[...]s strategies for seeing from (any) standpoints, in order to see well. (refer to lecture-performance Standing on the Shoulders of Giants - Sina Seifee 2015, on a critical epistemology of seeing-from-far)
= whom to see with?
Haraway: only partial perspective promises objective vision. This is an objective vision that initiates, rather than closes off, the problem of responsibility for the generativity of all visual practices.
The ‘eyes’ made available in modern technological sciences shatter any idea of passive vision? these prosthetic devices show us that all eyes, including our own organic ones, are active perceptual systems, building in translations and specific ways of seeing, that is, ways of life.
partial way of organizing worlds
is unlocatable irresponsible?
is my visual exhibition a knowledge claim?
To see from below (or the perspective of the mathematics, Kinect, hacker?) is neither easily learned nor unproblematic
ways of being nowhere while claiming to see comprehensively (i did not claim any of these - i didn't try even. i was there traveling with relation to my co-travelers and a technology relation) my issue with the images is their generality and perhaps that is their unlocatablilty. but to situate my knowledge and myself i am not solely depending on the image rhetoric. i was committed to mobile positioning, and that is critical.
mediate vision
knowledge potent for constructing worlds
trying to be less organized by axes of domination
Science has been utopian and visionary from the start? that is one reason ‘we’ need it.
my eye were crafted by the blood of mosquitoes...
translations and exchanges, material and semiotic
what has the property of systematicity in my Amazon?
orientations and responsibility in material semiotic fields of meaning.
is Here, Kinect's vision not immediately a very powerful metaphor or technology (for political epistemological clarification)?
The visual metaphor invites us to investigate the varied apparatuses of visual production, including the prosthetic technologies interfaced with our biological eyes and brains.
should i have an argue for (politics and) epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating?
view from a structuring and structured body
we love stuttering, and the partly understood
Translation is always interpretative, critical, and partial
Amazon (location) resists (the politics of) closure
logic of culture (nature made flexible)
science coded body
black coded body
colonised coded body
coded as self sufficient (when?)
the project and me are not boundary object (i am not tarzan)
suppress the lost text of aristotle on the rhetoric of humor
how can something work and not work?!
mathematical competition
what is the other story (of forest, journey, etc.) that i want urgently tell?
or the rhythm of what story i want to change?
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In 1905 the French neurologists G. Deny and P. Camus recounted the case of Madame I who had lost body awareness. She described her “general insensibility” as follows: “I'm no longer aware of myself as I used to be. I can no longer feel my arms, my legs, my head, and my hair. I have to touch myself constantly in order to know how I am. I have the feeling that my entire body is changed, even at times that it no longer exists. I touch an object, but it is not I who am touching it. I no longer feel as I used to. I cannot find myself. I cannot imagine myself. My insensibility is frightening, as if everything were empty.” Madame I was unable to recognize the position of her arms and legs and was completely insensitive to pain. According to Israel Rosenfeld's thesis, Madame I was unable to know her body as part of her memory. (her brain could not create a body image) She could not imagine, or create in her mind, images of parents or the houses where she had lived. Lacking a continuous image of herself, she could re-create momentary images only when she was verifying to herself that she had a body. (see Strange, Familiar and Forgotten pp 40-42)
“If all self-reference were destroyed, consciousness and understanding would not be possible.
“Meaning and understanding are parts of the structure of consciousness that emerge from self-reference; they cannot exist without a body image.” (p.55)
“Self-reference is not a hypothetical idea but a demonstrable part of the structure of consciousness; a partial breakdown in the physiological mechanisms that create it give us the phenomenon of phantom limbs.” (p.56)
Two English neurologists, Lord Russell Brain and Henry Head (!) coined the phrase “body image” for the internal image and memory of one's body in space and time. The body image is not only a picture of the body but also an anticipatory plan for the detailed movements of the body, and rather than a fixed structure, it is dynamic and plastic, capable of reorganizing itself radically with the contingencies of experience.
The body image can also incorporate external object, implements, and instruments. When they are being used, they can become intimate, vital, even libidinally cathected parts of the body image.
