Presencing Absence in Images

This quote from the middle of my Prezi was useful for grounding my theoretical points about the role of absence in electracy: transition from image to image is the thing (the limit) which is “present only in the form of absence.”

According to another one of my quotes, this “thing” or “limit” is the subject: “Thinking is the subject’s search for the thing (the real) whose very refutation makes it (cogito) possible.” As a visual genre, the photo montage most effectively captures the conductive movement that characterizes the subject’s unconscious.

From this I want to create a photo montage in the spirit of David Campany’s notion of “late photography” by returning to those sites of wreckage that are passed over every fifteen minutes or so in the media blitzkrieg of instant access. However, my “sites of wreckage” are not physical sites but digital sites such as old memes or stories of pop culture that have since been relegated to the cyber-refuse bin.

This would be a good project to use material from the Entertainment and Family sections of mystory. Perhaps even interspersing my subjectivity in the moment of transition between a still of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and a familiar family photo.

In this project, I will be following Lacan’s instruction by noting that repetition can be characterized as the search for the moment in which an event “seems to be under an obligation to yield itself” (i.e. the real, “original” encounter) (51). Movement is important here because encounters with the real are not static: “you cannot be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving.” The real is moving and inaccessible, and I can only circle it through this transition that conveys the illusion (the veil) of an encounter with it.

In choosing individual images for this montage, try to follow this advice: “create an image that brings you to the point of action and then stalls, allowing the imagination’s invocatory nature to carry you into the here and now of the present only to have the image pull you back to the precipice from which you threw yourself. This is the “unresolved oscillation” of viewing experience (60).”

This would also be a good project to explore the rim-like movement described by Lacan and extrapolated by Christian Metz in his chapter of The Cinematic. In this quote from my mapping project, Metz seems to be telling me to create images that allude to off frame elements: the absence of the off frame element must be evoked by a feeling that is within the image’s frame. Similar to the temporal tension between past and present that I discussed earlier, this punctum propels the viewer outside the frame of the photo only to discover that the “thing” she is in search of was always already the lack initiated by an element within the image itself. This is Lacan’s image of the rim as a diagram of the movement of desire, entering into the gap only to return from where you came.

Shattering Barriers with Photodynamism

Anton Bragaglia’s essay on “Futurist Photodynamism” reverberates with the same energetic potential that he locates within the emerging cinematic technology of the early twentieth century. Written in first person plural with a defiant, antagonistic tone, Bragaglia’s passionate manifesto laments the shortcomings of specific cinematic devices while at the same time celebrating the conceptual potentiality of their future constellations.

In emblematic (and Bergsonian) fashion, Bragaglia denigrates the stale reflection of reality he sees as inherent to cinematography: “We despise the precise, mechanical, glacial reproduction of reality, and take the utmost care to avoid it” (25). He continues to cite other problems with cinematography, describing it as “absolutely idiotic,” noting how its cold dissection of movement destroys “any kind of aesthetic concern for rhythm.”

Bragaglia uses the negativity of these denunciations as the basis for his concept of photodynamism. Contrary to cinematography’s neglect of “trajectory” in its “mechanical” reproduction of reality, Bragaglia cites this as photodynamism’s “essential value.” Likewise, in contrast to the representational depiction of motion, photodynamism aims at a more synaesthetic approach to movement that, once experienced, “still palpitates” in the viewer’s memory.

Here, Bragaglia’s method of media analysis may be of use to our search for an electrate metaphysics in the way that he employs the use of contrast in formulating his theory of photodynamism. In a previous lecture, Ulmer characterized our second project as looking for a way to “get at what is not get-at-able.” Perhaps one such way of beginning this search would be to combine this axiom with Bragaglia’s approach to media and locate the ways in which technology itself is trying to “get at what is not get-at-able,” in other words, locate the desire of the other (which is also our desire) in your media. In formulating a technology’s desire, isolate the physical, emotional, perceptual, psychical limitations it claims to overcome and use this as a contrast to formulate your electrate poetics for a particular device. Then, once you isolate the limitations that a technology claims to overcome but fails to do so, use this failure as the basis for an electrate poetics that (although not yet existent) would transcend this border.

Similar to the way Bragaglia’s essay formally enacts the spirit of photodynamism, it also might be useful to experiment with the genre or style of your writing by drawing upon the same energy of the conceptual theme and/or technology you are exploring.