Succession and the Film Strip

1. Succession and the Film Strip In film, the automated quality of succession means that, under normal conditions, depicted movement is homeomorphic with photographed movement. Animation, in the sense of reconstituting movement from a series of still images, is at the heart of all analogical moving-image practices.

2. Ways of Worldmaking Photographs are of the world, but how do movies project a world? • Photographs confront us with conundrums of being, of our place in the world and of our perceptual relation to the world and the past. Barthes: only a qualitative self examination of what photographs provoke in us, can deepen our comprehension of this experience. • Photographs as well as filmed images present a mode of existence split by qualities of presence and absence, present and past, now and then, a here before us now encompassing a there displaced in time. (Paintings do not have such ontological splits)

3. Ways of Worldmaking • Cavell: A representation emphasizes the identity of its subject, hence it may be called a likeness; a photograph emphasizes the existence of its subject, recording it; hence it is that it may be called a transcription. • Fotografische portretten zijn dus geen representaties, maar documentaties van presences (and thus absences). Paul Sharits Shutter Interface (1975) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcxGNAVasjU&feature=related A painterly/filmic object. A cameraless articfact exploring the filmic automatism of ‘succession as the basis of automated movement

4. A NEW LANDSCAPE

5. Medium as potential and virtual A medium, then, is nothing more nor less than a set of potentialities from which creative acts may unfold. These potentialities, the powers of the medium as it were, are conditioned by multiple elements or components that can be material, instrumental, and/or formal. Moreover, these elements may vary, individually and in combination with one another…

6. Medium as potential and virtual The creative Idea, inspires the creation of automatisms that on the one level belong to these potentialities. On the second level the Idea becomes actually expressed in the unfolding of a form, a form expressed through the creation of automatisms… Through the idea one recognizes the unrealized powers of a medium, a virtual life lying within the horizons delimited by its constructive elements, whether simple or complex. In this the materialism of all art making is understood.

7. …je vois un paysage nouveau pour moi. Mais il est nouveau pour moi parce que je le compare en pensée à un autre paysage Jean-Luc Godard

8. During the past twenty years we have all lost in some degree the capacity to involve ourselves deeply and sensually in the 35 mm image. Film is no longer a modern medium; it is completely historical.

9. Conclusion one: What are the criteria for evaluating the shift from film to digital in the moving image? • The new territory is ‘without image’: het oude beeld is weg, het nieuwe is er nog niet • De ‘new ontological perplexy’ van het beeld dat niet ‘one’ is (nieuwe media zijn erg diffuus). • Our scene is of three uneven historical rhythms: photography and film, electronic imaging and transmission, and computational processes

10. Mainly digital cinema • New automatism: digital arts are characterized by automated processes. But do algorithmic processes make a new medium? • Problemen dus: is een computer een nieuw medium; is het fotografisch realisme dwingend (spatial correspondence)?, • First paradox: new imagery represents represented space. The computer is the medium? Digital mimicry? • Second paradox: it fakes photography without relying on the analogical processes (perceptual realism).

11. Conclusion two: a certain conceptualization of film theory still provides the core concepts with which this transition may be understood and evaluated • Mental or cognitive continuity on how represented space links to motion in the natural world: perceptual realism bases its judgments on a correspondence between modeling algorithms and the cognitive schema on which they are based. • Spatial and representational qualities of the image reassert its graphism. • Photographic credibility lijkt belangrijk, daar waar alle films veelal digitaly synthesized zijn.

