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SINAN IMRETHESIS 1PARSONSLUKE BULMANFALL 2011

René Maigritte. La Reproduction Interdite. Oil on Canvas. 1937

SINAN IMRETHESIS 1PARSONSLUKE BULMANFALL 2011 2

THE BEGINNING



In the course of this discussion the reader will have felt certain doubts arising in his mind; and he must now have an opportunity of collect-ing them and bringing them forward.It may be true that the uncanny [unheimlich] is something which is secretly familiar [heimlich-heimisch], which has undergone repression and then returned from it, and that everything that is uncanny fulfils this condition. But the selection of material on this basis does not enable us to solve the problem of the uncanny. For our proposition is clearly not convertible. Not everything that fulfils this condition — not everything that recalls repressed desires and surmounted modes of thinking belonging to the prehistory of the individual and of the race — is on that account uncanny.Nor shall we conceal the fact that for almost every example adduced in support of our hypothesis one may be found which rebuts it. The story of the severed hand in Hauff’s fairy tale [p. 244] certainly has an uncanny effect, and we have traced that effect back to the castration complex; but most readers will probably agree with me in judging that no trace of uncanniness is provoked by Herodotus’s story of the treasure of Phampsinitus, in which the master-thief, whom the prin-cess tries to hold fast by the hand, leaves his brother’s severed hand behind with her instead. Again, the prompt fulfilment of the wishes of Polycrates [p. 239] undoubtedly affects us in the same uncanny way as it did the king of Egypt; yet our own fairy stories are crammed with instantaneous wish-fulfilments which produce no uncanny effect whatever. In the story of ‘The Three Wishes’, the woman is tempted by the savoury smell of a sausage to wish that she might have one too, and in an instant it lies on a plate before her. In his annoyance at her hastiness her husband wishes it may hang on her nose. And there it is, dangling from her nose. All this is very striking but not in the least uncanny. Fairy tales quite frankly adopt the animistic stand-point of the omnipotence of thoughts and wishes, and yet I cannot think of any genuine fairy story which has anything uncanny about it. We have heard that it is in the highest degree uncanny when an inanimate object — a picture or a doll — comes to life; neverthe-less in Hans Andersen’s stories the household utensils, furniture and tin soldiers are alive, yet nothing could well be more remote from the uncanny. And we should hardly call it uncanny when Pygmalion’s beautiful statue comes to life.Apparent death and the re-animation of the dead have been repre-sented as most uncanny themes. But things of this sort too are very common in fairy stories. Who would be so bold as to call it uncanny, for instance, when Snow-White opens her eyes once more? And the resuscitation of the dead in accounts of miracles, as in the New Testa-ment, elicits feelings quite unrelated to the uncanny. Then, too, the theme that achieves such an indubitably uncanny effect, the unin-tended recurrence of the same thing, serves other and quite different purposes in another class of cases. We have already come across one example in which it is employed to call up a feeling of the comic; and we could multiply instances of this kind. Or again, it works as a means of emphasis, and so on. And once more: what is the origin of the uncanny effect of silence, darkness and solitude?


THEORIES AND PHILOSOPHIES

Paul Virilio’s treatise The Aesthetics of Disappearance -- more virtuosic meditation than traditional scholarship -- considers the motivations and repercussions of a contemporary society fascinated by speed. Speed, or velocity, is understood literally as space (distance) mapped against time (duration), reaching its absolute limit in light, which col-lapses both space and time. Indeed, Virilio is attuned precisely to the culturally correlated obsession with moving (driving, flying, riding) at high speeds and viewing (watching) moving (light) images. At this limit, light (absolute speed) dissolves the implicit dualism suspended between these phenomena, that of embodied motion and that of disembodied stimulus, anticipating a neuro-psychological event ef-fectuated by the simultaneous or synchronic discharge of neurons to the brain resulting in an epileptic, or, in Virilio’s terms, picnoleptic, seizure. Such lapses are quite common in maturing children whose developing psychic mechanisms are often momentarily incapable of assimilating the prevailing contingency of outside experience, and in adults during their waking moments -- Virilio’s example, which opens the book, is of dropping one’s morning coffee, a lapse in conscious-ness for which one is fundamentally unaccountable. Crucial to these two moments, each operating synecdochly, is their structural place at the point of passage between radical binaries: unconscious sleep and conscious awareness; unconscious infancy and conscious adulthood. Speed, then, by inducing such sensory overload, supplants the project of reason (mature consciousness) by eliding observable difference, situating the observer in a perch between things -- between binaries -- the observer himself marked, en passant, as indifferent. Indeed, the world sped up (or the world from the vantage of speed) is expe-rienced as multiplicitous variety irreducible to diachronic singularity or topographical proximity, history, discourse, context, obfuscated for the experience of pure, undifferentiated surface: light.