(Don Ihde:) “To embody one's praxis through technologies is ultimately an existential relation with the world.” (Technology and Lifeworld, p.72)
Embodied relations such as the experience of “seeing through” glasses (or the use of hearing aids, blind man's cane, or driving a car) take the technology into the perceptual-bodily self-experience. The mediating technology becomes part of the body image, and achieves “instrumental transparency”
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(Giuliana Bruno)
This tangible, superficial contact, in fact, is what allows us to apprehend the objects and the spaces of art, turning contact into the communicative interface of a public intimacy. (but not in the Amazonian skin contact) (it is different than Lucretius reflecting upon the nature of things)
(materiality of) cultural surfaces
As a form of dwelling that engages mediation between subjects and with objects, the surface also can be viewed as a site for screening and projection.
The surfaces of the screens that surround us today express a new materiality as they convey the virtual transformation of our material relations. And these screens, which have become membranes of contact, exist in our environments in close relation to the surfaces of canvas and walls—also undergoing a process of substantial transformation. And so it is here—in this meeting place that is surface—that art forms are becoming reconnected and creating new, hybrid forms of admixture.
who shares (deep) engagements with superficial matters?
layered space of interaction between subject and object
surface can be read as an architecture
from mediated encounters with material space to mobilization of cultural space (the exhibition)
memory, imagination, and affect are linked to movement -- embodied in jungle walk?
modernity's desire and fancy for tactile experience, driving and impulse to expand one's universe and eventually to project it, to exhibit personal passionate voyage of imagination -- effects of a spectatorial movement that is evolving further in Selfie. that is the emergence of such sequential virtues motion capturing that comes to inhibit the train of thought = interconnection in the sequence of ideas expressed during a connected discourse and how this sequence leads from one idea to another (modernity).
(i don't do filmic voyage)
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By Consequence, or train of thoughts, I understand that succession of one thought to another which is called, to distinguish it from discourse in words, mental discourse.
“When a man thinketh on anything whatsoever, his next thought after is not altogether so casual as it seems to be. Not every thought to every thought succeeds indifferently.” (— Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, The First Part: Of Man, Chapter III: Of the Consequence or Train of Imagination)
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the current forms of biotic forests is due to the spreading of seed-dispersing plants millions years ago (what about abiotic? Kinect)
one of issues related with rate/speed is synchronicity
the effects of biotechnically / bioculturaly situated people
Amazon's nature in opposition to slave gardens (slave plantation systems with factory machine) (along with imperial botanical gardens)
for travel and propagation of...
moving material semiotic
part-time organisms
when visuality is looked at in a haptic modality (the tentacular face for example), vision can be figured as touch, not distance. negatively curving in loops and frills, not surveying(/surviving) from above.
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when a depiction (poetic, visual, etc.) is dangerously ambiguous?
are we really immersed in data realities? and that really means we are losing the sight on experiences fetched by our bodies?
co-existing and contradictory incomplete models that ground us in our critically limited existence. what does beyond the (techno-cartographic-episto-cogno-histo-) map's horizon means for this situated “us”?
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(Amanda Boezkes)
the ontological purification apparatus
we are now on an idea of the earth in so to calibrate our sensorial systems to adjust to human-born unpredictabilities that override and neutralize long-standing histories of local knowledge.
how an ecological perspective can be incorporated into vision -- become a visuality? -- mobilization of visuality
how an artwork may account for the ways ecological change registers in vision?
geo-aesthetics
information is not energy-specific (Gibson)
theory of affordance : information pick-up process --> threshold between the sense-system of organism and the invariance of the environment
an experience of an observer that is not a property of the observer, it is invariant and relational.
that is, it acknowledges that objective information about an environmental system can be obtained both in spite and because of perceptual change. in this respect an indigenous knowledge is not simply an order of cultural perspective, they are rather a form of objective testimony, by the people who are attuned to the environment's invariant structure. they are not simply a traditional or local “point of view.”
in this sense what kind of info is the image of Kinect about the environment? it is not objective info nor culture, what is it? personal testimony? descriptions of a technological reading?!
affordance, as a concept, allows complexity and refusal to reduce environments, objects, and actions to the basic function they may have to the perceiver in her/his/its world -- it permits a level (horizon) of consciousness of the world beyond function.
