[...]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 [...] is a way of certifying experience, also a way of refusing it - by limiting experience to a search for the photographic, by converting experience to a souvenir. [...] the very activity of taking pictures [...] assuages (erleichtern) general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated (worsened) by travel.
cognitive activity
giving form to experience, also transforming things into signs, welding image and discourse
the contemporary experience is also made of sharing/tweeting/liking images
the contemporary political economy: communicative capitalism derives surplus value from the volume and velocity of sings and data circulating in the infosphere.
proliferation of cognitive signs is another feature of communicative capitalism, submitting the mind to an ever-increasing pace of perceptual stimuli
(for Berardi) seeing means accelerating perception in the fields of everyday experience, accelerated tautological vision derived from constant passive observation. this is another of communicative capitalism's form of governance, as this kind of vision generates techno-linguistic automatisms by carrying information without meaning
is Kinect image-compilation a creature of infosphere? (boring question?)
normalization of groundless seeing (exemplified in google earth)
“picture does not make an image” (Serge Daney, before and after image)
image against vision
life persists irrationality, not given form by imagination, ceasing to cohere into a higher truth. (Fox, cold world)
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(Ada Smailbegovic)
nature of things (2013, Sina + Elisa)
related to temporalities and velocities (plant politics of movement)
the video registers different rhythms and textures of change in the event of weather
methodological impulse to draw on descriptive practices of natural history
attuning to particulate differences that compose change
the temporal dimension of human “umwelt” is tuned into a limited set of rhythms and durations. therefore many of the temporalities that are relevant for developing a politics of time (such as longe duration of geological time) may not be directly available to human sensorium.
not just something that it is difficult to sense, but temporality as a compound entity of other variables. (temperature, etc.)
binding times together
an alternative perspective on (anthropocene) temporality involves developing a poetics of description as a mode of affective and aesthetic amplification
=> developing an experimental poetics of technology as a mode of aesthetic amplification towards a less perspectival visuality -- the writing tends to operate in a more tentacular mode of perception --> sweating on every negative space
+++ sweating again was crucial in our sensorial (and therefore cognitive) relation when we were in Amazon. Kinect and sweating both propose modes of perception other than perspectival shadow casting system of vision.
(organic or inorganic/technological?) processes that constitute the planet/plant
=> intimacy with the organic/inorganic/technological processes that constitute the planet
(my work is to create or find out) poetics and the methodologies that register the bite and indexes its significance
(+ bite of the critter on my skins)
(Chakrabarty in The climate of history:) “man's environment did change but changed so slowly as to make the history of man's relation to his environment almost timeless and thus not a subject of historiography at all”
the collapse of this age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history
plant writing
formulate transitional categories that would be responsive to differentiated modes of activity attuned to the difficulties of depicting natural phenomena that are continuously in flux.
reader of the meteorological registers
envision the temporal flux
the shifting edges (of the Kinect building generics)
(Kinect image) as architectural form composed of different (transitional) materially instantiated temporalities
transposition of qualities
within grammatical and figurative textures (of poetic)
between the material and the metaphorical
modes of materiality
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(W.A.G.E. working artists and greater economy)
for artists who don't have secondary jobs, their mobility--despite being underwritten in many cases by class privilege--is forced. they are wired-up, networked carriers of social and cultural capital set in perpetual motion, transforming cities in their passage through them on the art circuit--sophisticated nomadic clans who travel to survive.
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nature of things (2013, Sina + Elisa)
places marked with zones of limited habitation--you can't live there, you are a visitor
a place that is both wasteland and wilderness at the same time
wasteland tourism (museum in chernobyl)
1. the christian tradition: it was our obligation to use up the earth before the apocalypse
2. the romantic view: we humans are the servants of the land, we are its eyes, we are its expression
we are becoming visitors of waste wilderness, most natural and unnatural land simultaneously
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the moment the world enters my body it has already been transformed
for Elisa and me Bochum's forest was a location, with its decay, it's subtropical humidity and toxins, and because of the way it is trapped between the natural and the man-made.