Entwined with this psychological narrative is a socio-political narra-tive, one that Virilio articulates as a direct relationship between speed and power: a speed that affects invisibility, and an invisibility that affects power. In a moving discussion of the American media mogul Howard Hughes -- Citizen Kane himself -- Virilio notes that for the last quarter of his life Hughes, having pursued traditional avenues of wealth and having indeed accumulated quite a fortune, became a recluse of a particular sort of reclusion predicated on conjuring an inertia via speed. Faced with his impending death and haunted by the seeming transience of his material fortune, Hughes attempted a cer-tain spatio-temporal simultaneity, parking the same unused cars and airplanes at airports across country, watching from his bed the same films again and again, and, in 1938, breaking the world air record for circumnavigating the world and then parking his triumphant airplane in the precise place it had stood before he had departed. In enact-ing such loops, Hughes effects a certain omnipresent banality -- the sentiment of inertia -- the effect of remaining same across time and space. In the obsession with speed that occupies the latter portion of Hughes’ life Virilio argues that the real object of Hughes’ desire is not speed but rather an absolute power, a power as much over ones own physical mortality as over other people.


In his essay on philosophical archaeology, Agamben casts archaeology as the science which exposes the paradoxes of the logic of presupposition and exclusion. Unlike Kant, whose philosophical archaeology merely reproduces this logic, Agamben thinks Foucault acknowledges the gap between “a heterogenous stratum that is not placed in the position of a chronological origin” and something “qualitatively other,” which establishes the relation between what is excluded from that order as heterogenous and what is included within the order of knowledge. This gap is constitutive for archaeology, according to Agamben, because it renders that which is included intelligible and establishes its credentials as knowledge. Instead of presenting this knowledge as essential and necessary, however, Agamben claims that Foucault’s archaeology establishes the distinction between knowledge and its presupposed yet excluded other “in order to work on it, deconstruct it, and detail it to the point where it gradually erodes, losing its originary status.”

What is central to archaeology, for Agamben, is “the movement of freedom” that Foucault attributes to dreams and the imagination in his ‘Preface’ to Binswanger’s Dream and Existence. Foucault had praised Binswinger for recognizing the “poetic”function of dreams and the imagination, rather than emphasizing their role in wish fulfillment, as Freud had done. The “movement of freedom” to which Agamben refers is this imaginative “poetics.” Instead of proposing an objective account of the past “as it was,” Agamben thinks Foucault’s archaeology exercises its “freedom” and its “poetic” license, conjuring up an image of the past, which it then proceeds to deconstruct.Through this movement, Agamben suggests, archaeology exposes the past as a projection of the present, which contains the present within itself. This in turn reveals the image of the past to be a history of the present, because it shows how the present recreates itself as the “future anterior” of the past.

By making the past the origin of the present order, while simultaneously excluding the past as “other” than that order, the present secures a beginning for itself and saves that beginning from critical scrutiny. The origin of the past is simply the “will have been” of the present, whose image is “derealized” by archaeological excavations.Recognizing the logic of inclusion and exclusion at work in our image of the past allows us to free ourselves from the fantasy that the set of inclusions and exclusions that order our lives are somehow the “archaic” origin of our present reality. Far from being an inheritance which we must carry into the future, archaeology presents the past as a work of fiction, something which is literally “made up.”We may study the past and play with the distinctions projected into the past by the present, but we are under no obligation to regard them as essential and original features of our individual and collective modes of existence. This, I think, is the concrete meaning of redemption for Agamben, because it “unworks” the distinctions that organize our lives and our political institutions, and gives us the freedom to create new forms of life.


Any anomally within a system forces the participants within that system to question and doubt its workings. Such anomallies can be used to taunt one’s perception of reality and presence within that reality. If an apple falls from a tree, and for a moment, remains suspended in the air before resuming its descent, this will show a fault in a generally accepted perception of reality, thus, allowing one to expand his understanding of the construction of the worldaround him.

