User:Emily/proposal final draft

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.""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." 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." 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

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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)