“we are forever collecting ourselves” (Baudrillard)
we have always encountered the world via technology
(now internet)
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(Zoe Todd)
Zapatista (a revolutionary leftist political and militant group based in Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico) principles of “walking the world into being” (as locus of thought and practice to decolonize posthumanist geographies)
(for Juanita Sundberg) the zapatista movement theorizes walking as an important practice in building the pluriversale, a world in which many worlds fit. [...] as we humans move, work, play, and narrate with multiplicity of beings in place, we enact historically contingent and radically distinct worlds/ontologies.
the epistemic violence inherent both in academic treatment and dance (they both bring things to life?) (is dance controlled form of violence? does violence always bring things to life contrary to the belief that it kills life?)
(i don't want to) trivialize (Amazon and my Amazon trip) as case-study and neutralize its indigenous ontologies
(John Hartingan:) Anthropocene as “charismatic mega-category”
(of the white intellectual space of the Euro-Western academy)
(which sweeps many competing narratives under its roof?)
(indigenous artists, Rebecca Belmore & Jolene Rickard:) material might act as a bridge, instead of a mirror
(narcissistic obsession of Western civilization/art with material-as-mirror)
(Dwayne Donald:) place-based cultures and knowledge systems
colonialism is basicly “disconnection”, denial of relation
(in its heart is written “we are not related”)
(so few indigenous bodies are present in sites where academic discourse are being forged and practiced) when they are present, they are often dismissed as biased, overly emotional, or unable to maintain objectivity over the issues they present. (can i say the same treat is with iranians? and in which scene or context? -- iranians are “not” famous for exhaustive discursive unemotional and unopinionated maintenances)
(around me / around here) => importances and pleasures of going from “around me” to “around here”
(how can we stop in art to) recreate exploitative patterns from the past (?)
ecological imagination is a turn towards reciprocity and relationship
in Kinect the path of a journey is refracted, mirroring a critical site of refraction, as a practice. walking with Hanno in the Amazon forest is a joyful and critical engagement through a form of practice that resists universalizing tendencies.
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tree is never tree-like (filial, Arborescent, versus rhizomatic)
vertical vs. lateral
Arborescent vs. reticulated (like the patterns on a giraffe or spots on the python)
stake at “relationships”
how can we problematize narcissism? what if it is the wrong word describing a certain property of life? Narcissus is recognizing himself in his environment and he dissolves himself in that image. the main thing about this story is that he is most alive via the story, Narcissus is basically undead.
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close-range vision
how can we practice movement and touch in the physio-locality of the eyes?
tentacularity
touching was considered a cruder scanning at close range and seeing a more subtle touching at a distance
importance of far distance over close range => refer to project Standing on the Shoulders of Giants (2015, Sina)
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forest's “space”
Hernri Lefebvre distinguishes Representation of space and Representational spaces. ... Representational spaces are “directly lived” through associated images and symbols which overlay physical space, making symbolic use of its objects.
Representation is a distinctive manner of imagining the real, and is a fundamental phenomenon upon which all culture rests.
or instead of how a forest looks like, what is the forest made of? and for whom? what is the forest made of is the matter of negotiation (between the different kinds of beings who think differently about the forest)
in order not to neutralise the forest to culture (cultural history as an explanatory priority to the historically contingent circumstances) we can propose two questions of older critique of perspectival perception:
1. that the body accounts for perspective (?)
2. representation is exclusively mental (?)
of course both questions are phenomenological positions, but that does not mean that we no longer need representation to understand relationality. (Konh words)
needing or not needing representation to understand relationality
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(Latour)
not a philosophical argument, but a cabinet of curiosities assembled by “friends of interpretable objects”
... not an encyclopedic undertaking ... we have chosen only those sites, objects, and situations where there is ambiguity, a hesitation, an iconoclash on how to interpret image-making and image-breaking. (going to sites or objects where there is ambiguity, hesitation)
(the exhibition is not about recollecting truth or objectivity)
christian religious paintings that do not try to show anything but, on the contrary, to obscure the vision.
redirecting the attention away from the image to the prototype (Platonism run mad?) -- redirecting of attention to another image
are we really going to spend another century naively re-destroying and deconstructing images that are so intelligently and subtly destroyed already?
do we really have to spend another century alternating violently between constructivism and realism, between artificiality and authenticity?
science deserves better than naive worship and naive contempt. its regime of invisibility is uplifting as that of religion and art. the subtlety of its traces requires a new form of care and attention.
(we need new forms of attenti[...]