Cinematic Thresholds

8/12/2019 Cinematic Thresholds

1/26

CINEMATIC THRESHOLDS

Instrumentality, Time & Memory in the VirtualEd Keller ([email protected].)

copyright1995

1.0 THE VIRTUALI would like to begin with a mise en abyme, a meditation on the nature of

the virtual which will throw this essay through its entire trajectory anddeposit us in a place where a more detailed development of each of these

concepts can occur. As a starting point I find the formulation of the virtualthat Deleuze gives us via Proust fascinating :

'Real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.'p96, Bergsonism

This understanding of the virtual insists upon its operative nature;moreover, the operative nature of something that is not, most likely, visible.

It is used by Deleuze within the context of the performance of memory as aforce that conditions our perception ineluctably and shapes us as subjects.

In Deleuze's investigation of the subject through Bergson's idea of memory,virtuality is the key realm within which memory locates itself .

1.1 The Threshold

The role that the virtual plays in its intersection with time, with memory,can be described by a performance value that will be initially termed the

Cinematic Threshold. The term, which I take from Deleuze, reminds us of aspectrum of instrumental qualities that are identifiable in film and in

photography; as well as in techniques manipulating space, and rative. Thecinematic threshold is a revealing possibility in film, which exposes the

previously unseen and unthought. As such it maintains an instrumentalitythat has a direct effect upon the configuration of our subjectivity; it gives usmore than an expanded lexicon; in fact, the main theme that this paper

develops is that there is inherent to this cinematic threshold a certain

quality that involves us as viewers/participants in such a way that durationis invoked. This is built into the method of the cinema, and to varyingdegrees into each technology that we live within. So the description of such

instrumentalities will be our focus.

1.2 The Invocation of Duration; Speed's role in relation to Duration

One of the special relations developed by the Cinematic Threshold is the

1


2/26

involvement between time and certain intrumentalities. As it performs, at

the limit condition of our retinal capacity, it invokes time in a particular waywhich we can call duration (following Bergson). Speed is invoked, as well,

for the varying speeds and slownesses present around the cinematicthreshold (the slow mo/ the closeup/and so on) extend the retinal limit in a

way that would be previously outside of thought. Speed's relationship totime will take on a larger significance (this connexion will be developed

through Bernard Steigler's analysis of Nietzsche) in the action that memoryplays in configuring our perception, our subjectivities, because of the

concern that has been revealed vis a vis our physical limits, and time as thearea into which perception descends.

The main trajectories of this investigation are thus revealed. Our concern is,with the configuration and extension of subjectivity, understanding the

virtual as the chief realm for those configurations.

1.3 OPERATIVE FICTIONS...(who ever said I was writing anything but

fictions...)Note the model of subjectivity in William Gibson's Neuromancer, Count Zero,

and Mona Lisa Overdrive. The individual's perceptual field is not restricted totheir own library of experience, nor to a purely retinal model. Telepresence

thus becomes legitimized as a realm of experience along with the retinal,and the haptic, in such a way that the individual's extension into the virtual

is a commonplace. As well, their access to libraries of other's experiences isa field that extends their personal subjectivity in much the way that our

current technology of the hard drive and the Internet might be said tofunctionally extend our memory, creating a deployed subjectivity. This point

assumes not that our subjectivity was ever purely localized, but that theinstrumental qualities of our current technology allow a new form of an

already existing deployment. The importance of this example is twofold- itopens the question of the virtual as always having been present in the

operative nature of any instrumentality, however concrete- and itsimultaneously notes the instrumental peculiarites inherent in Gibson's

understanding of virtuality.

As noted above, there is an affiliation between the performance envelope of

film, which evolves from it's particular instrumental characteristics, and

Bergsonian duration. A favorite example from another discipline employingthe explicity operative virtual is the work of Max Ernst, specifically hiscollage novels, which have been the subject of some attention in Krauss and

Foster. I use Ernst as an example of a somewhat different understanding ofthe collage as a model of hyperplanarity/inchoate becoming animal, and

thus a perfect site for an analysis of virtuality. This argument depends uponan understanding of the surface of the image in Ernst not as a site for a

purely psychoanalytical or textual decoding, but a field of intensities that

2


3/26

invoke the inchoate and the savage. Andrew Benjamin's term timing

captures the element of this new form of savagery well in it's understandingthat the work of the work is to TIME: to throw the subject into duration.

1.4 CGI/CAD

This is a realm that is close to home for architects, but also for the modernfilmmaker. Questions of 'presence' will be opened here, vis a vis the

interface. It is linked in my mind to the development of modern computergames, which are one of the primary examples of an extension into

cyberspace of the operative realm of the virtual in a way that is specificallyspatial (as an extension of the subject into a virtual space through

telepresence). Marathon, a new game for the Macintosh platform, is a goodexample.

1.5 POWERPower is coursing through the virtual in it's inflections of our everyday

freedoms. Any understanding of the virtual must take into account thematrices of power that bound it's practical and passionate uses. The issue of

power may be understood via it's two aspects developed by Deleuze,Guattari, and Foucault: puissance and pouvoir. As Brian Massumi clarifies:

'Puissance refers to a range of potential...It may be thought of as a scale of

intensity or fullness of existence...puissance pertains to the virtual, (theplane of consistency), pouvoir to the actual (the plane of organization). D&G

use pouvoir in a sense very close to Foucault's, as an instituted andreproducible relation of force, selective concretization of potential.' -1000

Plateaus, p xvii

The relation of power to the virtual takes on tremendous force within theInternet. Between the dialogic formation of subjectivity and the

instrumentalities of cyberspace can be found one potential escape path fromsome of the matrices of power I will touch upon. There are conditions which

can be drawn from cyberspace and mapped onto other disciplines, as well,so one is not limited to cyberspace's constrained virtuality; however, mymain theme recognizes that our society is moving increasingly into the

technologized virtual, into a composite or cyborg condition; therefore, I feel

it crucial to theorize techniques of the virtual for this deployed base. It isimportant to note, as well, that computers and the Internet itself acceleratetechniques of surveillance, and provide powerful tools for cataloging

individuals. This aspect pervades the use of the networked computer andhas sinister overtones at best. In theorizing the Internet then, these

aspects, which deploy a truly crushing kind of panopticism against theindividual, must be considered carefully.