how a beetle may rest on the retina of bird's eye like pieces of puzzle fitting together
facts of environment
to what extent can an ecological perception become virtualized, represented, and returned to vision as a condition, or style of being? that is how to take conscientious of the ecological beings that we are in any project? -- that is attuning vision to an ecological reality
E. h. Gombrich understood the perception of art as a process of cultivating the visual skills of recognition in the eye itself
historical ways of seeing
any skill we have in spite of environmental variances, is operating from visual schema that are geared to trigger pattern recognition, (art?)
visuality vs vision
the caricaturist does not teach us how to see, but rather instantiates a new code of recognition. a visuality is nested into vision; vision is reciprocally primed to recognize a visuality ***
visuality involves more than pattern recognition
perception is not the tool by which we experience art, but its very content and substance. john Onians concludes that “each painting forms its own ‘eye’.”
what kind of eye the art (of my Kinect) cultivates? (a techno-aesthetic eye?) (the diagrammatic eye?) (referring to the diagram project “sadistic statistics”)
the ways we see ...ly (historically, ecologically, evolutionary, technologically,) more part and parcel of the visuality of the anthropocene
the neuro-aesthetic eye
to “read” environment in terms of info pick-up and accommodation
to simply perceive as we do
but to parlay (double up) our perceptual system into a modality of processing, response, and responsiveness
(the aesthetics of) the visual brain is the contact (not contract) between the individual and the ecosystem
modulation of ethos in landscape?
Kinect is not bringing a knowledge that is neurobiologically imperceptible to the naked eye nor is it technologically making a worldview accessible.
“it is low tech”, its images are born of partial recognition, attunement, and attention
low-tech works may be critical for developing a visuality that is not yet integral to or explicit within new media, visualising the specifically neurological dimension of ecologicity and mobilizing vision as a perceiving organ to cultivate this self-awareness.
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(McKenzie Wark)
climate science, a key science of our time, rests on an apparatus of very powerful computers and communication vectors, which overcome the “friction”, as Paul Edwards calls it, between data and communication. it brings together global data according to global standards, mathematical models of physics of climate drawn from fluid dynamics, and massive computational power. the model and data coproduce each other in a way, as the data sets are all partial, and many data points have to be interpolated to make the models work. and then all of that has to be mediated back to human awareness via tables, graphs, computer simulations, and so forth.
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(Irmgard Emmelhainz)
(anthropocene) change in the conditions of visuality
transformation of the world into images
phenomenological + epistemological consequences
images participate now in the forming of worlds, they have also become forms of thought
the optical mind
the radical change in the conditions of visuality has brought about a new subject position or point of view, announce by the trajectories of:
1. antihumanism (between impressionism and cubism)
2. posthumanism (between cubism and experimental film)
3. non-grounded form of vision (from experimental film to digital media)
this regime of visuality implies: automatization, tautological vision, and signs leading to other signs
resulted to => the proliferation of images also implying the cancellation of vision
“vision cancelled”
linearity of the Renaissance perspective plan created the illusion of a view to the outside world, analogous to a window.
cubism: showing a perpetual present in a parallel temporality.
perspectival multiplicity became embedded in the picture plane.
invented a discontinuous space, making identity and difference relative (questioning the classical metaphysics), by subverting the relations between subject and object.
does my Kinect pictural model employs the architectural space? is camera architectural?
in experimental film, duration became a key component of aesthetic experience, analogous to human consciousness, a prosthetic vision
identity and difference, rejection of a priori space
how to release the subject from human coordinates? what are references to human coordinates? screen's rectangular frame?
the machine (optical perception) delivers a posthuman, prosthetic enhancement of vision, which announces, first the incipient (initial) normalization of perception as augmented reality and data visualization
displacement of the subjective center of operations
epitomize
subvert
fragmentation brought by mechanization, has an alienating character
its impossibility to give back an image or serve a reflective mirror
it is indifferent to “me”
the exhaustive visualization and documentation of wildlife is effectively concealing its ongoing extinction (one of the reasons i am not using the zeiss-lens-camera recordings)
(for Susan Sontag) taking photographs [...] i[...]