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Home , Animism

Digital Animism

Samuel James COLLEGE OF FINE ARTS Master of Fine Arts (Research) 2013

1 ORIGINALITY STATEMENT ‘I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another , or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project's design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged.’

Signed Date 7/10/13

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Signed Date 7/10/13

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Signed Date 7/10/13

2 ABSTRACT

This thesis explores the essential hybrid construction of digital video artwork. An argument is made based on the awareness of the ubiquity of digital image, for the recognition of digital, virtual presence and how its substructures inform the actual. Aesthetic journalism, videography as research and the animation of the virtual are examples used to discuss the artistic developments of animism in digital culture.

This practice-based research thesis, Digital Animism, considers the potential new forms that can emerge from readily identifiable images when the concept of animism is applied within a virtual environment.

The work produced on two regional residencies in proposed that through combinations of nature imagery a methodology of virtual phenomenology, using the sensory image, is a way to bridge materiality and non-materiality. Furthermore, in reforming the imagery of the inanimate, digital compositing allowed a proactive development of new, relational scenarios within the virtual. The resulting artwork Artifact Cartoons is an exploration into digital morphogenesis, using videographic artifacts to reconstruct meaning in an alternate, digital space. As digital production progressively takes over the indexical of the environment, the aesthetic tools we use redefine the parameters of perception. On this basis, these experiments explored an aesthetic phenomenological transformation of how we perceive nature, and how our participation instigates a hybrid re-generation. In this research I ask the question; does the photographer or videographer develop an augmented perception of the world and becomes compelled to compensate by developing a new virtual authenticity?

This practice-based research firstly investigates how an intense engagement with the processes and of the digital has the potential to shift the indexical of the environment. Secondly, artificial environments are created as a development of a new actual: as Deleuze suggests, the actual is merely a composition of many virtuals. The development of sophisticated virtual scenarios, posing as a form of aesthetic 3 research, present not only new experiences but immersive phenomena. If nature is reduced to an aesthetic-virtual , can its virtual chiaroscuro alone be conceived as living? It presents video art as a participatory interactive, animated continuum, presenting its content within a child-like imaginarium.

Artist Statement for the exhibition ARTIFACT CARTOONS (Kudos Gallery, Paddington November 2012) The human form takes a role in the visualizations of land. The diversity and similarity of forms of a single country are illustrated as well as the indexing of human intervention in the way we understand nature.

This collection of videos was considered as a form of research-animation exploring hybrid mechanisms of perception and how they interfere with nature. Through a combination of morphic resonance and accidental encounters, video compositions can present emergent, animistic phenomena. The world can be seen only through our interference and as such, video acts as a reproduction and simultaneous displacement of seeing. 3D stereoscopic animation is used to express the limitations of a bifocal and perspectival view of nature. This work took place on residencies in Cairns, QLD and Fowlers Gap, NSW. The takes advantage of the polarity of the Australian climate and considers the authenticity and appropriateness of a phenomenological imaginary.

Video: Samuel James Movement: Victoria Hunt Sound: Melissa Hunt

4 CONTENTS

Introduction 6 Consciousness and Video 9 Video and Aesthetic Emergence 21 Collage and the Hybrid Image 25 Animation as Research 28 Tango with the ‘dead’ image 36 Conclusion 43 Bibliography 46

ILLUSTRATIONS (all images are HD video stills courtesy of the artist 2012)

1. Staffs Incubating 2. Huskrabbit 3. Leaningsky 4. Animal of its surroundings 5. Stormmakingriver 6. MeteoricDistressSignal 7. Snakerock 8. Anthropologylater 9. Antbridge 10. Intersectivespaces 11. Nightrelations 12. Waterlobe 13. Threestonesinvalley 14. Flyfrenzy

5 Introduction

In the broadest sense, animism is the near universal aspect of the psyche which attributes to objects as well as beings. In writings on child psychology, ’s hypothesis on animistic seeing begins with the idea that the world cannot be conceived beyond the framework of our own perception. From a child’s viewpoint of the imaginary, all events and experiences are seen as products onto which we transfer our own qualities and things with which we are acquainted. Similarly, Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes our limited point of view as ‘partiality’, the possibility of having only a certain perspective at each moment in time. This does not diminish , but constitutes a multiplicity of the relationship between sense and existence, an infinite variable perception. I would like to elaborate on what we could think of as an impressionistic perception, and to understand the distinction between animate and inanimate as an abstraction which we only learn as adults. I am interested in video’s multiplicity and how video phenomena become confluent with perception itself. After first considering theories of perception this paper also researches the string of events in media production which consider video to be a living, reflexive medium where the camera, the body and the body’s relationship to what is outside of it, are complicit in virtualising phenomenology. The user's relationship to the camera implies its utility in our perception and prompts us to consider the extent to which the camera is alive and contrives its own image in its sensorial functioning. This paper briefly tries to draw a traditional understanding of animism to a contemporary phenomenology which is inclusive of the virtual environment.

In the book Animism, Respecting the Living World (2006) Graham Harvey provides a concise summary of different practices and histories of animism, and draws various threads towards contemporary beliefs in animism. He cites animism as a very broad

6 term which is used to label a wide variety of phenomena. These range from 18th Century theories of physicist and chemist Georg Stahl which differentiate matter containing more or less 'anima'1 (living material) depending on how burnable or corrodable a carbon-based substance is - to 19th Century writings of anthropologist Edward Tylor defining animism as 'the in or spirits, an expansive grouping of 'entities that are beyond empricial study'2 to 's 20th Century reductive psychology of spirits and only being 'projections of man's own emotional impulses'3. Graham Harvey also discusses the alternative panpsychic of 'shamanthropologists' or 'shamanovelists'4 which regard animism as a practice of construction and belief. Shamanic practice is dependent on seeing and healing which is primarily informed by journeys that induce an experiential knowledge of matter through passage of an individual into the unknown. Harvey describes some aspect of 'techniques of ecstasy'5 which are compatible with artistic practice, particularly artwork which is reflexive and focussed on the intervention of the medium in the production of an . In contemporary discussions of animism there is the acknowledgement that animism can be considered illusory. For example when we encounter the unknown we begin scanning for what most concerns us and begin mental fantasies of the unknown, in which we attribute life to the non-living and often anthropomorphise and fetishise the object. From this position which questions the perceptual view of the individual I would like to discuss the use of video as a medium which allows these kinds of subjective interventions using a quasi-virtual technology to participate in ecstasy-invoking interpretations of the unknown. Video allows both artists and the general user an alchemical intervention

1 Graham Harvey, Animism, Respecting the Living World, Columbia University Press, New York 2006 p.3.

2 Edward Tylor, Primitive Culture, Researches in the the development of Mythology, Philosophy, , Art and Custom, John Murray, London, 1913.