Any anomally within a system forces the participants within that system to question and doubt its workings. Such anomallies can be used to taunt one’s perception of reality and presence within that reality. If an apple falls from a tree, and for a moment, remains suspended in the air before resuming its descent, this will show a fault in a generally accepted perception of reality, thus, allowing one to expand his understanding of the construction of the worldaround him.


The senses deceive. Thus, our existence — more appropriately,

presence — must be established through our relationship

with space and time. The present is but a moment; it can

never be grasped. Interpreting it is forever destined to be

an attempt. Every interpretation of the present is in fact an

interpretation of the past, and the past is always a projection

of time towards the present. The future too is like this.

Past and future are both projections into the present. The

more distant the past we attempt to remember, the more

constructed this memory becomes.

Yet even this unstable relationship between past, present,

and future constitutes a more trustworthy comprehension

of existence than sensorial experience. Our present is always

defined in terms of a relationship to the recent past and the

near future, by remembering what we have just done and

imagining what we are about to do. These projections of

the past and the future are dislocations of imagined spaces

within time. (FIG. 1)

I will take advantage of the insufficiency of sensorial

experience. I will exploit its deceptive nature. I will as well

disrupt the relationship of the self with space and time. There

are methods for doing this, which I will explore and use to

disrupt the viewer’s established presence.

Our brain negotiates the product of our senses all the time.

It is a defense mechanism; an indication of the innate fear

of humans to fear, pain, and change. A soldier may get a

limb blown off and not feel a thing. In shock, the brain will

block out pain. One may stare at the sun and upon entering

a darker space, one will see the world much darker than it

actually is. There is discrepancy between the rate at which

events occur and the rate at which we adjust ourselves to

these occurrences.

I will create such instances, where our mental construction of

the world through our senses becomes distorted.

In relation to space and time, I will shut the windows that

look onto the recent past and the near future. Time will be

distorted, and objects within time will be distorted with it.

A pendulum, perhaps, will have an irregular swing, stopping

at a diagonal for a moment, before continuing. A mirror in

which the reflection of the viewer is delayed, distorted.

There are countless ways to create this separation of the self

completely from space, time, and sensorial experience. I will

make uncanny the mundane experiences of the everyday. I

will bring to surface the unfamiliarity of the familiar world we

continuously construct for ourselves moment after moment.


SYNTHESIS

PRESENT

FUTURE

PAST

The present is defined bythe constant renegotiation of this distance in

time.

FIG. 1


The satricial novel by Abbott not only acknowledges the limitations of the dualistic nature of the world, it in fact offers multiple alternatives to it. To the two worlds of one and two dimensions, Abbott introduces a new world — the world of three-dimenstionality. He then describes in the detail the social inplications of transferring from one to the other. These social implications do not interest me much at the moment, but are important in exploring a fantastical personal struggle in experiencing and implementing a paradigm shift.

Louis Wain was a fine artist who suffered from schizophrenia. He was obsessed with drawing cats even in his earlier, more mentally stable years. This is one of the prime examples of mental disorder manifesting itself in art and the artist’s work. Schizophrenia is not a gradual shift from the conscious to the completely fabricated subconscious. In more severe forms like this, it is instead a constant fluctuation between the two states, allowing the patient to never grasp either one. This is a hostile takeover by the subconscious, and the world it fabricates becomes the reality of the patient. In Virilo’s terms, it would a constant state of picnolepsy, a gap in time that the conscious never synthesizes.

Edwin Abbott, Flatland

1884 1917 - 1939

Louis Wain, Series of Cat Drawings


PRECEDENTS IN THE LAST CENTURY

1930

This installation cleverly exploits the veiwer’s two-eyed nature to haunting metaphysical ends. The two ‘chambers’ when looked at from the right angle eliminate the image of the viewer, accomplishing Smithson’s task of “eliminating the consciousness that regulates binary vision.” The expected experience of this piece is very straighforward, but by distorting this expectation, Smithson is aware of the anticipations of the viewer.

This mature Mondrian reflects a stage in his life when he established what he thought was a universal, utopian new language. This language, for Mondrian, is a language of equilibrium between opposing factors. Perhaps this is the closest fine art has come (during the time of its creation it certainly was) to Agamben’s definition of love of both sides of a dichotomy. Mondrian believes not in the absolute establishment of a line between opposing factors, but a constant renegotiation of it between both sides of a dichotomy.