3


4/26

The techniques examined here, within these contexts, do suggest at least

the mention of the word resistance. However, I use this word with caution,not seeking to proffer examples of what I consider useless revolutions

that we have seen in the past, but to think through the problem in theway that Walter Benjamin devoted himself to mechanical reproduction.

This paper's trajectory is an attempt to extend the theories of Deleuze &Guattari, Ensenzberger, Bahktin, et. al. into the consideration of the dialogic

as it irrupts across the World Wide Web. Crucial is a theory of the virtualfrom a viewpoint which assumes not an independent subject, (even in the

virtual) but a dialogically configured subject; and one that does not castaside the elements of aura that Benjamin struggled with, but was unable

to incorporate into his socialist schema for mechanical reproduction. Lestanyone cry global village here as a riposte to these issues, let me hasten

to add that simply having global telecommunications broadcasts is NOTenough.

2.0 THE CINEMATIC THRESHOLD

The Cinematic Threshold refers to the operational value of a set oftechniques inherent to the filmic, and particular actions these techniques

carry out within matter and our perception.This bases the notion of the performance of cinema, not on a largely

psychoanalytic model (cf. Christian Metz) but rather on a model invested in

a multiplicitous space of capability- by this I mean an assemblage thatworks through a combination of the interpretive and the machinic. Thusdeveloped is the notion of the subject formed by an assortment of forces

both enunciative and machinic. By enunciative I mean textual, but alsoimageistic, habitual; narrative in the sense that even an appliance might be,in that it restricts program to a single sequence and function within the logic

of capitalist consumption. Machinic forces are those that realize their effectoutside of, or within the fabric of, a subject's interpretation. The machinic is

to some extent invisible.

The setting up of this invisibility may be revealed through an interrogation

of the instrumental qualities inherent in certain filmic techniques. There areanalagous techniques of virtuality not limited to the purely cinematic whichwill also implemement these new degrees and kinds of subjectivity. But let's

start with film...

"Movement has an essential relation to the imperceptible; it is by nature

4


5/26

imperceptible. Perception can grasp movement only as the displacement ofa moving body or the development of a form. Movements, becomings, inother words, pure relations of speed and slowness, pure affects, are belowand above the threshold of perception. Doubtless, thresholds of perceptionare relative; there is always a threshold capable of grasping what eludes

another: the eagle's eye... But the adequate threshold can in turn operateonly as a function of a perceptible form and a perceived, discerned subject.So that movement in itself continues to occur elsewhere: if we serializeperception, the movement always takes place above the maximumthreshold and below the minimum threshold, in expanding or contractingintervals (microintervals). Like the huge Japanese wrestlers whose advanceis too slow and whose holds are too fast to see, so that what embraces areless wrestlers than the infinite slowness of the wait (what is going tohappen?) and the infinite speed of the result (what happened?). What wemust do is reach the photographic or cinematic threshold.."Cinema 1, p280-1

Deleuze here uncovers a host of concerns; for example, the limits of an

individual perception, the relation between speed, time and perception. Thisproject is addressed as well by Walter Benjamin when he says

'The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what inany case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural

formations of the subject.' -The Work of Art in the Age of MechanicalReproduction

The camera is an instrumentality that cuts out a bit of reality and reveals

the unthought in it; similarly the moving section is one in the catalogue offilmic techniques that form an instrumental practice occurring in the

evolution of cinema, an evolution that moves from the still image and POVto the moving image, to the moving POV/section, to finally a time image.

The implications of this development of technology for the subject inrelationship to power have been clarified by Jonathan Crary, who notes in

reference to early camera technologies:

As a complex technique of power, it was a means of legislating for anobserver what constituted perceptual 'truth', and it delineated a fixed set of

relations to which an observer was made subject.

This begs the question of how power relationships decide a technology .

Greg Lynn addresses this in comments from a recent virtually realizedconference (published in print in ANYissue 10, 'mech in tecture') when he

writes

There should be a distinction made between more fluid and supple relations

5


6/26

of operation in space and time (abstract machines) and the mechanismsproduced out of these relations (concrete assemblages). What is interestingis the argument that the diagram comes before the concretemachine: "techniques are selected by diagrams: for example, prison existsas a mechanism only when a new diagram, the disciplinary diagram, makes

it cross 'the technical threshold'." The diagram is the social and culturalorganization that makes technology possible.

Thus the threshold we are dealing with is one of both perception on a retinal

level and perception, or configurations of the subject, on a more distributedplane. It also re-situates our question of the threshold back on the plane of

the virtual, as this plane is where the abstract machine lodges itsperformance. The question is not here the chicken or the egg, but more,

how do the two dynamically reconfigure each other- the technique workingupon the diagram and vice versa. This brings us to the catalog ofinstrumentalities, filmic and otherwise.

Any catalog of instrumentalities will be of course incomplete, and should be

viewed as highly provisional, and to some degree culturally relative.However what is at stake here is realizing the operative nature they carry,

and not defining an essential set of techniques. With that stated, I wouldlike to move from the optic/cinematic, to the computer and its spectrum of

possibilities, and finally to look at the intersections between power and thecomputer's instrumental characteristics. Deleuze identifies numerous

techniques which are germaine to this discussion, which I will apply toseveral films. These instrumentalities are ordered in a sequence that

parallels the evolution of cinematic thresholds that Deleuze maps inhis Cinema 1&2.

2.1 THE POSE

This is a quality diagrammatically exemplified by still photography. Notsurprisingly, many representations of architecture adopt the pose as well-

static views of buildings frozen, concretized in time (the absence of time).Exceptions might be animations (sic.), some renderings by Zaha Hadid, andthe like; or the work of Boccioni- I am thinking in particular of The City

Rises, but Boccioni's work in general has a concern with the intersection

between time, perception, and technical instrumentaliteis (cf. SanfordKwinter's recent analysis of the Stati d'Animeseries in Assemblage).

A curious example of the pose in film can be found in Gus van Sant's MyOwn Private Idaho.

I use this example knowing that it is not entirely within the theoreticallimitations Deleuze identifies with the pose, however, it is so intriguing I

can't resist. In this film, during certain moments of sexual tension, the film

6


7/26

denies specular pleasure to the viewer by immersing us in a series

of 'poses'. Van Sant uses these poses with intent, unlike the internet whichgives us a series of poses because of current technical limitation. The

theoretical intent is of course, completely at odds in these examples but theresult is somewhat the same. There is a distancing from presence, and as

Deleuze notes, the development of a modern theory of montage depends onthe idea that cinema has moved beyond this manner of involving us in

motion."In fact, to recompose movement with eternal poses or with immobile

sections comes to the same thing: in both cases, one misses the movementbecause one constructs a whole, one assumes that all is given, whilst

movement only occurs if the whole is neither given nor giveable.'p7, Cinema 1

In the case of My Own Private Idaho, these scenes turn the condition ofsexuality on screen on its head, by virtue of their rhythmic and enunciative

value within the film; in fact it is interesting exactly because these scenesfunction as time images, even though Deleuze relegates the pose to the

beginning of the evolution of cinema.

