User:Sara/: Difference between revisions

Latest revision as of 14:01, 16 January 2017

Hypervisibility (the what?)

On the 29th of June 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) released the very first recording online claiming an all-embracing Muslim Caliphate. The general sentiments accompanying this first declaration (at least for us living within the frontiers of the so-called Middle-East) were disbelief, then horror, then a surprising and brutal sense of familiarity. As ISIS started to publish their videos online after the break of the Syrian revolution in 2011, it seemed impossible to miss the endless references to western popular aesthetics and digital platforms to emphasize the Islamic State's role in the global political imaginary.

The horrifying images that surfaced on the Internet after the declaration of the formation of the state drew my attention to the ease with which such scenes are iterated. The shocking casualeness of the online circulation of the images of a ravaged body seemed to turn suffering into a benumbing spectacle.

In today’s dense inforsphere, we are surrounded by an overload of images and the faster they circulate the more difficult it becomes to seize them or comprehend them. According to Saidiya Hartman, it is this hypervisibility that problematizes the precariousness of empathy: the feelings that consume us vis-à-vis the images of horror are either indifference or a narcissistic identification with the (humanity) of the other.* But then my question is, where does the horror come from? Does it only reside in the act of killing? Or does it manifest itself in our failure to extract meaning from the digital hypercomplexity we are surrounded with?

In my project, I would like to address this question by interacting with digital images outside of the realm of the visual, outside the limitations of meaning and perhaps even beyond language. I would like to treat digital images as noise; as undefined utterences that are constituted beyond the finite capacity of human comprehension.

Language

“ […] A digital image that can be seen cannot be merely exhibited or copied but always only staged or performed. Here, an image begins to function like a piece of music, whose score, as is generally known, is not identical to the piece - the score being not audible, but silent. For the music to resound, it has to be performed. To perform something, however, means to interpret it, betray it, destroy it. Every performance is an interpretation and every interpretation is a misuse. "

__ Boris Groys, Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction (e-flux, 2009)

In his 2003 book In the Break, Fred moten starts by stating that objects can and do resist. But what is an object in the age of digital reproduction? "It may seem obvious”, Mitchel Resnick and Brian Silverman write in their 1996 essay Exploring Emergence*, as an object composed of four white squares moves on the black canvas of the side screen:

“ … in fact, what appears to be an object is not really an object at all. All that is happenning is that little squares on the screen are turning “on” and “off”, following a set of simple rules. And those rules say nothing at all about objects …"

This simple example reminds us that objects are nothing but a set of abstractions performed by commands and rules that flow in a ritual of endless transformations between the written, the seen, and the spoken. If photography teaches us something about the visual representation of the real, then digital images teach us about the abstraction of the real into an act of language.

- http://www.playfulinvention.com/emergence/index.html

Noise (the how)

So how to make noise?

In order to answer this question, we must first contemplate what is sound and what is listening. In Salomé Voegelin's Listening to Noise and Silence, she states that "listening cannot contemplate the object/phenomenon heard separate from its audition because the object does not precede listening. Despite the differences in the mechanisms of listening and the mechanisms of seeing, it is important for me to stress on the perfomativity of the digital image, to the idea that the image is only visible once it is performed and interpreted from an originally non-visual score. In this inter-operative motion, it is impossible to separate the viewer and the set of interfaces that connect the viewer with the visual scene.

Elements

Relation to previous practice

Last year I took a set of recruitment videos produced by ISIS as my target material for a series of visual experiments. One of the examples involved the extraction of constitutive digital data from the video “Flames of War” and leaving it with hardly indetifiable pixelated explosions. By removing the p-frames of the video, the photographic element was removed, meaning the only element that contained representational information about the image was eliminated. The abstract movement inscribed in the i-frames was all that remained.

I take this example to revisit some of the images I was creating earlier without necessarily understanding why at the time. However, along my search, both my political concerns and my relation to my practice are starting to make sense.

The main reason I went to study audio-visual arts was because I was always interested in sound. My relation to images had always been a complex one. I had hardly ever been to the movies prior to entering film school, but my fascination with films came originally from its aural performance, from the fact that it all melted back down to language, to speech, to the voice. And here I am again, trying to explore this phonic materiality of the visual, and trying to find ways to articulate it and expand on it.

References

- Groys, Boris. Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction. E-flux, 2009.

