Virtual Punctums

For my next few posts, I want to push my instructions for my experiment further into the electrate realm by positing more specific techniques to try out for my project while referring to the data gathered from the first two posts of my poetics.

One of my favorite quotes from my Prezi mapping is “represent the objet petit a by creating circuitous images of displacement while keeping in mind that to ‘get at’ what is ‘not-get-at-able’ you do not actually ‘get’ there, you can only circle it.”

I think this would be a great conceptual starting point for creating some augmented reality images using Aurasma. By overlaying virtual images onto physical images I could formally enact the “not get at able” and use the photos that I created in mystory as the visual material for these virtual (unconscious) images.  

To keep this project from depending too much on technological gimmickry, I need to find images that generate a punctum, overlaying these onto less engaging and/or staged (dead) photos such as portraits.

A good place to look for punctual images (at least for me) is my photos folder, which contains a large amount images that I have seen countless times and immediately call forth a particular feeling from that time in my life. Maybe set your screensaver to slideshow mode and watch the images pass before you randomly, noting ones that create a punctum.

Because Aurasma allows you to link the virtual images, I could also link to particular sections of mystory, thus creating a circle back to the first part of the project and rereading it in terms of the material gathered in the second part.

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?

Locating Desire(s)

In his lecture on painting, Lacan spends a few moments regressing on the “value of artistic creation.” Starting from Freud, Lacan mentions the impossibility of locating an objective substance that undergirds art or even a criteria through which such value could be tracked down. When analyzing a painting, Freud focused on “the function that the original artist’s phantasy played in his creation,” a rather concise definition of the typical role that psychoanalysis plays in film and literary theory, and which Lacan notes “always produces a shocked reaction on the part of the listener” (109). Conversely, Lacan wants to approach art less in terms of its subjective relationship to the individual creator/viewer and more in terms of its collective relationship within a social structure.

As discussed in my last post, this is a move from essence (which I read here as intention) to function (relations). In prefacing his main claim, Lacan is quick to note the analytical difficulty in locating causal links within an area of culture as overwrought as artistic production. He writes, “If one considers all the modulations imposed on painting by the variations of the subjectifying structure that have occurred in history, it is clear that no formula can possibly embrace those aims, those ruses, those infinitely varied tricks” (109). Furthermore, Lacan’s purpose in focusing on art (or, more accurately, “pictures”) in this lecture is not a synchronic historicity (“the function of painting at a particular moment, for a particular author, at a particular time”) but merely “the radical principle of [its] function” (110).

Integral to this function of art and its relationship to society is the notion of “sublimation,” which I think is related to what Lacan refers to as “dompte-regard,” or the taming of the gaze that occurs in artistic consumption. Extrapolating this notion, Lacan refers to the way in which art “has something profitable for society” in the way that it “calms people, comforts them.” However, this “comfort” is a very specific kind of comfort. It is comforting to the viewer because it shows her a circumstance in which another is “living from the exploitation of their desire” (111). This is an interesting point because Lacan seems to be arguing that the “satisfaction” of artistic consumption is accompanied by a simultaneous introjection of the other’s (the artist’s) desire in artistic production. This is the way in which the gaze is “tamed” through the subject’s contemplation of desire as it arrives paradoxically  from the other within the subject.

Lacan continues by describing how this circulation of desire between/within subject and other is tied to “the painting of a veil” which is less important ontologically (a thing/substance it might conceal) than it is relationally: the veil is what provokes the viewer “to ask what is behind it [the painting]” (112). This “other thing” is the “petit a” which, as Ulmer claims, is an “ambassador of desire.”

In formulating an instruction from the theoretical material gathered in this post, I am reminded of our discussion about the importance of position within Julien’s text and how a knowledge and recognition of the implications of one’s position in a system can increase an agent’s ability to increase efficacious alignments with the events in the system. Relating Julien’s position-efficacy correlation to Lacan’s ideas regarding the social functions of art might allow us to rethink our position(s) as viewers/consumers of art by drawing attention to the vacillation of desire between viewer and artist, subject and other.

With this in mind, here is an instruction: As you consume art/media, ask yourself “where is my desire coming from?” I think this instruction might also be related to the “mood” section of the metaphysics, morality, and mood criteria established in Internet Invention in the way that it asks the subject to respond to an experience (desiring) that has already taken place.