3 Sigmund Freud, and Taboo, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1913, p.139.

4 Graham Harvey, Animism, Respecting the Living World, Columbia University Press, New York, 2006 p.142.

5 op. cit. 7 with the actual, giving the ability to capture the apparent presences of animism, hinged on the moment of the urgency of acquisition and to freely manipulate the virtual image. In the traditional meaning of animism, this process respects a strong dichotomy of and matter and how material body being filmed represents spirit being translated virtually. My question is how much value does the virtual image contain and how is it perceptually 'alive'.

Like all components and projections of nature, the virtual is incorporated into our immediate sphere from childhood, from the comprehension of the self through the mirror, to role playing in games and sports, this virtuality displaces us and at the same time begins to build up concepts of reality. The virtual world functions with the brain and its biochemical and electromagnetic activity, meaning the consideration of the brain as an animate being in itself is part of the natural extension of the virtual. The ‘collapse of difference’ due to photography has enabled media to be considered more as a mutable form, ending 19th Century concerns for how photography has complicated the notion of authenticity or originality. “Multiple, reproducible, repetitive images destabilised the very notion of originality and blurred the difference between original and copy.”6

Several theorists have since traced the relationship between and media (Gilles Deleuze, Maurice Merleau Ponty, Jean Baudrillard) and describe the character of media art as animistic, through the non-differentiation of media simulacra from the natural phenomena of the world. To understand phenomenal emergence in media establishes the affective event as something becoming emergent through symbiosis with the actual. This research sought to establish links between nature as no longer exterior or other due to the mutability and integration of digital phenomena. In this work I also discuss the fluidity and possibilities of engagement with nature through media and its evolving, self-reflexive appearances.

6 Liz Wells, Photography: A Critical Introduction, Routledge, London, 1996 p.23 8 The unique properties of video have allowed it as a medium, to become highly responsive and integrated with the actual. The ability to fine tune aspects of moving image to for example, a dancer in space, allows the formation of new, media-born space. It is a zone in which media can be representing of real space and generating a hybrid space fused with other media material. The dichotomy is presently between the notion of empirical ‘essences’ and the Marxist/Deleuzian concept of morphogenesis. Both must be considered in relation to how we can think of video as a form of consciousness. Firstly I wish to break down some processes of contemporary video art making.

Consciousness and Video Object

My particular interest as a video artist has been to look at the relationship between video as a documentary image and aesthetic image and how these are interwoven in any videographic portrayal of the actual. Video documentation has attempted to fuse these two categories to present an evolved, consumable image, mixing semiotics and perception to form a new kind of researched ‘truth’. The fusion of what we perceive as real documentary and fiction is held within the virtualising, morphogenic continuum which starts from the feed of the domestic digital camera and becomes online simulacra of what people can find and experience. Identities and realities are continually reflected in this aesthetic documentation via the animistic potential of media tools, web apps and other software. In the affective translation

Figure 1

9 of video, the digital domain is imbued, on every level of production with varieties of aesthetic and semiotic readings related to the variety of cultural and subjective viewpoints. At all levels, media can be seen consciously and unconsciously assimilated within the actual, blurring the boundary of the virtual. Last century Jean Baudrillard described our world as a composit of this greater mediatised simulacrum.

In my work making video projection for live performance from 1995-2012, I have been engaged in what Deleuze and Guattari call desiring-production which draws the body into the morphogenic fields of media production and cause extensive permutations of what the body can be. There is also the increasing lack of distinction between body and the media image of the body as they mutually project each other into being. Baudrillard writes, “The invention of Reality, unknown to other cultures, is the work of modern western Reason, the turn to the Universal…. We think of ourselves always as facing the Real. Well, there is no face-to-face. There is no . Nor any subjectivity either: a twofold illusion. Since consciousness is an integral part of the world and the world is an integral part of consciousness, I think it and it thinks me.”7 The reflections of the mediatised image influence the actual body and the convergence of actual and virtual is a variation on illusion coming into actuality at the moment it is witnessed. In this sense, the virtual is a liberated, performative body, there is no sense that it is any more or less complex than its actual counterpart. Baudrillard continues: “The play of is over, the paradoxical play of presence and absence. What remains is the integral form of reality, of which we are all operators.”8

As digital operators we are integrated within a self-reflexive medium of re-invention (Yvonne Spielmann) and the only state in which video is seen as transcendent is when the viewer is outside of this system, unaware of the foreignness of mediatised

7 Jean Baudrillard, On the World in its Profound Illusoriness,in The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact INSOMNIA website, translated by Chris Turner, Editions Gallilée 2004 p.37 URL http://insomnia.ac/essays/on_the_world_in_its_profound_illusoriness/

8 ibid. 10 reality. When we see a movie in the cinema when we are children, we comprehend the system of images and its paradoxical suspension of illusions in which we live and are constantly encompassed. In Baudrillard’s view, our temporal consciousness is overtaken by the temporality media. Digital animism is what I would like to think of as the transference from ‘live’ to media and back again and to change the definition of animism, as the transgressions from the actual to be perceived as an ongoing life. The phenomenon of media has made the virtual habitually and necessarily ‘animate’ and allowed us to experience it as actual. Drawing attention to the paradox of the system is to also expose the media-animated distortions brought about by an image itself in relationship to another. From the lens to the edit, the content of video seems to be a zone of manipulation where our own input also recontextualises digital identity and place. I would like to see this as an ‘animist’ engagement in which we are participating in making our own images, which generate the formation of new phenomena.

There are several modern discourses which consider the concept of photography and consciousness. Walter Benjamin refers to the optical unconscious as the means by which technology enables a seeing which was not previously possible, that is, an exclusive photographic consciousness. As a dislocator of original time and space, Benjamin was observing photography as a new zone of debate between people and their environment, a synthetic reality. Normal consciousness, the state of being in the world but not separately perceiving it, is consistent with Rosalind Krauss’s concept of ‘collapse of difference’ in which reality and phantasm cannot be differentiated. German playwright and animist Heinrich von Kleist, reminds us that in our relation with the inanimate world “Grace appears purest in the human form which has no consciousness…”9 The consciousness of engaging with objects must be eliminated to begin to produce and believe in the living world. For dancers and puppeteers in the theatre the belief in the movement of the body with an object is the basis for a relationship with the outside world: – to understand the object is to also understand

9 Heinrich von Kleist, On the Marionette Theatre, trans. Christian-Albrecht Gollub in German Romantic Criticism, German Library, vol. 21, New York: Continuum, 1982, p.244 11 what the object can be. Contemporary theorist on animism and art, Jan Verwoert talks about ‘the instrument’10 which no matter how simple an object, conveys its animism through a transference of other – music comes from wood. The form of the shaft of bamboo becomes a flute when two holes are cut in it and breath is blown into one of them and thus transcends its inanimate state.