2.2 DEPTH OF FIELDDeleuze notes in Cinema 2that

'... depth of field creates a certain type of direct time-image that can bedefined by memory, virtual regions of past... This would be less a function ofreality than a function of remembering, of temporalization: not exactly arecollection but 'an invitation to recollect...'--p109

This notion of depth of field could be linked to painting: like Piero Della

Francesca's Flagellationor Velasquez' las Meninas. Counter to it onemight posit Uccello's Battle of San Romanoas an example of the lateral

activation of a visual field. One could also discuss Tarkovski here at length inhis explicit use of slow pans across Bruegel's painting Hunters in the

Snowin the film Solaris; a lateral cinematic move over a painting thatoperates primarily through depth of field. Using any of these examples as anoppositional strategy would be a mistake. The point here is that a timing has

occured which involves the viewer as a more active participant both

perceptually and enunciatively in the space the film creates. This is atechnique which intersects tangentially with the interpretive and thenarrative in the way that it brings duration into play using the memory

explicitly.

2.3 THE EMPTY SETis a technique akin in a way to silence in a musicalcomposition (or an absolute volume/noise) where the screen dissolves

utterly into a color. There is an abstract element to this, in fact, which

7


8/26

replaces the interpretive in the pose shot; this abstract or sensate realm is

where the empty set locates its operative nature. In the opening sequenceof Bergman's Persona for example, when our POV dives into the projector's

arcing light, thus dissolving the screen in an intensity; such a move exposesin both an enunciative and an instrumental manner the apparatus of the

film. As well, Kieslowski uses this technique of the empty set in a moreexpressionistic manner when in Blue his lead character experiences fugue

states- moments of intense anguish and inspiration when she recalls therecent death of her family, or suddenly and cathartically hears the

continuation of a symphony she is writing , in lieu of her dead husband. Thisintensity of darkness, of blue on the screen, is matched with brief passages

from the symphony. They do not occcupy the role of transition, but take usboth deeper into the experience of the character, and place us out of the

filmic- thus problematizing the filmic experience in a sublime, or blissfulmanner (cf. Pellegrino D'Acierno, Roland Barthes).

2.4 SHOT AS MOVING SECTIONSimilarly, in the shot used as moving section, which begins to activate the

POV of the camera; the shot understood as '...a mobile section, that is, atemporal perspective or a modulation.'Deleuze quotes Epstein: '...For theperspective of the outside he substitutes the perspective of the inside, amultiple perspective, shimmering, sinuous, variable and contractile, like thehair of a Hygrometer.'(One thinks immediately of Roberto Matta'smultiperspectival deep space, in works like The Vertigo of Eros.)

Filmically there is a parallel in the travelling tracking shots inGreenaway's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, which reveal

different realities as they transparently pass through architecturalboundaries, poches; the intensities of violence swathed in white in the

bathroom, in contrast to those in red, or green in the dining room orkitchen. Placing the characters in differently colored yet identical costumes

as the pan passes through each architectural boundary is a revealing of theapparatus. For instance; the upward tracking in the opening shot, revealing

the scaffolding of the set, emerging from the city set's underbelly to themuted growlings of the packs of wild dogs that populate its back alleys.

Another travelling shot of great interest is the closing scene of The

Passenger, which (and I am indebted to Pellegrino D'Acierno's analysis ofthis shot) sets up a series of limits- the window grate, for instance; andbrings us into the climactic scene with perhaps, certain expectations; then

lets us see, first, only Nicholson's feet, then, as we enter third personcompletely and our attention wanders out of the room, through the window,

we pass through the barrier of the window and barely notice the gunshotbehind us as we transgress this limit and move out into the court beyond.

This shot is interesting as well because of it's out of field characteristics, but

8


9/26

I mention it here as an example of a focusing of our attention in the way

that our POV/character is established in the shot, then transformed, in thecourse of a movement.

2.5 THE OUT OF FIELD

As we see in this travelling shot, the out of field can play a particular role infocusing our attention. As Antonioni uses it in The Passenger, and

in Blowupor L'Aventtura, we find that certain rhythms and expectationsare set up which take us out of an absentminded apprehension of a

narrative sequence in the film, and put us into a state of bliss.This sublimecondition of perception/attention is of great interest in the extension of the

analysis of the virtually operative in cinema out to other disciplines. Deleuzeillustrates:

'In one case, the out of field designates that which exists elsewhere, to oneside or around; in the other case the out of field testifies to a moredisturbing presence, one which cannot even be said to exist, but ratherinsist or subsist....the further duration descends into the system like aspider- the more effectively the out of field fulfills its other function which isthat of introducing the transspatial and the spiritual into the system which isnever perfectly closed.'p17, Cinema 1

In the game Marathon (and also when one surfs the Net using Netscape,)the out of frame is a constant operative element. Marathon even maps

Lacan's notion of the gaze as a hostile other, in that one is constantly underthreat of attack by aliens; one's presence when surfing the net however is

more akin to the sense that one is on an infinite plane of information(perhaps Bryson/Nishitani's notion of sunyata?). But the element that links

Marathon and the Net is the possibility of the dialogic. In Marathon, we mayimmediately enter this dialogic condition by joining forces with other

humans 'jacking in' to the game; whereas on the Internet the immediacy ofcommunication is slightly vitiated, but has much more content and more

closely approximates Bryson's understanding of other. (These models bothdiffer from the out of frame that we have unpacked above in that the fullydialogic does not emerge from a linear filmic narrative in the way it can

through the Net. )

2.6 MONTAGEThis model is has connexions to the one that we find developed for montage

by Deleuze:

'What montage does, according to Vertov, is to carry perception into things,to put perception into matter, so that any point whatsoever in space itselfperceives all the points on which it acts, or which act on it, however far

9


10/26

these actions and reactions extend. 'p81, Cinema 1

I extend this by noting Deleuze' comment on Tarkovski's

conception: '...Tarkovski challenges the distinction between montage andshot when he defines cinema by the 'pressure of time' in the shot. What is

specific to the image...is to make perceptible....relationships of time whichcannot be seen in the represented object. 'p xvii, Cinema 2Thus we returnto our initial concerns with instrumentality and find them irrupting within thetechnique of montage.

