) and advises against interpretation of the artist's psychology through the art work (89).

She distinguishes explaining (museum wall text, catalogue, extended captions) from evaluating (review) texts. While the former calls for concise expression, both explaining and evaluating texts follow a structure of: what are you seeing/what might it mean/why this might matter. The latter, rather than summarizing press releases or the curator's text, regards the art writer's own idea crucial for taking the readers through understanding the artwork (165).

What I find the most relevant are: reminders on vocabulary choices, how to write a brief about a moving image work, and how to write an artist statement.

The vocabularies should be grounded in solid nouns, singular and well-chosen adjectives, precise verbs and free from adverbs. Avoid piling up abstractions, lists, jargons (Ch4, 68) and tired metaphor ("seismic shift" and other geological types (102). To write an explaining brief about a moving image work is not to summarize the whole film but rather find a guiding idea from the work and express it clearly (135). To write an artist statement is to find a way to sincerely say who you are and what your work is. The statements also aids the artist in thinking, so the words must first ring true to the artist who writes it rather than a guess of what the reader wants to see.

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Specific advice/exercises on writing artist statements:

- Read statements from notable artists.

- Concreteness and specificity. Create images through words.

- Which decision (whether hard-won, accidental, or bearing unanticipated results) produced the most meaningful outcome, for you?

- Which moments changed everything? What were you really excited about as you worked? Edit out the rest.

- Ontology, epistemology, metaphysics carry specific technical meaning; use sparingly, only if essential.

- Ground your reader in media or images they can see/identify a key theme, idea or principle that holds your art together.

- Imagine you are writing directly to the one person who understands your work best.

artistic research (as methods)

Art and Artistic Research

Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (2010)

Throw the stones really hard at your target; or, rest in peace

Efva Lilja

As an artist, professor and vice chancellor, Lilja speaks about her personal strive, pedagogical exchange and visions for an infrastructure that supports curiosity-driven research. She believes artists have the ability to "possess a unique form of knowledge which is communicated through the finished work." A research environment such as a higher education institution provides space, time and resources for reflection and further development of practice, allowing insights to emerge. She criticizes market demands as it curtails artist needs, opting for "productivity" and "effectiveness." (However, she contradicts herself by writing "our graduates can go out and compete for work in a national and international labor market." This shows her struggle to bridge the vision of artistic research as a way of knowledge production and the lack/difficult of it carrying it through because of existing norms.) As a vice-chancellor, she advocates for a cultural infrastructure friendly to the growth of knowledge and ethics toward a democratic society. She is Swedish.

On the difference between artistic research and artistic practice

Germán Toro-Pérez

Toro-Pérez argues that art and research (mostly associated with science) are two ways of appropriating the world, and have respective relationship to truth. Using electroacoustic music practice as an example, the author traces the development of art music from "an aesthetics of expression" to that of "experience." He asks the readers: what makes a psychoacoustic experiment different from the investigations that lead to a specific art composition? Based on Heidegger's definition of research, research directs toward knowing. In the author's view, art practice directs toward experiencing (although done with rigor). Further, Heidegger attributes "character of constant activity" as part of research, marking institutions a necessary environment for it. The same cannot be said about artistic practice where knowledge is dealt with "selectively and methodically but not systemically." Thus, the author answers the question by pointing out that an experiment leads to a proof or disproof of hypothesis, whereas a composition (albeit through investigation) leads to sensory experiences.

The author ends the essay with an observation that while research leads to knowledge, the knowledge can be uncertain; and while art creates specific experiences, the experiences are real, and thus "opens the possibility of experiencing the truth, but does not guarantee it." (In this context, I am not too concerned about making the schematic distinction of reality and truth.)

Whereas I agree with the author that art and research are ontologically different, I think the grey area in his argument is the "investigations" that lead to the production of an art work. If those investigations produce knowledge (and so happen to be done in an institutional environment and distributed for the public good), can the work of art be categorized as a work of research?

Javi's classes

The Glitch Moment(um)

Menkman, R. (2011) The glitch moment(um). Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures (Network notebooks, 04).

The Glitch Moment(um): A Void in Techno-Culture (p.29-31)

The author argues that glitch disrupts the flow of the technology which delivers the content (eg. broadcast TV). Glitch reveals the involvement of the machine in front of the user/reader/viewer and raises the question of authorship. It encourages the audience to reflect on the medium/media.

(I question its effectiveness.)

The Glitch Art Genre: Between the Void and Commoditized Form (p.55-56) + The Genre Paradox (p.57-58)

Glitch art represents unstable processes and the associated conceptual thinking. Rather than inventing new terms for artworks that incorporate this representation (which does not differentiate between disruption and commodity) — it clarifies to theorize glitch art as a genre with thematic content, iconography and narrative structure. The genre fulfills the expectations to exploit the medium and question "the use and function of technologies, their conventions and expectations." Under a common genre the materiality of glitch can be studied closely.

The challenge (or paradox) of the genre framework is the difficulty to distinguish a deliberate, considered work involving glitch (and its process) from something that merely appropriates the retro-nostalgic aesthetics. Constant improvements in technology renders previous versions of it obsolete. Because of that, glitch exists anachronistically outside of the serious intention of a genre (eg. "faux vintage" filter on Instagram). It calls for the spectator's knowledge in "media technology texts, aesthetics and machinic processes" to recognize glitch art and the message within.

(See footnotes on p56 for literature on genre.)

The Emancipation of Dissonance Glitch (p.65-66)

Glitch questions authorship and technology used to convey that. It is a critical reflection on the medium and creates awareness among the spectators.

("Gentrified errors" is a good phrase.)

The work of art in the age of digital recombination

De Mul, Jos. “The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Recombination.” Digital Material: Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology, edited by Marianne Van den Boomen et al., Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2009, pp. 95–106.

appearing on P95 Digital Material: Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology, Amsterdam University Press

Using the text from "The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction," De Mul argues that digital recombination leads to a return to auratic qualities of objects. He summarizes the changes in the value of the work of art: from cult value to exhibition value (through mechanical reproduction) to manipulation value (through digital recombination.)

Computing and database — used somewhat synonymously in this paper — become the successor of the machine. The relational database (a development from the relational model of data by Edgar F. Codd, dating back to the 1970's) presents a procedure in structuring, re-structuring and partially re-creating information based on each copy of the previous database(s). Like the mechanical (re)production, this (re)production process of recombination and manipulation turns into "material metaphors."

The term "database aesthetics" refers to the user interface and the interactions it enables (or allows?) within the designed structures. De Mul emphasizes that manipulation holds, and creates, value. In this new aesthetics, art is no longer for the worshippers or spectators, but rather for users. The change in this vocabulary is indeed interesting. However, do users gain any agency through the new aesthetics. De Mul only makes clear the manipulation value to the politicians, but not to the users.

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This essay leaves a few questions:

Benjamin theorizes that the value the work of art derives from its uniqueness and singularity in space and time (cult value.) For the work of art, why is exhibition value valuable? (The example used here is Paris Hilton, "famous for being famous", and the success of politicians such as Reagan.)

Although De Mul discusses "political art," he does not clarify the relationship between politics and political art. Along this (lack of) logic, it is hard to justify why manipulation value is relevant for a work of art. Do I assume that manipulation value translates from politics to political art? Or do I abolish the distinction between politics and art all at once?

Jujube/synopsis

Contents

haptic aesthetics