Figure 2 An example of video that deals with transferral of this kind of animate state is the work of Australian artists, Ms & Mr. where the re-animation of their home video footage allows a reshaping of their presence, transcending historical linearity in the alterations of their personal documentary. Portraits of their childhood in super 8 films, rotoscoped and recomposited into a contemporary image, for example the surface of the moon, is a reconfiguration of the actual as we presently witness it. We understand the syntax as 'they as children are meeting each other again in media on the moon'. They say “We would consider video as a new kind of manifestation. We also think a lot about the impact of the recorded image (in our case, the illusion of one's own biographical data) neurologically, and how this would be related to memory re-consolidation… we unquestionably confuse our memories and our

10 Jan Verwoert, Anti-Materialist Materialisms, keynote lecture, Adelaide Festival Artists Week 2011 viewed October 2012, URL http://www.adelaidefestival.com.au/wp-content/uploads/ Artists'%20Week%20Day%20One%20-%20Opening%20Keynote%20&%20Response.mp3 12 relationship with any 'original' media, however this process closely reflects the way the brain changes memory over time.”11 The complication of the image being presented and recomposited is animism's anarchic reaction to , described by Anselm Franke as "ontological anarchy —where exclusions become increasingly intelligible through their symptomatic displacements in the economy of desires, in the genres of fiction, in psychopathologies, and so forth."12 Animism is situated in the imaginary negatives of the modern but rather than rejecting it, exists within its a-priori narrative. Animism becomes evident in the necessary re-emergence of what has been subsumed by the rational. It has the quality of being somewhere between presence and absence, an ambivalent field. What prompts 'spirit' to appear is its setting amongst that which it is not - modernity causes the transformations. I contemporary artist, Hiraku Suzuki's practice as a drawing artist, he is inspired by the concurrence of urban and natural environments in an interchangeable, 'in- between' state. He is also playing with the in-betweenness of the graphical and the actual, giving graphic representation to the re-imagining of matter which can be found in the landscape of the modern world. In his work (Tokyo Wondersite 2008 'Between site and space' and Artspace, Sydney 2009 'Diorama of the City') found objects are reduced to simplified motifs or re-contextualisations. These provide an alternate reading of urban matter. In relation to animism I am referring to Suzuki as an example of representing the point of transmogfication of matter becoming and being re-encoded through image, in a way looking at modern material's re- emergence in other media. Suzuki's work is a discovery of modern archaeological interrelationships, for example using the broken white lines of asphalt of a city street to illustrate the veins of dead leaves. He says, “I am interested in not only the act of excavation itself, also the fact that the discovered subject is fluid. Sometimes it is fabricated, and it transforms itself as time goes by….The outer material of buildings is

11 Ms & Mr statement in an email interview, (conducted 15-3-2011) email: [email protected]

12 Anselm Franke Introduction - Animism, e-flux issue# 36, New York, July 2012 viewed April 2013, URL http://www.e-flux.com/issues/36-july-2012/ 13 made of mineral and sand in general, so you can imagine about sand dunes while walking between the buildings…it is about changing your view point slightly, to have a close look of a fissure between "now" as time, "here" as place, and "when" as time, "where" as place.”13 The manipulation of the object into another image here is derived from an analogue experience of exile from the real. Artifact Cartoons adopts a digital version of this process, as it also considers the media images produced to be material, the new media matter a transference of the actual.

We can identify the importance of human agency in the engagement with objects and their virtual fissures. For the animist, these fissures can be links to loaded, qualities of material, activated by tracings of the other and act as cognitive markings of the actual. The effect is for the replicated image to be brought from memory to activated life. Raul Ruiz describes the original practice of sorcery with the Spanish term hechizo14 (‘artificial event’) whereby the use of artifice and are the tools to induce control over an individual’s - the implementation of artifice in sorcery has the purpose of unveiling a deeper source of living activity. In my previous works, Simulated Rapture (2006), Anamorphic Archive (2008), and Vivaria (2010), the performer is in submission to the environment and is being assimilated by the virtual, to resolve a virtual portraiture. Connections and revelations arise in these works by revealing their relationship to objects through visual compositing and aesthetic displacement. Similar to analogue rubbings or etchings, images in these works reveal themselves through mechanical processes to become an original object. This process is dedicated to visual emergence by methodical processes and focusses on tasks of compositing rather than preemptive semantic readings.

Emergence in video compositing becomes a feedback loop. There is the sense of the original being extracted and distilled whilst the image is still subject to observation.

13 Interview in Cats Forehead viewed June 2011 http://cats-forehead.com/journal/ HirakuSuzuki.html

14 Raul Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema, Editions Dis Voir, Paris, 2005 p.74 14 The image perpetuates in Von Kleist's terms unconsciously. This perpetuation is supported by Deleuze and Guattari's warnings against associative image making in Anti-Oedipus (1972). They imply that free association only leads back to the Oedipal and “In reality, we still have not accomplished anything so long as we have not reached elements that are not associable”.15 In Dadaism, collage assembly can remain “a set of pure singularities”16. The paradox of animistic emergence can be described in Guattari’s proposition to “discard the bonds of social (and technical) machines” to find the “orphaned object, distinct by having the absence of any tie.” There is the temptation to ‘furnish’ the isolation or disjuncture but this goes against the ideal of “obtaining a functional ensemble, while shattering all the associations.”17 This is the purest function of digital animation, the action of making things do something by applying a set of parameters and see how they carry out. This method is where the machine captures and quantifies images primarily on its own, but aligned to this event is the phenomenological confluence of human participation which looks back through aesthetic simulation as complete authenticity to the ritualised, edited object. Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the unconscious as a ‘factory not a theatre’ (Anti-Oedipus 1972) suggests that the -image is not meaningful in itself, yet the processing of images is an essential desire function of the unconscious. In , it is not meaning that attracts us, but a need for the production of images, the need to pursue technology. Deleuze’s unconscious flow is resonant of editing an abstract cut-up film “To desire consists of this: to make cuts, to let certain contrary flows run, to take samplings of the flows, to cut the chains that are wedded to the flows.” And he says “This whole system… means nothing”18

Deleuze's belief is that the actual does not exist in itself but is instead determined by the cluster of its virtual components. “Purely actual objects do not exist. Every

15 Félix Guattari, Chaosophy, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, CA, 2009, p.103

16 op.cit

17 ibid. p.104

18 ibid, p.53 15 actual surrounds itself with a cloud of virtual images”19 This is useful in understanding where we stand with the environment and that the environment does not see things in the same way that we do. Presence is acknowledged in varying degrees of proximity to the actual, with the effect of the immediacy or latency of the environment’s absorption and re-emission from the actual and he states, “it is this very brevity that keeps them subject to a principle of uncertainty or indetermination. The virtuals, encircling the actual, perpetually renew themselves by emitting yet others, with which they are in turn surrounded and go on to react upon the actual.”20 The brevity of the process of video making enhances the effectiveness of video as an animist medium, as the process is already a technology which is relatively fixed and enables immediate ambivalences to arise. In the labor intensive process of celluloid filmmaking, Raul Ruiz observes the procedure as “a constant practice of attention and detachment, an ability to enter into the film and return an instant afterward to passive contemplation”21 We are always being participatory in experiencing media, we perpetuate its reflexivity. The one button operation of a compact camera held out from the body at mid-arm’s length, looking into the simulated LCD screen of what is before us, can become a tool which differentiates from non-camera seeing because it breaks the actual into separated moments of reflexivity, by filming, we replace the actual with separate, isolated images. Rosalind Krauss describes the domestic cult of the camera – “The camera is hauled out to document family reunions and vacations or trips. Its place is in the ritualized cult of domesticity…. The photographic record is part of the point of these family gatherings; it is an agent in the collective fantasy of family cohesion.”22 She describes the brevity of the instamatic camera and its seamless integration with everyday life which again adheres to Von Kleist's 'unconscious' state of the animistic.