2.61

Let's consider Stan Brakhage's short film 'The Dead'; what seem to beformal camera techniques initially throw us as viewers into an abstract

realm. Above and beyond the absence of an explicit narrative, he employsrotations of the camera as a frame, rotation of composited frames within theoverarching frame, lengthy continuous tracking and travelling shots, various

effects like solarizations and color value inversions of the compositedelements, handheld movements juxtaposed against the interminable

tracking shots, the overlap of different color treated composites of the sameimage, which are often rotated against one another, the composite against a

tracking shot or a 360 degree pan of its color inverted reverse, and so on.These strategies are initially impenetrable; however, as in the minimal

compositions of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and John Adams, after a certainacclimatization period a shift in perception occurs- a shift analogous to the

one that an attentive subject also experiences in Dan Graham's pavilionprojects, (cf. the installation on the roof of DIA Center for the Arts,

Manhattan).

This perceptual shift opens the viewer up to continuously deepening levelsof information and rhythms which the work begins to articulate. In this way,

the work captures completely the level of simultaneous affect and effect thatis a prerequisite for it to become a mise en abyme of the world- a Time-

Image. {The performance of this kind of work takes place on many levels-within the enunciative, one can enact a whole series of interpretations onthe work, in the way that Rosalind Krauss might- locating the work within an

historic trajectory, analyzing the artist for their psychic investments, and so

on. } However Brahkage's work also occupies a machinic realm that couldbe called a radical phenomenology, in the way that it functions purely uponthe sensibility of the eye or the ear. It is this abstraction combined with a

deep enunciative content that calls forth the question of duration.

10


11/26

3.0 MEMORY, DURATION, SPEED

Let's look closely at memory, duration, and speed. It is clear at this pointthat each instrumentality deploys itself to varying degrees of effect

depending on the 'balance' between these parameters. Bergson's memory

is 'virtual coexistence.', and is identical 'in principal' to duration. The act ofsinking into memory involves first a general invoking of the past, then a

search for specificity. This is described as a 'leap into ontology.' After thisleap has been made, recollection gradually takes on a psychological

existence. "From the virtual it passes into the actual state." This actual stateis the moment where the virtual becomes operative. Bergsonism, p57

This mechanism also becomes the locus for our confusion of recollection

images and perception images- which is in part why the retinal exercisessuch a force and makes cinema (or more frighteningly, television) as

powerful a realm as it is in the configuration of subjectivity. Bergson showsthe relation between these two kinds of images by placing the mechanism of

memory, the virtual coexistence of the past, coeval with the present: "Thepast would never be constituted if it did not coexist with the present whosepast it is."Bergsonism, p59 Coexistence becomes a key factor in ourunderstanding of how duration, memory, and perception intersect.

'Duration is indeed real succession, but it is so only because, moreprofoundly, it is virtual coexistence: the coexistence with itself, of all thelevels, all the tensions, all the degrees of contraction and relaxation(dtente). Thus with coexistence, repetition must be reintroduced to

duration... a repetition of planes rather than elements on a single plane;virtual instead of actual repetition. The whole of our past is played, restarts,repeats itself, at the same time.'Bergsonism, pp 60-1

3.1Memory is a difference of kind- and calls forth non reducible differences.

This condition aligns it with the mathematically/geometrically anexact: itis "...susceptible to measurement only by varying its metrical principles ateach stage of the division."Bergsonism, p40 Existing/perceiving as we doin a continuous multiplicity is thus the condition of being thrown into

duration, whilst simultaneously perceiving. Here we find the operative realmfor strategies that produce encounters with duration. As part of their nature,

they possess irreducible and anexact multiplicities.The non numericalmultiplicity is duration. Duration/intuition bind together to form a rebuttal to

the dialectic, which locates itself in a false articulation of the real, and then afalse response to that articulation.

3.2

11


12/26

What is the role that speed plays in this constitution of memory in the

virtual? For Bergson the delay in time, the actual neural delay, sets up theinstrumentality of memory, putting it into duration. I am interested in this in

that the computer invokes an increase in speed in terms of certainspecialized computing tasks- and in the sorting and archiving of information.

So speed plays a role in transforming structures- as in the vertebrate whichfolds itself in half so rapidly that it acquires the territory of the cuttlefish.

This is what Foucault is touching on when he isolates speed, territory andcommunication as the three great variables of modern space. Before

tackling the political significance of territory and communication, though, Iwould like to look again at the relation of speed to time and memory.

3.2.1

Bernard Steigler, a participant in the Electrotecture conference last year,makes two points of interest to us here. In the course of suggesting thatspeed may well be older than time, and considering the technological

reasons at play in this idea, he suggests that in virtuality we question therecasting of the boundaries between the real and fictive:

'If we say that speed is older than space and time, then from theNietzschean point of view this leads to an erasure of the difference not onlybetween fiction and reality but also the organic and the nonorganic. This is acrucial concept for Nietzsche, particularly in terms of this notion ofselectivity and the struggle for existence.'

As we have developed above, the subject exists in an imperfect composite

of perception and recollection, one always superimposed on the other.Steigler deals with a particular inflection of memory- he says 'I subscribe toDerrida's term retentional finitude, which ...means that our memory, whichsince Hegel has been thought as interim or interiorized memory, is in factbased on objective or external memory. 'Steigler cites Borges' story Funes,the Memorious, as an example of memory related to forgetting and

selection, thus '(posing) ...the Nietzschean question of memory.'This tiesthe relation of power and the will to the idea '...that Nietzsche's elaborationof power is actually based on a technological understanding of selection.'Therefore, '... time (like space) cannot be thought except in relation to

speed (which remains unthought).' [these quotes from ANY #3,Electrotecture ] The significance for us in these questions lies mainly inSteigler's questioning the operative limits of the real and the fictive, and the

explicit tie to the instrumentality of speed upon the 'computerized' mind.

Note also that the temporal dimension suffers an attenuation along theevolution that moves from real time vocal interaction, to much slower,

textual interaction in printed matter (if in fact there is any interaction)--

12


13/26

back to real time interaction with the telephone; arriving at potentially real-

time but completely non interactive media, with the radio and the television.Finally we encounter the speed of games like Marathon, or the WWW, which

invoke very different forms of the dialogic.

