User:Emily/Self-directed 03/03

Introduction

to be added

Methodology Text

In the text below, I will explain my recent research and works. By reflecting on them I will state my previous working method and also try to establish new working methodology in order to assist my later practices.

In last two trimesters, I have been working on how manipulation of audiovisual content (mainly cinematic materials) could alter the way of seeing. My work started in a quite simple manner, in which films are utilised as input which produces books, videos, and browser-based work, and interactive installations. The idea derived from my previous experience of déjà vu, a sensation that you feel what you are experiencing at the moment, have been already experienced before. This may has complicated reasons about how our brain works, however that’s not what I want to address here. For me it raises doubt about the ability of recognition - namely the recognition to time-space, to real fact, to personality, etc. Because of my interests in video editing. It brought me back to think about montage, but in a more broad and free sense. I started to research the cut-up techniques through different times. I have looked at the French Surrealists' game of Exquisite Corpse , Tristan Tzara's cut-up poems, the French literature group Oulipo, William S. Burroughs's and Brion Gysin's fold-in technique, etc. They were mainly used in the creation of literature and later later have been extended to video making. All these works are more or less leave a space for the performativity of their own materials.

Review of recent works

• One of my works reflects on this research is a photo book, which was produced using images and texts (subtitles) taken from the Roman Polanski's film, “The Tenant”. The images and texts are extracted at moments when characters say the word "know", and then the frames and texts are reassembled into the form of book. Some of the pages are designed to be shorter than the rest, which provides the opportunity for the reader to read across pages, and at different intervals. The repeated “know”s are situated in a half-baked story (original film), within which readers can break the linear reading experience.

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How can a moment be altered when we view a narration from one point, and jumping to another, or starting from the middle, or if we were to then move the beginning to the end?

• I try to experiment with different ways of experiencing and perceiving. Later on I made a split-screen video work. The audiovisual content is extracted from the most dramatic part of the same film, The Tenant. The original shots play along with reversed each single shots. The beginning and the end of each shot can be viewed at the same time and goes on playing to the end (and beginning) of the sequence.

There are actually doubled contents but the work does not aim to double the vision but produce an altered viewing experience, different from watching a linear narrative. What I liked here is since in the work I used such a simple strategy, people could already get it straight away while watching. But they would still sense the altered experience, which I think will make people more aware of the manipulation of the content. The same data can be addressed to different experiences and purposes.

Since I got a lot of question about why I used films within my work I started to think about the content I worked with. At first sight, film may be considered as a closed system. I understand by closed system it means actually the director's choice of moving image sequences, the final result. But the media form itself rests on a database upon which choices can be made. I read an articlefrom writer, Daniel Coffeen, in which he states "a film is the product of a selection from different shots, hours of dailies and coverage – the film rests on a database." As he told the film, “what we end up seeing is only one possibility. Cut it again and there's a different movie.” Therefore, it is not hard to imagine a film has the potential to be treated as raw material. It is open-ended. The database of it is autonomous. The pieces of footage relate to each other in one or other way, which makes the permutation more exciting.

• At the same period, with newly learnt coding technique, I tired to develop different permutations with film. I wanted to make a chat-bot like Eliza which uses films as its database. The work will invite people to go into a dialogue with different characters in films. Participants can lead the dialogues, cut them and reassemble them. But in fact only a vague topic bouncing back and forth. As we know from the Eliza effect, it was sometimes so convincing that there are many anecdotes about people becoming very emotionally caught up in dealing with doctor Eliza. Even though I haven’t managed to create my own algorithm, I assembled my film according to the characters’ lines and made a video out of them.

Link:https://vimeo.com/128725792

• Besides that, I also made a browser-based work. <http://www.tangyuzhen.com/browser-based%20works/dialogue.html> People can interact with this piece by scrolling the webpage up and down. The movement/paying of each clip and the conversational text will be presented accordingly. The organisation of the materials also follows a question and answer format, like André Breton developed Q&A form in Exquisite Corpse. Indeed there is more or less unpredictable randomness. But it is not randomness that I aim to create within them. On the contrary, in order to present its performantivity, they have to work with rules and conditions.

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Broad context

Omer Fast’s work, The Casting(2007)

Marc Lafia's work, The Battle of Algiers()

Research strands

It was a nice experience to explore different possibilities from the same material. After I took a look at my previous works as a whole, I would conclude that the cut-up technique (permutation) as a visualising strategy are used in my work to explore the performativity. However, within the text, I would more like to think about what is or will be the coherent interest leading me to where I will be in the near feature.

On one hand, Permutation is one of the main concepts in my previous work. It is "self-inclusive and self-contained" (Brion Gysin, ) , But the performative outcome of itself can be so productive, even infinite, like the work, a Hundred Thousand Billion Poems. Departure from cut-ip technique, It quickly make me lead me to look at database structure, relational database, object database (the Google knowledge graph), the zzstructure. To make it simple, a data model define the relationships between different data elements and the structure designed upon the data on the basis of the relationships. Geert Lovink's notion of database-watching catched my attention. "We no longer watch films or TV; we watch databases." At this stage, the permutation gets much complicated, it is not only about the data model or algorithm we use. We have been encouraged a personal relationship with the database in which we feed in more information, and get more ideal or predicted result in return. But are we really in dialogue with machine? As Lovink argued, "Cultual awareness of how algorithms function is still a long way off." It also runs into what I have read about Andrew Pickering's notion on knowledge - “seeing knowledge as situated (rather than transcendentally true) while continuing to take it seriously (and not as epiphenomenal froth)” (Pickering, 380) What would be the epiphenomenal study when we cannot picture its whole context? What would the phenomenal inform us when it is in different context?

On the other hand, I get interested in the Dreamachine created by Gysin and Ian Sommerville. It is a nice exemplification of "a technology of the self, a material technology for the production of altered states" , "We could say that the brain explored the performative potential of the material technology (in an entirely nonvoluntary, nonmodern fashion), while the technology explored the space of brain performance. " During the on-going thematic project about encyclopaedia of media object, we discussed Heidegger's essay The Thing. What he discussed about readiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand quite interest me. The substrate of thing will not present until it malfunctions.