19 Gilles Deleuze & Claire Parnet, The Actual and the Virtual, Dialogues II, Continuum, London, 2002, p.112

20 op.cit

21 Raul Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema, Éditions Dis Voir, Paris, 2005, p.90

22 Rosalind Krauss, A Note on Photography and the Simulacral, October, Vol 31, MIT Press, 1984, p.58 16 For us to assume that the camera can be intrinsically bound to concepts of reality we can also refer to Frederic Jameson’s Signatures of the Visible where he examines the transformation of space into media ‘material’.23 He describes the need for humans in the desire to describe unknown space to align themselves with the non-human (i.e. nature) and this is exemplified in the desire to capture an image. The subject colonises the object, “Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudoworld that can only be looked at…. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the non-living.”24 Whether we are thinking of Deleuze’s actual/virtual production or Jameson’s ‘media material’ we can see that in the postmodern era, the mechanically produced image becomes another form of consciousness. This is the field in which image manipulation and the digital simulacra becomes the animistic zone of postmodern experience.

This argument is restricted to the animism of aesthetic images, not the machine, thereby avoiding a discussion of in technology. This study is focussed on the production of the virtual image and where it becomes a new phenomena. Painting inflects our aesthetic perceptions in the same way the digital image does but the digital image removes us more thoroughly and unconsciously by being part of everyday modern communication, it is not restrained to the walls of the gallery. If animism is the ability to attribute life to something, then the spectacle is the antithesis of the animist focus. It is the high level of integration in our that creates animism. Guy Debord suggests the two-fold, post modern loss of possession of the object, the image isolated and fragmented, remains a concept out of our reach which drives the very desire to capture and reproduce it. The situation of desire, born from a perceptual lack of connection to the actual comes with a warning, “the real divested of the anti-real becomes hyperreal, more real than real, and vanishes into

23 Frederick Jameson, Signatures of the Visible, Routledge, New York 1992, p.11

24 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, Zone Books, New York, 2012, p.12 17 simulation”25 The real cannot be divested of the anti-real if animism is to be found in the aesthetics of video and all of its manipulations. We can play with the image but the game is so much more alive if we know its place in 'the real'.

Figure 3.

In the desire to attribute consciousness to the animated image, what is made illustratively can instantly become re-consumed phenomena in a culture which is founded in reproduction. Photography, by capturing moments of reflected light from objects, collects memorable, impressionist digital tracings of objects and this 3D to 2D process is one suited to the simulations of post-modernity. These impressions of two dimensionality describes a bound-up image. Susan Sontag quotes Cartier Bresson; “the photographer… must become the subject in order to capture it”26 The photographer is being and becoming in the same time as the event or object. The photographer’s sense of awareness conducts an allegory, which is attached to a signification of the object. The need to communicate the transaction and the phenomenological exchange or the belonging of the subject in photographing something is participatory between photographer and object and also between the photograph and the audience. Catherine Elwes describes photographic subjectivity as what separates art from the ‘unsynthesized manifold’ of raw data from

25 Jean Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange, Translator: Chris Turner, London: Verso, 2001, p.12

26 Susan Sontag, On Photography, Penguin Books, London, 1977 p.116 18 intentionality, whether political (in the old interventionist sense), or aesthetic.27 The participatory act of capturing, as it will always involve the human viewer, implies that the perception is what bears the sense of animism in the digital image. Intentionality allows us to embrace the unembracable only through the photographic act. Media can be thought of as part of survival, acting as a cognitive, embedded neural system. Baudrillard suggests a viable means of communication between the ethereal and actual by using quantifiable media which enables, like language, distinction and cognition equivalent to the mind which creates it. Something born of the act of acquiring and hybridising the image enables us to communicate on a level that is non–ending and reflexive. “Simulation is an attempt to extinguish this symbolic debt that we cannot respond to…in the surrogate artificial world of post modernity that we put in its place, everything can be exchanged.”28

To the extent that many people instigate virtual social lives, the design of their web status and the images of their presence becomes a dominant place of identification. To manipulate one's image also affects one's self. One is bound within a digital manifestation whilst still formulating it. Living inside the ever expanding, self authored microcosm one becomes enmeshed with one's own fantasy. The microcosm in the live-in film set of Charlie Kaufmann’s Synecdoche is the fantasy world of the character Caden Cotard. Cotard plays the film's director in which the virtual world, penetrates into the physical world of the film set, a place of his own design and personally written script. Each day, the apparent 'facts' of his world are rewritten transferring the real-life actors to enact Caden’s own life dilemmas, to the extent that he himself is on set as the director living out his meta-life in the film. Baudrillard proposes that the subject and the world reciprocally think each other into being - ‘object thought’. We cannot say whether the object or the thought occurs first but are rather perpetually in dialogue. In Synedoche there is the confusion whether

27 Catherine Elwes, PROFILE: A Polemical History of Video, in brief, viewed June 2011, URL http://www.contemporary-magazines.com/profile71_2.htm

28 Jean Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange, London, Versio, 2001 p.151 19 Kaufmann's vision is his real persona or if he remains the arch-director. Ultimately he loses his grip on reality and chooses to become the cleaner rather than the director in his own film set. Is the set now the real place and the world outside the studio no longer applicable. Deleuze proposes virtuality as a tightly bound circuit, “Pure virtuality no longer has to actualize itself, since it is a strict correlative of the actual....the two are indistinguishable."29 The object being veiled by virtuality is a system derived by a mind that distinguishes itself from objects around it. The object can be seen separately through its ‘total impetus’ which would be in general terms, the act of perceiving hidden and ambivalent forms, the sense and non-physical feeling of materiality. This sense generates the need to animate the isolated, dormant object's lack.