- Resnick, Mitchel and Silverman, Brian. Exploring Emergence, 1996

http://www.playfulinvention.com/emergence/index.html

- Moten, Fred. In the Break, University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

- Voegelin, Salomé. Listening to Noise and Silence, continuum, 2010

@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
-'''(Re)visiting'''
+'''Hypervisibility (the what?)'''
-The first time I mentioned the execution of the Jordanian pilot, Muath Safi Yousef Al-Kasasbeh, by the Islamic State (January, 2015), I was describing the shot values of the video, from one cut to the other. I thought that by not recounting the event of the execution itself, I would be sparing whomever is listening to me, the shocking horror of the violent account. I didn’t understand back then what to do with that or where to take it. I didn’t know what my question was either. Today, a year later, I unintentionally find myself revisiting that video again.
-I started with wanting to transform the video into an excavation site, where I can deconstruct the contents of the image and strip it back to what it really is: calculable detectable digital data. In the research process, I stumbled upon opencv (open-source computer vision).
+On the 29th of June 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) released the very first recording online claiming an all-embracing Muslim Caliphate. The general sentiments accompanying this first declaration (at least for us living within the frontiers of the so-called Middle-East) were disbelief, then horror, then a surprising and brutal sense of familiarity. As ISIS started to publish their videos online after the break of the Syrian revolution in 2011, it seemed impossible to miss the endless references to western popular aesthetics and digital platforms to emphasize the Islamic State's role in the global political imaginary.
+The horrifying images that surfaced on the Internet after the declaration of the formation of the state drew my attention to the ease with which such scenes are iterated. The shocking casualeness of the online circulation of the images of a ravaged body seemed to turn suffering into a benumbing spectacle.
-''Observation 1:''
+In today’s dense inforsphere, we are surrounded by an overload of images and the faster they circulate the more difficult it becomes to seize them or comprehend them. According to Saidiya Hartman, it is this hypervisibility that problematizes the precariousness of empathy: the feelings that consume us vis-à-vis the images of horror are either indifference or a narcissistic identification with the (humanity) of the other.* But then my question is, where does the horror come from? Does it only reside in the act of killing? Or does it manifest itself in our failure to extract meaning from the digital hypercomplexity we are surrounded with?
-With Michael’s help, the first experiment conducted on the video of pilot Al-Kasasbeh was the frontal face recognition technique. It was interesting to see how a human face is perceived and understood by the algorithm. The script’s success as well as its failures in detecting both the pilot’s and the militants faces caught my attention. The algorithm managed to successfully detect the pilot’s face throughout the video. It has also managed to find tiny symmetrical face-resembling shapes or shadows present in the sand or in the rubble, but not a single time did the algorithm meet a militant’s eyes.
+In my project, I would like to address this question by interacting with digital images outside of the realm of the visual, outside the limitations of meaning and perhaps even beyond language. I would like to treat digital images as noise; as undefined utterences that are constituted beyond the finite capacity of human comprehension.
-[[File:Observ 1.png|800x452px]]
+'''Language'''
-''Observation 2:''
+''“ […] A digital image that can be seen cannot be merely exhibited or copied but always only staged or performed. Here, an image begins to function like a piece of music, whose score, as is generally known, is not identical to the piece - the score being not audible, but silent. For the music to resound, it has to be performed. To perform something, however, means to interpret it, betray it, destroy it. Every performance is an interpretation and every interpretation is a misuse. "''
-Hoping to separate the background from all human activity showing in the video, I started a new experiment. The background, with its hazy desert views and the blurry objects appearing vaguely, is reminiscent of mystery video games like Limbo. At the beginning of the game, a small boy appears lost in a dark black & white hazy forest called the “edge of hell". Trying to find his way through, the boy keeps encountering the most horrific deaths. He comes back to life endlessly. Like Limbo, the execution video starts with Muath entering the frame, walking, looking around, lost. Once background extraction is applied to the video, a black&white image appears. As the script takes the first frame as a reference for subtraction, the silhouette of the line of soldiers waiting for Muath at the beginning keeps recurring continously throughout the video. I didn’t manage to separate. I unknowingly merged.
+__ Boris Groys, Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction (e-flux, 2009)
+[[File:Screen Shot 2017-01-16 at 12.25.35 PM.png|thumbnail|right]]
-[[File:Observ 2.png|800x452px]]
+In his 2003 book In the Break, Fred moten starts by stating that objects can and do resist. But what is an object in the age of digital reproduction? "It may seem obvious”, Mitchel Resnick and Brian Silverman write in their 1996 essay Exploring Emergence*, as an object composed of four white squares moves on the black canvas of the side screen:
+“ … in fact, what appears to be an object is not really an object at all. All that is happenning is that little squares on the screen are turning “on” and “off”, following a set of simple rules. And those rules say nothing at all about objects …"
-''Observation 3:''
+This simple example reminds us that objects are nothing but a set of abstractions performed by commands and rules that flow in a ritual of endless transformations between the written, the seen, and the spoken. If photography teaches us something about the visual representation of the real, then digital images teach us about the abstraction of the real into an act of language.