These speeds demand a thinking through of the perceptual boundaries thatinflect our definitions of the dialogic. The Internet steps into a new position,

as it allows real time text communication, voice, image; and in a format thatresists (currently) the canalizations that pouvoir imposes upon the current

mass media.

4.0 INSTRUMENTALITIES/PROJECTS

is a small catalog and analysis of certain

instrumentalities, and projects I have worked

4.11 The archive/sorting

One of the first instrumentalities thatsuggests itself for examination in the computathe extension of memory previously initiated b

notion of the archival quality of the computer we see the function of the computer as a virtu

externalized form.Specific to the concerns of this paper as well are the ways to facilitate the

organization of information. During the preparation of this essay, Iassembled hundreds of pages of notes, previous writings, and downloads of

texts off the Internet. To remember all this information would be almostimpossible, for anyone but an idiot savant; to remember it and sort it

requires a technology. Previous technologies might have been textual,functioning purely as an archive. However, now the archive has become

activated through the hypertext links that can be formed within it. Thisessay was composed in Storyspace, a program used to compile all the text

into a series of slightly differentiated fields; I then used a feature of theprogram called the 'Path Builder' to ferret out links from word to word.

Thus I can follow a path with a label like speed through hundreds of pages,and in so doing, leave a map behind. So, although I outined the text in a

conventional manner, within storyspace, much 'content' was gathered byfollowing paths pertinent to each element of the outline. The next step in

this process will be to distribute this text to a group of individuals forcomment, so they may add a series of links throughout the 'space' formed

within the application. In this final stage the essay is posted as a hypertext

13


14/26

document on the World wide web, with

links to other documents worldwide. The procand collaboration has thus been accelerated d

performance of memory is changed as well, asBergson is currently replaced by card catalog-

Webcrawler on the WWW. This is a temporaryand soon 3D spaces of information will come t

realtime Net based VR begin to produce resultthe cognitive/intuitive spatial map offered by

The Net is transforming as well the idea

of the archive, as one can conduct research oThis ubiquitous deployment has enormous imp

understand our relation to memory- scientific,question is raised- are we now configured- even constituted- as subjects within theimportantly, as the key theme of this essay- when were we ever NOT

configured by a virtual assemblage?

4.12 Computer GraphicsIn the realm of Computer graphics and CAD the way the computer operator

is integrated in the virtual space through the technique of the movingsection becomes a key element to a transformative media.. In CAD, one

might use a static section to describe a project for construction, or in certaindevelopment stages; but to visualize/experience the space, one moves,

walks, or flies through it. This moving section invests the user of thecomputer with an understanding of the spatial configuration that would be

hard to obtain through static tools. In addition, one may study the buildingas a dynamic entity in space and light, or even attempt to analyze its

presence dynamically in regards to program.

There is a paradigm shift at work here that has the potential to change theway we think about architecture. Worthy of note is the fact that many of the

software packages that we now use to design and simulate space, and whichwere developed originally for the film industry (SoftImage, Alias, Wavefront)now have capabilities to run physics simulations. As Greg Lynn recently

observed to me, there is even a quality of form that one might obtain from

these softwares which differs between packages which focus on cadd/cam(Autocad), ones that describe objects in space in a more surface and splineoriented matter (Alias) or that describe object motion according to Fcurves

which are precisely editable (SoftImage).

4.2 ProjectsThe projects follow a evolutionary order of development, in terms of their

involvement with duration and virtuality.

14


15/26

4.21 WHETHER CONDITIONS: institute foDaly and I were CGI artists and designers with

Studio AEM for this project. We began with a s3D cartesian space. From within the perspecti

the grids using splines. These splines were faitell which plane of 3 space they were in; there

image we were looking at on screen, with the forming in. To quote Stephen Perrella's descri

Design decisions are weakly determinedby resonance and effects occurring within speand beyond the sphere of the project. Intentiodevelopment of form. In the Institute, the pro

programs of contemporary market driven information culture.

These splines were then skinned, and

we moved through them, searching for places that might become space.The institute now consisted of three overlapping objects, one glass, one

metal, and one a coruscating LCD display screen that Sean created out ofa map of digital phone lines. This movement through the 'objects' was akin to a dig

the interior areas of the institute were completely dark until we moved lightsources in to reveal the space.

4.22 SUPERSTRUCTURE

Another competition completed with Studio AEM. The project was about asfast track as one can get; modeled and rendered on a Sunday afternoon, it

was at fed ex the next evening, after a long night working on the boardlayout with Kunio Kudo. This degree of speed was in keeping with the

agenda of the project. Earlier Perrella and I had discussed the theoreticalintent of the project; I then developed the computer models and rendered

them from a sketch he faxed me Sunday morning. The theoretical agenda is

15


16/26

best represented by our text on the board, which I quote from here.

The hyper-surface superstructure of a virtual corporation headquartersinvestigates future intersubjective relations as they are transfigured intonew forms of human settlement in the age of information...The virtual

corporation diagrams a space between print publishing (two dimensions)and architecture (three dimensions). Within this dimensional framework, anelectronic net bridges informational modalities into a hypertext surface.Service modules within the headquarters electronic furoshiki incorporateprint and electronic publishing, interactive media such as CD-ROM, CD-Interactive, video and interactive television, animation, computer-aideddesign and modeling, and architecture...The entire event-apparatus of thevirtual corporation functions as a hypertext surface where subjectivities aretransformed into the digital flux of a disseminating electronic skin/surface....This endless digital fabric may also be understood as the skin ofthe 21st-century cyborg the seam between human existence andinformation technology.

4.23 CARDIFF BAY OPERA HOUSEsee Greg Lynn's Textin Basilisk 1.1 for a complete project descriptiCompleted with Greg

L ynnForm, this projectbegan with an analysis of the site coastline around Cardiff at severa

branching oval system, which was used as a new profile of major abranches. The structural fins were developed as well from branching

extracted from formal and programmatic configurations on the site.when the program deployment had been partially worked out, we m

verify certain design moves that were being made on paper.

Ultimately most of the design was completed in a moretraditional manner, but we produced a stereolithographic model fro

files, as well as these renderings and a short animation that made iboards as a Muybridge-esque motion study.