Figure 4

The aesthetic-illusory experience is what conventionally magnifies the virtual envelope of reality. Bill Viola quotes Detlef-Ingo Lauf in Tibetan Sacred Art, “The world is seen as a manifestation of forms composed of separate transitory elements, forms which are themselves transient and hence illusory….The world that appears to our eyes.… enables the artist to see the world of phenomena as a vision, as a state yet to be realised.”30

29 Gilles Deleuze, The Actual and the Virtual, Dialogues II, Continuum, London, 2002, p.113

30 Bill Viola, Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House, Thames & Hudson, London, 1995, p.26-27 20 Video and Aesthetic Emergence

“Video keying is synaesthetic; such a claim can be made for no other aesthetic medium.”31 Gene Youngblood suggests that the aesthetics of animated video can be considered on its own terms as an actual material. He points out that there is no a- priori dependency between the parts of video, therefore conceptually and indexically to composit images together, creates a relationship which breaks the of the original object. The aesthetics of video compositing thus develops an arbitrary relationship to the original. Baudrillard reminds us that as there is no necessary relationship between the simulacra and its origins. This is contrary to thinking of image as somehow related to an actual counterpart and therefore able to be magical or transformative. Youngbood links this kind of electronic image making to surrealist practice which perhaps alludes to the ability of synthetic images to connect independently to the unconscious.32 In Artifact Cartoons I am accepting each captured video object as a generic component of the actual (in direct relation to its origin). I am not thinking of the image as synthetic object, but one that is intermediary and has a clear relationship to the actual. In the process of grading, framing, masking and compositing this work pursues and aesthetic which is emergent. Software which communicates specifically with the senses determines aesthetic simulation, which Youngblood terms synergy. Like the body, software only knows what kind of tasks it can perform, but like human behaviour, greater actions are derived through a combined sequencing of programs. In a sophisticated image composit, one image combines with another until a new image is formed. The outcome is essentially a combinatorial flow of image ready to be combined with other images. In science emergence is considered to be the production of new molecular forms through the combination of previously existing molecular structures. The classic example is the bonding of a hydrogen and oxygen molecule which results

31 Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, E. P. Dutton; First edition (January 1970) p.273

32 Ron Burnett, 'Video Space/Video Time' Mirror Machine: Video and Identity ed. Janine Marchessault, YYZ Books, Canada, 2006, p.171 21 in the transformation of (those gasses) into liquid (water). In the emergent process, water is by no means an end product. This research proposes that aesthetic emergence can begin by seeing the virtual as a direct derivative of the actual.

The concept of image emergence can be applied to 3D stereoscopic film, where on viewing, the perception eventually becomes adjusted to the illusion. 3D projected space is created by adjusting the convergence of different channels of video image being received by the left and right eyes. It is a play with the bifocality of our perception and unveils the reason for our perception of the apparent three dimensionality of space, the fact that we see with two optical receivers at the same time. In this unveiling we can be aware of the illusion of depth and space in relation to our body. The schizms which exist between the hallucinations and reality of space, can be aligned to the perception of actual and virtual. At one moment we are in a and at another we are aware that we are dreaming. This places the subject in the centre of a phenomenological event, and understandings of the relationship of image perception to the real is through this awareness, similar to the moments of 'the kick' in the film Inception. The 'kick' is the reminder to the dreaming characters in the film that

Figure 5 they are dreaming and this allows them to drop further into the dream to obtain a certain objectivity and control from within the virtual strata of consciousness. This

22 shamanic awareness describes the reverse-engineered architecture of the real and virtual. All that is required is knowledge of the rules of an image's construction - the medium is the message. In self reflexively we are still in control. In Dennis del Favero’s Scenario (UNSW iCinema, Sydney Film Festival 2011) the viewer is subjected to a fully immersive, 3D projected environment which responds to and surrounds the viewer. Scenario is a participatory game in which a leap of is taken within a virtual space where we can demonstrate functional and perceptual abilities to control an outcome - to play a game. Here the belief in the virtual here is a matter of increments towards what can be considered total immersion - an immersion which approaches the actual. Within a constructed virtual environment the viewer witnesses morphogenesis: the self organisation of complex systems from chaos to give rise to a generation of new forms. The 3D immersive space is not just data but a usable space with a tangible response to the participants. The potential of the virtual environment is that we can know its ontology as part of the actual environment, but that there is another virtual environment which configures a new ontology dependant on the user. Space and object are activated by human presence, such as the body being visible in digital space, giving birth to a collective, pictorial impression of a virtually present body. In the conventional notion of animism it is evident that there is an interconnectedness between matter and spirit and perhaps the body and the ethereality of virtual space. The virtual offers us this similar, designed situational space waiting for us to animate it. The author of this fabrication in Scenario indicates a being-watched state as well as being phenomenologically transferred by a participatory, multifarious, virtual space. It seems within this space, images first reduce, then hyper-develop to a familiarity of foreignness, putting the viewer within a desirable reach of the unknown. To some extent, the appearance of human bondage with the virtual environment in a digital artwork requires seamless digital compositing. We could also refer to the AES + F collective (The Feast of Trimalchio 2009), as an example of reverent bondage to image, although in the stylisation of images AES+F demonstrate a breaching into the virtual by hyper-stylisation, making image more vivid than life yet also more familiar. Movements are reduced to a moment-by-moment morphing, an apparent existence 23 without true fluidity due to the hyper-perceptions of each separate moment. With the technique of pixel blending (interpolation of image movement between frames) and an idealised staging of imagery, AES+F describe their work as consumerist and mythological, taking advantage of positioning in a ‘high culture’ to “subvert orders of reality, fantasy, history and time.”33 The magnanimity of the Feast of Trimalchio uses the contrivances of media culture upon the audience and is visually gratuitous in its grandeur. Their image is achieved by the composition of separate, ambiguous, iconographic elements which are not in fluid time and displaces the human from the origin of the photo studio to an emergent digital reality. The concept of the body being bound to virtual environments is a central notion in the pre-conceptualisation of making film. In my dance film work (Dream Shelving 2011, Vivaria 2009, Simulated Rapture 2007 and Boxing Baby Jane 2005) I deconstruct this form by pre-contextualising or privileging the performer to be aware of the digital environment they are about to become part of. The performer constructs the work for a pre-made digital environment and projectively responds to an invisible, virtual space. Their translation into a storyboard image is to dance a not- yet existent space or one not yet activated by human image. The performer works with a space of their cognition. The performer is complicit in how they become part of the composite image, developing a virtual-phenomenological acquaintance through an understanding of where they will be in the finished film. This is reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis or Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times where workers are subjected to and encompassed by the machine. The technogenetic 'body- becoming' is the body which is engaged in the passage between virtual and actual, moving from reality to appearance. Erin Manning points out that digital technologies work with the body at the level of perceptual emergence. To make new emergence appear in a digital space it must be capable of making what she calls "new sensing bodies."34 The body must dance the novelty of the emergent space and understand

33 David Elliot, 17th Biennale of Sydney catalogue, The Beauty of Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age, Thames & Hudson, Australia, 2010, p. 259

34 Erin Manning, Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, p.72 24 that "a body is never wholly actual".35 The digital is animistic in the combination of a filmed, projective body and a digital space. Both manipulate each other. In Artifact Cartoons, the movement of the digital objects (the images of clusters of sticks, stones and dead organic material) follow the motion tracked limbs of a dancer/performer who responds to the overall virtual composit - they see the digital environment and perform within it. The human body is initially outside the virtual composit, and conducts a remote, projected narrative onto the digital spaces around it.