1964

Robert Smithson, Enantiomorphic Chambers

Piet Mondrian, Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow


Robert Irwin’s exploration of perception of space is evident in this piece. By distorting the viewer’s understanding of the space between him/her, the piece, and the wall behind the piece, Irwin gives the impression that the space surrounding the viewer is constantly shifting. For a moment, the sensorial experience of the piece is convoluted and incomprehensible to the viewer.

Carlos Castaneda was was Westerner who lived with the Yaqui Indian Sorcerer, don Juan Matus, where he learned of Shamanism and its metaphysical goals. Castaneda’s journey gave him the ability to transfer himself into alternate mind states where the conscious, subconscious and the unconscious exist not as separate states but as one unified presence. This could be seen as the alternative to the duality that shapes life (good - evil, black - white, heaven - hell, conscious - unconscious, etc.) that Girogio Agamben talks about, and equates to indifference and to absolute love — love and indifference for both sides of this duality. Castaneda’s experience skims the border between sanity and insanty, yet he finds a way to grab hold and acknowledge in a meditative way what most would consider surreal and abnormal.

1968 1968

Carlos Castaneda,The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge Robert Irwin, Untitled


The character Dr. Manhattan goes through a radioactive accident, and in the first post-accident stages, exists only as consciouness without a body. His consciousness then fabricates a body for it to reside in, and with his new powers, Dr. Manhattan has the power to bend time mentally, and traverse great distances by bending space. He has no subconscious, as his memory always resides in his conscious mind. He never fogets, and he knows of the future, thus existing, in a sense, outside of time. Potentially he has experienced all past and future.

Marker’s film pushes the boundries of traditional documentray filmmaking. It exploits the problem of memory that I am in part dealing with in my project. Marker’s ‘critique’ of memory is that it is inable to reconstruct events from the past. Thus, Marker argues that perception, personal history and collective memory is always fabricated — a myth loosely based on the fact.

19861983

Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, John HigginsDr. Manhattan (from the Watchmen series)Chris Marker, Sans Soleil


Beyond traces the short story of a group of kids who find an escape out of the dichotomy of the ‘real’ world by finding a series of glitches in the pysics and systems of this world. Through a series of self initiated and intuitive experiments, these kids formulate their own understanding of the new world they realize they have been living in.

Glitch art, in general, exploits the anomalies in seemingly organized and systematic processes. Such anomalies are useful tools in subtly exploiting the seemingly transparent faults of established systems. In this case, this system is digital imaging media. In my case, this system becomes logic and reason.

2003 Unknown

Koji MorimotoBeyond (from The Animatrix) Unknown


My interpretation and experience of the concepts.

Allows the viewer to be critical and analytical of the concepts. Instead of experiencing them, they interpret my own experiences of them. A second hand experience.

The viewer in part is analytical of me as a person when he/she interprets my understanding and experience of the concepts.

The feeling is created in the artist, and is expressed through the piece.

REPRESENTATIONAL / PERSONAL


TWO DIRECTIONS

Similar to La Reproduction Interdite Revisited.

Allows the viewer to experience the concept as opposed to interpreting or analyzing it.

Universal: the piece can have a similar effect on a wide range of viewers. There is less of the ‘artist’s touch.’

Better use of the uncanny.

The feeling is created in the viewer.

EXPERIENTIAL / UNIVERSAL


The pendulum swings in slow motion or at an irregular rate. Thus, this uncanny experience seems to distort the laws of physics and urges the viewer to question the workings of his surroundings. Secondly, by distorting its own swinging rate in time, it distorts to viewer’s perception of relative time. For example, if the pendulum swings in slow motion, it could be the fact that it is in fact the viewer that is moving very fast.


FIRST PROTOTYPE

These two images are stills from a video experiment. A single screen displays a close-up of someone’s mouth, who is reciting the alphabet. Depending on the the viewer’s position and movement within the space, the audio and video tracks change independently (for example from the first image to the second one) to other close-ups of different people doing the same thing. Thus, the audio and video never belong to the same person, and eventually even start to layer on top of one another, and strange things start to happen like two voices coming from one mouth. Essentially, the piece accentuates the gaps we experience and immediately forget in our seemingly continuous experience of the world.


SECOND PROTOTYPE

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[email protected]@newschool.eduSINAN IMRETHESIS 1PARSONSLUKE BULMANFALL 2011 20

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