-Still looking for a way to separate, I changed strategy. Still tinkering with opencv, I chose to diverge from the ISIS video. Maybe the problem was not in the script I was working with. Perhaps it was the violence itself that kept resisting my attempts. This time I looked for the mundane everyday ritual: traffic. I tried to extract the background using the function cv2.accumulateWeighted(). Here, each frame is fed into the function as a potential reference background, and the function keeps finding the averages of all frames fed to it, resulting in the following images (I will show the actual video on Monday, perhaps with different source material). In this video, objects and people are visible when immobile, but then they slowly vanish as they move. Their activity sentences them to disappearance.
+- http://www.playfulinvention.com/emergence/index.html
-[[File:Observ 3.png|830x519px]]
+'''Noise (the how)'''
-'''Disappearance:'''
-The last script didn’t work on the ISIS video of the execution of Muath El-Kasasbeh. The camera needed to be fixed; the shot, stable. However, the slow transitions between appearance and disappearnace made me feel both enjoyment and confusion. I couldn’t tell if people existed or will exist, unless I compared the source video with the resulting one. Or rather, only their immoboilty would reveal them. I would like to try to acheive the same or a similar experience when working with ISIS videos. Would it be possible to turn them into beautiful tranquil and untroubled desert landscapes? (I will work on a still image using photoshop, to start with, and will try to either add it here in the coming couple of days, or show it on Monday along with the rest of the vidoe materials).
+So how to make noise?
-[[File:Disapp.png|830x519px]]
+In order to answer this question, we must first contemplate what is sound and what is listening. In Salomé Voegelin's Listening to Noise and Silence, she states that "listening cannot contemplate the object/phenomenon heard separate from its audition because the object does not precede listening. Despite the differences in the mechanisms of listening and the mechanisms of seeing, it is important for me to stress on the perfomativity of the digital image, to the idea that the image is only visible once it is performed and interpreted from an originally non-visual score. In this inter-operative motion, it is impossible to separate the viewer and the set of interfaces that connect the viewer with the visual scene.
-'''Hypervisibility''' (context)
+Elements
-On the 29th of June 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) released the very first recording online claiming an all-embracing Muslim Caliphate. The general sentiments accompanying this first declaration (at least for us living within the frontiers of the so-called Middle-East) were disbelief, then horror, then a surprising and brutal sense of familiarity. The Islamic State had already realized itself as a de facto sovereignty, performing its statehood in a simple matter of fact.
-Despite international outrage, and with the absence of any recognition or support from intergovernmental organizations, the Islamic State perfromed its sovereignty, transgressesing the borders of national institutions, and taking the universal citizen, separated from community, nation or history, as its subject. The horrifying images that surfaced on the Internet after the declaration of the formation of the state drew my attention to the ease with which such scenes are iterated. The shocking casualeness of the image of a ravaged body circulating online turns suffering into a benumbing spectacle. This economy of what Saidiya Hartman calls hypervisibilty, problematizes the precariousness of empathy: the idea that we the only feelings that consume us as either indifference or narcissistic identification with the (humanity) of the other. It obscures a routinized violent quotidian embedded in the brutal familiarity of the everyday ritual. Hartman’s fundamental work animates within the context of slavery and the history of blackness. However, I hope that her determination to defamiliarize the familiar act as a methodoligical guide to my work.
-'''Defamiliarizing the familiar''' (methodology)
+'''Relation to previous practice'''
-“ […] A digital image that can be seen cannot be merely exhibited or copied but always only staged or performed. Here, an image begins to function like a piece of music, whose score, as is generally known, is not identical to the piece - the score being not audible, but silent. For the music to resound, it has to be performed. To perform something, however, means to interpret it, betray it, destroy it. Every performance is an interpretation and every interpretation is a misuse. "
-As I remembered the description I made of the video of the execution of the Jordanian pilot last year, I became aware, through Hartman’s eyes, of the inevitability of the (re)production of the violent account. Even when I decided not to show the execution video (which is online nonetheless), I was still referring to it. The visual performance at the scene of violence inflicted on Math Al-Kasasbeh’s death was being restaged in all its different guises: in the performance of the digital image and the familiarity of my recounting it. Could I open up  a space for this concern in my work?
+Last year I took a set of recruitment videos produced by ISIS as my target material for a series of visual experiments. One of the examples involved the extraction of constitutive digital data from the video “Flames of War” and leaving it with hardly indetifiable pixelated explosions. By removing the p-frames of the video, the photographic element was removed, meaning the only element that contained representational information about the image was eliminated. The abstract movement inscribed in the i-frames was all that remained.
+[[File:Flames.gif|center]]
+I take this example to revisit some of the images I was creating earlier without necessarily understanding why at the time. However, along my search, both my political concerns and my relation to my practice are starting to make sense.
+The main reason I went to study audio-visual arts was because I was always interested in sound. My relation to images had always been a complex one. I had hardly ever been to the movies prior to entering film school, but my fascination with films came originally from its aural performance, from the fact that it all melted back down to language, to speech, to the voice. And here I am again, trying to explore this phonic materiality of the visual, and trying to find ways to articulate it and expand on it.
+'''References'''
+- Groys, Boris. Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction. E-flux, 2009.
+- Resnick, Mitchel and Silverman, Brian. Exploring Emergence, 1996
+http://www.playfulinvention.com/emergence/index.html
+- Moten, Fred. In the Break, University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
+- Voegelin, Salomé. Listening to Noise and Silence, continuum, 2010