Collage and the hybrid image

Raul Ruiz states that a film can be seen as a world of images “in which several films co-exist simultaneously”36 and that the coexistence of many films generate a series of multiple, circular narratives that were previously hidden from the world. He uses the term ‘polysemic’, meaning ‘to have many meanings’ in reference to film. The juxtapositions of montage film editing is to draw images alongside other images, creating potential films within films. Making a process film where the model is of progressive capturing and assembly, is to form a new state through inter-relational montages. Meaning is revealed in the single image which can be magnified and recontextualised, transposing the original form. In the 21st Century, the process of spontaneous video capturing is reciprocated by expediated post production and the possibility of greater combinations, links and chains of events have become more apparent with expediated media. In mass-image collection there is also a re- definition of the archive. The archive resembles a brain with synapses ready to be interlinked, to produce cognizant messages which are then re-reflected as new material. Every viewer can make these unforseen image-circuits active with material that is old and transform it into the present. Pre-dating the internet, Ruiz proposed an

Figure 6

35 op.cit

36 Raul Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema, Éditions Dis Voir, Paris, 2005, p.110 25

open structure called ars combinatoria which he translated as “a system of multiple stories, overlapping according to certain established rules.”37 An example may be a film with nine different images which can be seen in sequence, then in pairs, reverse pairs and then into permutative multi-channel assemblies. Ruiz makes the observation that a lot can be gained from realising and associating during the viewing, as well as during shooting. He also makes reference to the awareness of ‘a monster’38 which holds a key to the invisible. As the actual allows itself to be suspended in this ars combinatoria, media is constantly bringing the invisible to light. Perhaps pessimistically, Freud proposed that “No one… lives in the real world. We occupy a space of our own creation, a collage compounded of bits and pieces of actuality.”39 In aesthetic collage, the relationships formed by attaching different objects to bodies make us think both of play and phantom memory. Strangely, the appropriated identity can reveal frightening paradoxes in relation to the original. Perhaps this is one reason for the refusal of the notion of ‘original’ from the fear of how much it is

37 ibid. p.88

38 ibid. p.89

39 W. Galin, 'Feelings', 1979, in Collage: Assembling Contemporary Art. Ed. Blanche Craig, Black Dog Publishing, London, 2008, p.47 26 prone to change. In the case of manipulation of the image of ‘original’ nature which is morphogenic, the ‘sacredness’ of nature can appear to be trivialised. Different approaches to ars combinatoria can be shown by comparing the Lumière Brothers to Georges Méliès. The Lumières would travel for weeks to authentically document an event whilst Méliès would make a similar interpretation of events without leaving the studio. Both documentary (framing and editing montage) and special effects produce a morphogenesis of the original, despite one attempting to be more authentic. Artifact Cartoons combines a part Lumières and part Melies approach to see what could be considered authenticity in forms of aesthetic journalism. It is a study of landscape which is open to infinite revision. Collage naturally sets up fear and distrust because of the occurrence of brutal, undisguised displacements. “Collage, is indeed a yearning for a lost world and reflects a universal sense of loss…. a nostalgia for the present to describe that sense of exile from the real.…”40 It does not need to abide by harmonious composition, in fact it derives its energy from difference. Clashing images drawn together in video compositing reveals the essence of what an image can be in relationship to others. Video compositing positively resembles the contemporary psyche; adaptable, intuitive, transparent and metamorphic. The contortions of image displacement where one image inflects the form of another is where animism occurs, though we know this is a perceptual animism within a simulacra. It can bring the potentially emergent, silent image into turbulence, and then in turn be reseen as phenomenological experience. Here the relation between ‘live’ and ‘mediated’ can coax a relationship between what is perceived as material and immaterial. The projection of the emergent image back into phenomenal space (eg. a room) makes a room a new room, we see it as intentional and because of that, phenomenal. The video projection hitting a wall is a collage onto a material surface. The gallery or the living room is a transformatory, democratic and mutable space that perpetually regenerates the actual.

40 ibid. p.31 27 Animation as Research

Artifact Cartoons is a six channel video installation which aims to reveal the potential animism of nature as can be transposed by moving digital images. Hypothetical events took place in the creation of virtual, phenomenological scenarios - ones in which I myself was immersed or as Maurice Merleau-Ponty would call ‘embedded’. Merleau-Ponty says, “Flesh is the matrix that gives rise to the perceptions between perceiver and perceived. We are in a web of perception, determining from the inside.”41 From this position, aesthetic video research and compositing can grasp life through reformation of sensory impressions, implementing a phenomenological status of the manufactured image. The work began with the sensorial, phenomenological impression of the environment and ended with playing with the edges of optical perception and in this sense it was an experiential study of a media- equipped subject in the bush.

Figure 7 The original imagery was obtained on two regional residencies, one at the Tanks Arts Centre (Cairns) and the other at the Greenhouse (ARC), in Fowlers Gap, NSW. The proposals for the residencies were to analyse whether digital representations of environment can be in themselves virtually animate, and to what extent the natural

41 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, Gallimard, Paris, 1945, Preface, p. vii 28 environment is virtually recalled through our senses, creating the individual phenomenological imaginary. In the artistic process of making and researching there were several stages which questioned the objectivity of research. There were a variety of breaking down processes implemented in the attempts to image the land. The camera and compositing process was a compilation of representations of natural materials and phenomena and their combinations with many others. This pursued an idea of digital reformation of environment which becomes manipulated from the first capturing of an image. In these visual experiments the aim was to shift sensory awareness away from bifocal, perspectival vision and play with proximities and paradoxical composition for the purpose of observing and procuring an aesthetic in- betweenness or an ephemera of the interleaved spaces between objects.

Figure 8

The processes of video compositing, motion tracking, pixel blending and stereoscopic distortion allowed this kind of research but it was clear that using strong recollections of the original image as research was important to keep it an authentic study, not just an exercise in manipulated, spirit-photography. These virtual images of nature were able to draw connections in the edit with other environments and surfaces. In this sense, the work developed a catalogue of memory-sense-observation experiments as an approach to optical research. The results show that video can to some extent act performatively and as such, behave like and be a form of nature.