12. Conclusion two: a certain conceptualization of film theory still provides the core concepts with which this transition may be understood and evaluated Antonin de Bemels Scrub solo 3: soliloquy (extract) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL0Te0zvcsg

13. Lost in Translation: the Interface • Bridging the analog and the digital requires conversion. Digitaal vervangt analoog nooit helemaal; binary is not perception, het heeft een interface nodig. Digital is dus altijd discontinuous: het moet aan een kant voor de mens waarneembaar zijn (cultural exchange) aan de andere kant is er machine language. Analogical transcription is different from digital conversion or calculation • Digital= time is conversion of light into code (quantizing), physical causality and temporal continuity is broken, computer serves as a medium, applying algorithms while converting space and time into a code. It requires an interface

14. To Pierce, a theory of signs Analogical processes have a privileged relation to indexicality; it is fundamental to their activity of transcription. But digital processes, requiring mathematical [Cartesian] notation, have a privileged relation to symbolization (because of the discontinuity between input and output), making it closer to a written description than to visual impression.(p.120)

15. Automatism as Algorithm • The separation of input and output makes that digital information is in no way spatial, it is no image or medium. It is quantitative simulation through calculation. • Dit is niet alleen het geval bij film maar ook bij tv en misschien zelfs bij alles wat voorheen mechanisch en electronisch was… koelkast? auto? • There are no new media, only processes or operations that may be performed on symbolic information (127) • A computer is a medium. An algorithm is a kind of automatism. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li2jsFQSozk

16. What is a (digital) image? • Electronic image is not one: it is not displayed on the screen; its becoming visible in inseparable from the output device. (there are no new media ‘objects’). De varieteit is dus de varieteit van displays.

17. The virtual life of film=information or art? 1. Digital imagery is still believed to be true, to document, to be indexical. But they convert images to information and in doing so they accelerate and amplify their powers as communication • expand and deepen our relation to the present • Our immediate present is passing into a vast archive of digital images • As images turn to information, computers make personal photography public communication

18. The virtual life of film=information or art? • Freed from the individual device, the photographer is between images rather than making an image. A strange film and photography relation Sam Taylor-Wood http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyUWJqExw00&feature=related

19. The Digital Event Why is the brightness of the LCD screen, the relentless glare of the digital image with no shutter reprieve, no back and forth between one forty-eighth of a second of dark followed by one forty-eighth of projected image, with no repetitive pattern as regular as your own heartbeat, unable to establish and construct an experiential sense of time passing? And why could the projected film image do it so effortlessly in the past an still can? Babette Mangolte

20. Bijvoorbeeld: Russian Ark • Whether viewed projected in theatre or watched at home on a hogh-definition screen, it does not involve me in time. • Problem: it is ignoring that the assumptions of perceptual realism are indeed paradoxical. • Contradiction: it is no uninterrupted sequence nor is it film: it is montage. Meurer: it includes more than 30.000 digital events. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so_tB8UxGjA

21. The digital event: • Light recorded on charge-coupled devices is already fragmented into a discrete mosaic of picture elements, which are then read off as distinct mathematical values. • Corresponds less to the duration and the movements of the world than to the control and variation of discrete numerical elements internal to the computer’s memory and logical processes. • The digital event depends on montage, on being a one-way street (its translation) and compositing (the separate layers are not spatial wholes but numerically defined values: simulated and intentional.

22. The Ontology of Digital Worlds • Analogue= invisability of layers, continuity of movement and devaluation of filmic editing • Digital space needs no cuts and is not anymore a combining of spaces. Editing is consequence of the analog automata • Nothing moves: duration turns into durée of realtime. • There is no presence other than myself Conclusion: a block of duration => code continuity in space and movement => montage or combination (there is no difference anymore between creation and modification, Manovich)

23. The digital event= a manipulation of the layers of the modularized image subject to a variety of algorithmic transformations. Digital information expresses another will to power in relation to the world (174) Nietzsche: WTP is ambitie, streven, voltrekking zonder teleologie.

24. Hoe verandert de digital onze ontologie? • Er is geen andere wereld (we control, manage, communicate): matter and minds have become information. Even time is managed as information. Manovich: will is a ‘database complex’. • Jurrasic park tells us that reality is only recognized in its photographic appearance.

25. I think because I exist in a present time of exchange with others, who are not present to me in space