Remixing Mystory

My guiding instruction for my final poetics posts actually comes from my Julien section.

“The general who wants to win the battle and the painter who wants to capture the landscape must not acquiesce their inner desire and force it upon the world, rather they must observe the tendency of the world itself and locate the points at which the world’s tendencies converge with their own.”

Essentially, don’t try to control the production of felts, but rather wait to receive them. This point coincides with the final point from the first post of my poetics using the topic modeling software: electracy is interested in the unconscious fluidity of experience.

Intersperse moving and still images in your experiment because each genre conveys a unique relationship to time. In addition, don’t try to control the flow of events in a filmic felt as you won’t really know what you have made until it is finished and you notice how the disparate moments you originally focused on have been reconstituted by their relationship to the whole film.

Although we have focused mostly on visual felts throughout the semester, I don’t see a reason why we can’t use audio in our production of felts considering that music is perhaps the most visceral form of artistic expression and one that we also happen to share with other animals.

From this, I am going to produce a short video/photo montage experimenting with some of the slow motion techniques mentioned in The Cinematic as I circulate back and forth between the temporal registers of still and moving images. In this way I hope to hold true to my instruction that “there is something of the still that is only discernible in its relation to the moving.”

Since it is important to “observe the tendency of the world itself” for this part of the experiment, I will spend most of my time in the editing phase so I can test out a variety of compositions and note the serendipitous juxtapositions that arise from the technology itself. I’m not sure what images to use for this project. Perhaps the Community and Career sections, using moving images for Career and still images for Community which might work to formally reflect my conception of these aspects of my life. My career is moving forward, constantly changing and adapting to circumstance while my community remains the same, in the past.

Toward Techniques of Flippant Precision

My last set of instructions from The Cinematic is a bit more difficult to condense into a single idea because they are more technical in nature. I suppose my best attempt at a single instruction would be: have an attitude of flippant precision in capturing images of the particular event, technique, felt, or object you are focusing on. Hopefully this instruction will become less vague as the post continues.

In his essay “Images a la sauvette,” Henri Cartier-Bresson navigates the border between genuine “picture stories” and contrived compositions, citing the former as that collection of images which “can strike sparks from a subject” (43). For Cartier-Bresson, the role of movement is vital to the creation of a picture-story because “you cannot be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving.” Unlike the static, analytical method of literacy, electracy flows according to the logic of its object. Similar to shi, you have to position yourself in accordance with the dynamics of the situation as it presents itself to you. Be flippant about your control over the representation, just be precise in maintaining this element of flippancy.

Similarly, Cartier-Bresson mentions that in the creation of a picture-story (the “spark” for the subject, the punctum, objet a, etc.) one must resist the urge to overshoot as this will “clutter your memory and spoil the exactness of the reportage as a whole” (44). This is an especially important point to keep in mind in our era of practically unlimited image taking and archiving capacity. Don’t leave all of your editing until later; discriminate during the creation process itself. Also, Bresson invites us to integrate text into our images as well, since captioning can “illuminate whatever relevant thing it may have been beyond the power of camera to reach” (46).

Gaensheimer writes about a six-minute film called Gellert that might serve as a good model for our experiment. The film is simply a montage of photographs all taken within the same hour combined with a continuous stream of audio from the event. The effect of the still images and streaming audio collapses the temporal barrier between past of the image and the present of the audio to the point that “what was, what is, and what will be merge smoothly with one another” (76).

This experiment could even be accomplished with images and audio found online. This experiment would be mostly flippant in selecting the materials; the precision comes into play in the final product, or that reified moment of hitting the play button and watching the object organically unfold. Blake Stimson refers to this (post)process in his essay “The Pivot of the World” as “entering into a dynamic relationship that gives its truth only in the process of its unfolding” (94).

As a final note from the Stimson essay (and the collection as a whole), I would like to drive home the point that you should intersperse moving and still images in your experiment since each genre conveys a unique relationship to time. Stimson astutely points out that film is actually much more limited in its representation of time because it homogenizes time into a “false synaesthetic naturalism” which sacrifices the atemporal abstraction offered by photography. The question to propel my next series of posts on my electrate poetics would then be: how can I capitalize on this unique perceptual experience offered by the combination of still and moving images in the creation of my felts?