4.24 YOKOHAMA Port Terminal

This project began with an analysis of the site programmatically and interms of the three or four cruise ships the pier was to handle. This set ofrequirements inflected the initial circulation diagrams. From this point on the

project alternated between a virtual and a paper development. Greg Lynn

16


17/26

modeled some conceptual diagrams and then began inflecting them

according to a notion of inversions and program pressures. These inflectedforms were brought into Softimage and rendered, using stills and animations

to bring the moving section into play in the design process.

These forms took on a particular quality in terms of the specificinstrumentality of the program (Microstation) that Greg was generating

them in; there were peculiarities to the duplication process that producedwhat we termed 'Blebs' at points of folding in the program and urban

surface. We opportunistically used these blebs as they had a direct relationto the program intensities that were informing their genesis. The project

was resolved then on paper in the production of line drawings, using thecomputer plans and section elevations as underlays. At the same time I was

developing a set of perspectives and elevations in Softimage using the formsthat Greg had developed in Microstation. The final boards were acombination of hand drawn line work and Softimage generated CGI

elevations, plans and perspectives.

4.25 Operative Voids/Derives

-the project

Begun several years ago with Gregg Pasquarelli, operative voids is an urbananalysis project that developed out of a seminar Gregg and I took with Alex

Wall and Stefano DeMartino at the Columbia Graduate School ofArchitecture. This continuing project utilizes research, mapping and urban

drawings that seek to understand operative fields, through an investigationthat suggests conclusions about the relationship between enunciative

(significant) and machinic (operative) assemblages in the city. 'Operative'architecture is activated by a recombination of understood typologies that

are organized in varying ways to allow for the development of newconditions. The analysis and mapping of the urban environment must avoid

sinking into simple representation and investigate the repercussion oftransformations of programmatic and passionate relationships, thus drawingconclusions about possible reconfigurations of architecture as a machinic/

operative assembly which is complicit in the scripting of subjectivities.

We use the derive as an analytic tool which, when employed in conjunctionwith a computer system and model of the urban spaces being traversed,

allows an understanding of the dynamics of operative relations within thecity. By utilizing a parallel process between the virtual space that has been

constructed within the machine, and actual derives within New York, andcolliding the experience and results, we have begun to identify qualitative

changes and develop an abstract model that usefully articulates the

17


18/26

operative nature of the urban environment. This process takes place by

photographing and filming during the derive, modeling extensive portions ofthe city on the computer, mapping intensities and flows both

programmatically, spatially, and electronically and then moving throughthem simultaneously on the computer and in the city via mobile

communications. Photographs, text, and mappings take on an indexicalrelationship to the passage through 'real' space and combine with

isomorphic behavior within the 'virtual' model.

4.26 CUTTLEFISH

-project animations-

An urban intervention at the Trump City site on the west side highway inManhattan. This project developed concurrent with the operative voids

projectThe programme for this project called for a mediation between thespeeds that the west side highway perpetuates, and the very different

velocities that are present in the urban blocks bounded by the highway. Oneof the initiating concepts was the notion of barriers existing on the site, in

part due to the west side highway, that might be happily removed, oraltered. I began with a detailed program analysis of the site, and mapped

the program location, and physical and the programmatic barriers on thesite.

These analyses were then used to deploy programmatic interventions.

A site scheme was developed that attempted to respond bothprogrammatically and formally to issues of speed, communication, the

moving section, and a way of achieving TIMING on a larger urban scale.

The event surface was used as one of several partially abstract models, as amediator of the body, trajectories, the virtual surface, the real urban surface

of the project, and the coruscating architecture.

The initial design move actually took the highway from 96th to Battery Park

city, and collapsed it back on itself to model the kind of circulatory and

programmatic intensity that could occur, and that this site might support.

As a diagram of how the process developed a working model, this sequence

showing Oscar Nitzchke's Maison de Publicite lying down, compressing, andfolding in two like Deleuze and Guattari's cuttlefish demonstrates the

deformation of a more rigid programmatic and formal type. The speed thatthe vertebrate folds in two, Deleuze & Guattari note, is the factor that

determines whether it becomes a cuttlefish.

18


19/26

The project involves the zones moving from highway and water access, andconversely from the city access, in a tangled zone where speeds and

program overlap freely.

Existing program and and its lines of force, use, and intensity were used asa basis for the accretion of form.

The diagram from Nitzchke is used as a schematic for the sectional quality

of the project, which lays a thick surface down on the site- this surfacefacilitates physical connexion between points across the site, on its upper

surface various park and garden spaces pull people across from Lincolncenter and Columbus circle, while in its interior it has an open loft typology

supporting both working, commercial and dwelling space.

Its underbelly becomes the thick facade/ light space of the Maison de

Publicite, which can actually be inhabited, but which also provides a deepsurface above the park and enables circulation zones below at ground level.

The computer was used in this project to intensify the investigation of this

site- work on the operative voids project played into an understanding ofthe site; the site was modeled in detail; and the virtual model was worked

with using a material sensibility that took the form of the west side highwaywith its attendant program elements, bending , folding, and collapsing them

into themselves, to form the cuttlefish. This collapse of form and programsimultaneously in all three dimensions (not merely plan), according to

certain intuited performance parameters, was one of the key concepts of theproject.

4.27 The Unconfigured SubjectTract housing reconsidered

| project animations

'...the body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language anddissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated self (adopting the illusion of asubstantial unity) and a volume in perpetual disintegration. Genealogy, asan analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the bodyand history. It's task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and theprocess of history's destruction of the body... genealogy... seeks toreestablish the various systems of subjection: not the anticipatory power ofmeaning, but the hazardous play of dominations.'

19


20/26

Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Geneaology, History

This quote from Michel Foucault illustrates clearly the notion that the body is

a diagram of the forces exerted upon it: social, economic, political, moral,and ethical. These forces inflect the configuration of the subject through

language, film, social organization, architecture, modes of production, andthe like. It would be contradictory to this idea of 'force' to reduce the

configuration of the subject to merely a set of linguistic parameters-therefore, the notion of habit will be developed as a general term under

which the full scope of the other parameters fall.

Such an ontological system views habit as a force that demands anexamination of it's relationship to perception, form and program. In the

terms this project sets out- an interrogation of the dwelling as one site thathabit manifests itself within, concretely, in an architectural manner, a usefulstarting point was the mapping of a very local movement.