29 The behaviour of video object games and their collaged intersections is to arrange objects in relation or resistance to each other, to see or anticipate a Gestalt effect. Each video image was previously developed to become a prepared image-object - in effect an image that had become isolated and in need of relations. Once the image- object was engaged with other images, the combination suggested that no image could be considered a unification but was always in relationship to another which surrounded or affected it. At times of resistance the image-object remained unchanged, and its concreteness had strong reactions to what surrounded it. Some image-objects, being affected by a changeable force such as wind evolved more quickly than others. Sometimes time of change of an object was altered so that the change of a rock would be affected more quickly in comparison to the change of a plant. Decay cycles of organic matter influenced the animation properties. Other influences on the outcomes were time, scale and graphic intensity of represented matter.

The original proposal of Artifact Cartoons was to research life through the particular characteristics of the video medium; time, light, duration, electronic signalling and of course, reflexivity. The pixelised nature of the digital image was considered to be part of the virtual object’s morphic field. As a digital pixel is a formation of a spectrum of colour and light. As a study of matter, the pixel's optical properties draw connections between the digital particle and the dust particle. The photons of light are then being a transmitter between the two and the phenomenological subject. This reduction of optical event to the capturing of digital particles (rather than an image of realism) was the most reductive aspect of thinking of this as ‘animated image research’. It had the aim of manifesting the morphic fields of the environment by using the particular attributes of the video medium to reflect upon matter and its morphogenic heritage. In the experiments on particalization there were three initial portrayals; one in many, one of many, and many in one. The combinations of particles, some joined together in large masses, others in small, were not complex organisms but seen as essential components similar to our own bodies. Animations resolved to images which

30 describe “matter as the sum of its parts”, “a single entity in a mass of entities” and “a single entity as a mass of entities”. Video objects which had related simultaneity in time and space were also composited to create a variety of simulacra, finding relationships simply by bridging commonalities. The collection of animations were born from playful and childlike but often arriving at the revelation that nature is itself a kind of displaced, Frankenstein accident formed by displacements between interacting objects.

To work with the concept of morphogenesis, I implemented a more complex method of image displacement to take the image beyond an initial collage. The first technical thing to solve in the image composit was “what does the displacement map of this image go on to affect?” In video a displacement map is primarily responsive to the luminance patterns of another image, but in order for the images to not be more organically or chaotically displaced a copy of the target is also used to pre-displace the source image. There is a mutual and ongoing displacement between the target and the source images. If the displacement is time-shifted it can stagger the predictable interference between two video layers, more resembling natural and chaotic interference. An example is the piece ‘animalofitssurroundings’ (see Figure 4 and 49:40 in full sequence of Artifact Cartoons). In this piece I intended to show an anthropomorphic form which is derived from the environment that surrounds it. The final character form has a chameleon appearance, its body is being composed and displaced by elements of the background. If a direct displacement was made (without time shifting and mutual displacement) it would seem to be simply warping the background surface plane in exactly the same time/space. Using a mutual and time shifted displacement between the body and its surroundings allows a more natural form in a self generating, interrelated, virtual body. It appears to be crawling or flapping in the leaves around it taking on characteristics similar to a bear or a bird, though this animistic character is being invented by the leaves that surround it. When being overly consumed by the mathematical parameters of image manipulation and animation, I found it helpful to think of the image-objects as toys. Playing with the images revealed subliminal qualities and behaviours (such as the 31 previous bear-bird example) which could not occur in the material world. The key was to play with them, and resist calculating relationships for them. An illustrated book called Bush Toys42 lists a series of Aboriginal children’s games and toys made from crude materials. One example was a leaf which could become a self-elevating propeller, flying on the hot air of a campfire. Others were primitive representations of grown up tools and objects such as a tin can rolling on the end of a bent piece of wire becoming a toy truck.43 In making animations of nature it seemed that taking on anthropological values such as ‘spear’ or ‘bird’ was a distraction in terms of the work as research of the environment. But child’s play (introducing basic algorithmic games as the activation of the inanimate object) was a central concern in thinking about how adults explore and make their own definitions in unquantifiable areas. Play does not determine meaning but embraces relationships between things and seeks connections. The desires of museum viewers or children playing can have equal value as the museum or the dusty playground are both removed from the actual. The videographic medium works in a similar way and is also becoming increasingly participatory and less empirical - its language has become more playful than film, its tools are cheaper and already exist in everyone's home. The question still exists whether we think of video as an actuality or as secondary virtual experience. This obviously depends on the quantity of time spent immersed in media and for a video editor who spends very little time outside this is hard to dispute! This is the point of the singularity; the time when computers become dominant on our planet and we can work subject to their programs. Self determination in the singularity is perhaps only possible in our and through authorship of our own virtual realities. In the singularity, the subjective of the human will be more entangled with the virtual, and equally as significant, the actual will be difficult to distinguish from the virtual.

42 Claudia Haagen, Bush Toys, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 1994, p.91

43 ibid p.89 32 Figure 9

To manipulators of the inanimate, from puppeteers to motion graphics designers, animistic tools are used to approach a higher state of consciousness.44 In the bush I found that identifying objects as anthropomorphic instruments was a tempting game to play, and was used for animation in a few of the final works. I also found that sources of movement, for example, raindrops, palm leaves falling and wind, although useful as nature’s animated movements were often dynamically superficial in relation to the functions of a plant. For example, the fluttering of plant bodies in the wind had to be discounted as animistic as this is not the movement of the plant itself, but the air around it. Apparent signs of life in weather and the interference patterns of animals and insects cannot necessarily be attributed to the life of the plant, even though Tetsuro Watsuji in Climate and Culture indicates that plants are bound to these affective surroundings. Summoning the soul of the inanimate is usually performed as a ritual to derive sense through cognitive identification, and therefore only based on things we know or can perceive. The materialism of processes manifest spiritualist images through a pragmatic and ritualistic technique. As Jan Verwoert writes “ maintained that occultism was not just a matter of belief but also of practice…a thoroughly pragmatic attitude towards the of higher states of consciousness”45 Much of the processes of video animation are

44 Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2001 p.35

45 Jan Verwoert, The Other Side, Frieze, Issue 93, September 2005 (http://www.frieze.com/ issue/article/the_other_side1/) 33 programmatic and the application of these to chaotic images of nature has the aim of realising the occult properties of media.

Artifact Cartoons produces hybrid images through connections between images perceived in phenomenological observation. The process assumes that an image is not a thing but a medium, allowing it to be transformed. A perceptual surface derived from matter with another purpose. In experimentation with video and its connection to material, vision is not considered only an illustrative layer but a highly metamorphic one, 'material' in itself. Light being bounced off matter renders a reflection on the back of our retina but with a distinct and learned relationship between this and actual material. It leads immediately to the fallibility of perception, however once an object invariably becomes virtual it is free to move into many other conducive and perpetual relationships in a fetishised denial of the original.