The process of mapping was informed by readings of Kwinter, specifically his

essays in Assemblage dealing with the notion of a system transformationand that transformation's relation to the irruption of forms/chreods; the idea

of a structural stability forming around singularities; and the conclusion thatsome at least provisional identification of those chreods was necessary.

Interestingly in the mapping of certain affects and emotions, Kwinterfocused his analysis on formal/imageistic characteristics within Boccioni's

Stati D'Animetryptych:

"Each panel defines a unique field of unfolding, a section through a distinctepigenetic landscape in which forms exist only in evolution or equilibrium,that is, as event generated diagrams..."

This reading of one kind of performance envelope that Boccioni sets upbrought to mind the notion of the anamorphic program: a program

condition, or more accurately a gradient of perception, which was modeledon a decentered/oblique vision, a hybrid perception, rather than centeredsingle point perspective. The condition of the hyperplane becomes then an

analogue to programmatic anamorphosis, in that the hyperplane maps

diagrammatically the blends that occur in time between one program andanother as we function as perceiving beings. (An example: the hyperplanebetween dreaming, sleeping, reading, and drinking tea.)

From this idea of hyperplane emerged the consideration that the use of

certain appliances in the domestic environment invoked certain perceptualstates, and the movement from appliance to appliance could be more

accurately mapped using the hyperplane model.

20


21/26

Simultaneously came the idea that the notion of the cutup or collage workedas a method to rethink program, due to the limitations that habit imposed

upon the design process. Ernst, due to his aleatoric and collage processes,specifically his collage novels (La Femmes 100 Tetes), emerged as a

jumping off point. His diagrams of reconfigured program in the collagenovels were responded to, and considered as sites for intervention.

The tract house was the site (within the program of dwelling) chosen for

modification and deployment.As a way to problematize habit, and open the project up to unexpected

possibilites, apparently 'fictional' configurations were used as programengines, and the program which emerged became one employing the

reconfigured workplace and reconfigured sites of leisure as a way to linkeach tract house in a possibly heterarchical manner. This larger scaleconsideration was one that moving towards new definitions of work and

play, public and private.

Simultaneously, the intervention at a highly local level was being pusrsued,and the transformation of the appliance became a strategy to create new

basins of attraction within the reconfigured dwelling.

Burroughs' cutup was used as the initial method to arrive at redeploymentof the program and the appliance within the shell of the building, which was

itself the result of a sensibly guided cutup process used on a levittownhouse. The main concept guiding this process is the attractor (cf. chreod

above), which could be a formal element, like the appliance or theboundaries of the space surounding the activity, in relation to the procedural

(the event itself.)

In a return to the analysis that Kwinter unpacked regarding the Boccionitryptych, a technique was developed in Photoshop to investigate

programmatic overlaps. A courtyard house by Mies was scanned in plan,then collaged with extensively reworked areas of a plan by the situationist/unitary urbanist Constant. This collage was then altered using a smearing

technique to explore ways that diagrammatic program, or intensities of

program and activity, might blend through one another. The smearing wasviewed as a loaded abstract expressionist/gestural move; a way to arrive atredeployment. Ultimately this informed a similar 'spatial' smearing that was

used on the earlier iteration of levittown cutups, when a fairly simple 3Dmodel of the levitloft detournement was 'smeared' in section as well as plan.

The final step in the project was a series of rendered animations which

explored as many of the previous techniques as possible in an attempt to

21


22/26

isolate instrumental moments in the process, and the expected result. This

loose idea of specific instrumentality would be determined by an intuitionjudging the probable success or failure of a particular architectural/

programmatic/appliance configuration, or sequence (montage).

In the first of these animations, we move through the levitloft interior- thespatialized cutup plan. This is simply a walkthrough taking us through the

spaces generated by earlier steps.

In the second animation, levitorbit, we find an agitated camera swoopingaround the levitloft house, observing a variety of activities performed by

both unexpected program and individuals, and the buildings themselves.The sky and earth (which may be grass or water) are both elaborately

manipulated by the smearing technique, as the initial animation was alteredextensively, frame by frame, in Photoshop. This smearing links both formal(filmic and rhythmic) elements and program areas as well. Collage

techniques, the cutup, and other methods all make their appearance in thisfinal animation loop, - a situationist/surrealist collage using moving sections

informed by abstract cinema moves (cf. Stan Brakhage's The Dead).

'A central structure to Marx's thought, according to Elaine Scarry, is thereciprocity between object and body- every manufactured object recreatesthe body, and the body itself becomes a kind of manufactured object. In themost primitive subsistence economy, "consumption" amounts to little morethan food to fuel the body & provide for tissue regeneration. As economies

advance, a "production" emerges that merely supplements more bodilyfunctions with material objects: tools extend the hand, clothing augmentsthe skin, and so on. From this perspective, there is no qualitative differencebetween the most elementary consumable object, food, and the mosttechnically sophisticated prosthetics, for they all relate to the body as apermeable, manipulable surface, ingesting, incorporating, and expelling anexpanding range of objects. Yet this open-ended circulation does not occurin some pure and open space; rather, as various bodily functions areextended outside the body, so the spaces of these extensions are embodied,in every sense of the word. '

p 507, Incorporations(ZONE 6)

This quote illustrates the framework for this project. It charts a path

towards Unger's transformative vocation, or Turner's anergic-ludic state, asa final goal- the creation of an architecture that fosters these conditions.

These last two projects, which are ongoing, were begun in studios at the

22


23/26

Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, under Stefano DeMartino and

Alex Wall (cuttlefish), and Jessie Reiser (unconfigured subject).

5.0 MarathonMarathon is a new computer game that runs on the Mac; it is a lot like the

game Doom. There is a cursory narrative structure that has to do withaliens, a spaceship... you've seen it all before. You go in, and take on

Ripley's role as the lead bug killer. Of course, without Sigourney Weaver'spanache, at least at first.

Why am I talking about Marathon in this essay? Several reasons. It is a

close to real time, texture mapped and shadowed environment; one can

move through it with a full 6 degrees of freedom; bump into walls, flipsswitches; and there are others in the space. Two kinds of others: aliens,many types, which are pure constructs; and human standins. In the networkgame, one actually sees an avatar of one's partners in the melee; there is

no facial detail, but, if you want you can talk over the computer'smicrophone, you can watch your partner napalm alien bugs, you can run

past each other and bump into each other.

If that isn't enough, you can even jack into their sensorium; you canexperience space through their eyes.This is an interesting destruction of the

shot /return shot formula, , and a powerfully dialogic detournement of thatfilmic move, in the way that a player can literally place themselves in

the 'other' body of another player in marathon, thus seeing through theeyes of their partner/opponent. A VIRTUALLY DISPLACED GAZE. This

becoming other however goes much beyond the return shot, as it puts onein the avatar of another, as a 'rider' (to use Gibson's term) experiencing

their retinal world, helplessly. This trades the territory of command of one'sown motions through a space, for the territory of co-presence (or

surveillance, as in many cases in the game it may be used as a hostiletactic). Interestingly they can at the same time, if they so wish, ride you...

And then, there is the hack of Marathon. Michael Hanson wrote some codethat allows you to hack any parameter of the Game. The hack is

downloadable freeware off the Internet. You can become invincible (which israther boring...) or, more interestingly, you may specify behavior patterns

for the aliens. Not just what guns they carry, but what flocking behaviorsthey adopt, how likely they are to attack, how likely to tenaciously pursue;

how 'intelligent' they are; and who they consider friend or foe. It is

23


24/26

interesting to make them all enemies of each other- lob a grenade into their

midst and watch the shooting start. Let me show you a few recordings ofthe game.

To just make my point here. I had retinal afterimages for days after I first

played it- and I did play alot. It's a good game. Bcause it involves one in thetraversal of space. In real time.

Who designed the spaceship? Better question: who will design the next set

of spaceships, and set carefullly tweaked aliens free in them to studycirculation patterns; and then the possibility of deploying information- did I

mention that one can periodically jack in and read 'messages' from theship's computer? What if that computer were someone else? And this runs

on a mac IIci? Why aren't architects working with these people? Check outthe hack. And others that already allow one to create spaces.

The dialogic is irrupting in a spectrum of 'media' fostered environs, allvirtual.... I refer of course to the WWW and games like Marathon. This

becomes a realm for the development of a truly dialogic virtuality which weshould not ignore, even if at first glance Marathon seems to be a video

game.

5.1 The World Wide Web (The Dialogic and The Virtual)

The key instrumentality of the WWW is found in its integration of a dialogiccondition, which we can find defined by Bahktin and Enzensberger-- in

relation to it's own use of speed. Enzensberger articulates the elements of atruly communicative media: Decentralized program, each receiver a

potential transmitter, mobilization of the masses, interaction of thoseinvolved, feedback, a political learning process, collective production, social

control by self organization.

Speed as we have noted is a gateway under certain conditions to duration,and in this case a radically communicative realization of the virtual. I followDon Langham in his outline of the progressive developments of media:

the advent of speech, allowed communication at a speed approximating thatof human thought. Writing... is slower than speech, but is powerfulnonetheless for its ability to make speech dependent upon the speaker orthe memory of the hearers ...the widespread use of moveabletype...brought about a revolution not in the way people communicate, butrather in the way they conceive the world. Now, at the end of themillennium, we have what Harnad calls "electronic skywriting"--the "fourthcognitive revolution". In this revolution, writing will allow us to communicate

24


25/26

with speeds approaching that of speech, which is much closer to the speedof thought than other communication media.from The Common Place MOO: Orality and Literacy in Virtual Reality

by Don Langham ([email protected])

On the WWW text is only one part of a wide bandwidth communicativeenvironment that embraces images, sounds, and the moving image as well.

This brings back the question, following Bernard. Steigler's work, whetherthe deployment cybernetically of our memories is a vitiation of ourselves. To

adequately address this problem we must also consider his thesis that wehave never been deployed across any plane except one outside of

ourselves...

The lineage of technologies moving from speech (or perhaps witharchitecture as an inchoate form), to writing, then printing, the telegraph,the telephone, radio, film, and the television develops a set of behavior

patterns in relationship to pouvoir, (in contrast to puissance, which is aliberating, doubly affirmative sovereignty) and insists upon a transmitter

receiver model in its most proliferated form, the book/ radio/television/film.The 'narrative' sequences thus structured, which reflect the intentions of

pouvoir in various forms, have little to do with communicative media asdefined by Enzensberger.

5.2 (Dialogic fields or revolution.....)The Internet's origins were military in nature, thus invoking a particular kind

of pouvoir. But note also that packet transmissions, designed to reach theirdestination and reassemble themselves, regardless of the path to their

destination- bring to mind a different notion of the war machine: 'Thisanalysis of the two assemblages and their coefficients demonstrates that thewar machine does not in itself have war for its object, but necessarily adoptsit as it object when it allows itself to be appropriated by the stateapparatus.'p513, 1000 Plateaus, Deleuze & Guattari

5.3 In conclusion I will return to Foucault's three great variables of modern

space -speed territory communication. Each of these variables is retheorized

within the descriptions of the virtual that we have outlined above. A radicalcynic like Baudrillard might consider much of the liberating potential I havedescribed in the Internet to be temporary, as multinationals are currently

taking great interest in the Net as a market. Marathon might escape himentirely- purely a meaningless pastime within a spectacular culture. I

disagree. They are analagous to urban void spaces- A place for heterarchicalprogram to boil forth- savage high plains.

25


26/26

In fact, the world wide web is much more savage than Marathon, though

Marathon might seem more explicitly violent. There are similarities betweena diagrammatic understanding of the web- nodes with great empty space

between- and the urban void- explicit reified program surrounding anindeterminate zone. As well, there is a blending in the multiprogrammatic-

be it in terms of architecture, subjectivity, or the Net- which sees playmerging with work.

Turner identifies a condition in social transitions- rituals- which is important

to note here. He describes a socially reintegrative path of ritualtransformation as a liminal path- and calls it ergic ludic, as it reinserts the

subject into a social order. However, the path termed the anergic ludic is agame playing path that does NOT reintegrate, that does not work, per se,

but plays, and that sees the general condition of society as a problem, notas a datum. In the current form of the Net each individual can establishthemselves as intellectual, artistic and economic entities- with a sovereignty

that will radically alter the reach of the individual and change the way thatthe industrial revolution imparted a set of demands on the laborer.

The virtual is the site where puissance and pouvoir ripple through each

other. Our subjectivities develop themselves through the intersection of thevirtual (memory) and the 'real' (matter). It is important to understand,

foster, and develop the current dialogic condition of cyberspace, as in itsmodel we may find perhaps the greatest opportunity for humanity to step

into a radical ethics, politics, and morality.

-Ed Keller

1995

Documents

Cinematic Thresholds