In original videographic capturing the form is often blurred but is still used in its secondary form as an impressionistic diffraction of light. Light itself, in its interaction with matter, also suggests other respective content. The initial abstraction which takes place in virtual replication, reveals the ambivalence of any observations of objects in relation to their actual. What becomes more interesting is how perception is capable of changing during time-based recording. The temporality of observation is noted but it also draws attention to the delimitation of the camera itself. The recorder and the material is never fixed – the camera may move, the aperture may change, the body holding it moves, nothing can be static. In the compositing of video images we are beginning with displaced and to some extent, disempowered archive material. Any manipulations, such as slowing images down, is to control and divert the object’s visual assets. In Étienne Jules-Marey’s chronophotography, we witness fractures of the moment which remove us from the a-priori actual and draw us into cinematographic reflexivity. We see the movement image as a continuum that can appear open and closed at different points and we become aware that we know matter through various apperceptions of media. Artifact Cartoons works with these situations of recording where the content moves too grossly to perceive more than surface. The way to 34 excavate an image is to remain in moments of ambivalence where it is still readily becoming something. Of course the first click of a keyframe to control that ambivalence is an attempt to author content in the image. We are distracted by semiotics which attempts to replace the living ambivalences of matter. In the of animation we can counteract this by focussing on the new constructions according to imposed, manipulative algorithms creating a new actual which reveals what the image has become. With disregard for notions of original the video object becomes animist, a sequence of aesthetics which virtually self-generate a different paradigm. The futility of origin in this paradigm is evident in that for example a thirty second video of a plant shows practically nothing about a plant’s life (there is no difference between 20 or 20,000 video images in this time frame) so it is clear that we need to work on a different scale to address this difference. This exemplifies the tenuous relation of the original material to the virtual image and the need for play and tactility to procure animism in this kind of material. The early phenomenologist Edmund Husserl believed that to know something is to perceive it as “I think an object”46, that is to see an object whilst being conscious of how it is being seen. The predominant mode of photographic capturing, whether it is by a tourist or an artist is ‘I am an outside photographer photographing an object through my own observation’ which is a subjective reference to oneself in the image. For the tourist this is the primary goal in taking the photograph, the self referentiality of being with an object or place. But because the entirety of a situation cannot be captured in an image alone this gives a further reason for the hybridised, reflexive image. The formation of reflexivity perpetually differentiating from its original substance perhaps begins with a chiaroscuro based research of an object , how it develops photogenic properties and ultimately leads to graphic result – a Virillian synthetic vision. Considering this kind of post modern rupture of authenticity, in the video image we can be offered only the mutable side-effects of matter and subsequently the image is able to have both little value or any value we desire. Despite the optical limitations of video material the video object is also an

46 Emmanuel Levinas, Discovering Existence with Husserl, Northwestern University, 1998 p.22 35 experiment in mutable ontology; where a synthetic image algorithms can determine inherent meaning - movement is life. But the ontology of the image leads us away from the phenomenological relationship to the video object which is of importance in Artifact Cartoons. In Artifact Cartoons, optical research takes place only to satisfy a desire for observation but is then quickly followed by a series of re-compositions to provide further variation on the subject. During the capture process, the image may be preconceived as part of its future composition, imaginary pre-composition of the phenomenological image. This research process requires us to accept a visual anecdote or morphogenic form as a document of nature. The production of mutated images and Image’s pre-existence in virtual simulacra, allows us to take part in making these projections from combinations of perceptions and manipulations. From this apparent restriction we urgently pursue infinite varieties of graphic mutation, as though belief in origin is no longer possible. Alternatively the simulacra of the image and its weird situation of possibility, offers us a core virtual nature on par with occult practice, we must work with copies to understand essence and be suffice with an ultimately altered system.

Tango with the ‘dead’ image

The virtual ghilaf 47 or layers of reality can be a reminder of the importance of taking part, living or dancing within virtual space. In animation generally, the incentive is to make what is static move and to have life. But for emergence, quite a bit of effort is required to turn an image into a living entity, not to mention the formulative leap which takes matter beyond mere aesthetic appearance, beyond the iconographic. Brian Massumi says “a body occupying one position on the grid might succeed in making a move to occupy another position… but movement like this adds nothing at all. You just get two successive states: multiples of zero”48 The act of taking a photograph or to breathe life into the digital is to initiate an incarnation that sets in

47 Raul Ruiz Poetics of Cinema (cf. Louis Massignon on Hallaj and Harry A. Wolfson’s Le ), Éditions Dis Voir, 2005, p.89

48 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, Movement, Affect, Sensation, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2002, p.3 36 motion all forms of play. This pre-establishes a relationship between videography and appearances of veiled ‘surfaces’ of matter. The animism of the inanimate, such as rocks and sand, must somehow be animated to retain the essence of objects which are objects moving in Fernand Deligny's ‘lines of drift’ or Erin Manning’s, ‘woven environments’.49 Movement needs to be considered ‘extensive’ rather than as singlar thought points forming a line, to retain as Massumi says, the “dynamic unity or continuity of the movements”50 In Artifact Cartoons the compositing of dance movements into the image was a requirement to activate the object. For all animation the object must move. Without movement the object or composit does not 'emerge'. The most direct activation was through the interaction of the living movements of a human which is a precognitive adaptation coming from the dancer projecting themselves into the aforseen image whilst being filmed. This is still a video image of a dancer made of video pixels, yet to be post-infused with another image. It requires a belief in the electronic conversion of light, to sensor to pixel to think of this as animism. In the animation, emergence implies a metamorphic change in its material, from digital to a synthetic imaginary plane. The boundary becomes impotent (or Massumi's 'zero' value) when the morph appears to enact an awareness of the larger ‘metamorphic technosphere’ (Sobchack). A copying addition of ‘quick change’51 leads quickly into the anti-animist hyperreal where the morphed image loses its meaning. For Massumi a chasm exists where images (such as the many static digital objects in Artifact Cartoons) are animated retrospectively and fail to achieve life-like movement. As post production animated movement is not intrinsic to the photographed object, Massumi suggests that plotting movement back into them causes a deadness in the animation. To understand this dilemma of animation is to understand the problem of separating an object from its movement. Massumi notes that when we observe objects moving, they naturally undergo qualitative changes

49 Erin Manning, Relationscapes, 'Into the Diagram' lecture, Artspace Sydney 2012 (see https://diagramworkshop.wordpress.com/)

50 ibid p.6

51 Vivian Sobchack, Meta-Morphism Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick change, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, London, 2000 p. xiii 37 depending on their movement status. When we see an object momentarily as it is moving through a certain pathway, Massumi describes the ‘arrested’ object, seen in this way, being defined by what it has just done and where it has ended. “It has withdrawn into an all-encompassing relation with what it will be.

Figure 10

It is becoming absorbed in occupying its field of potential.”52 The changes that take place reveal one of the largest contradictions of nature – “the concept of nature concerns modification not essence”53. To avoid the ‘dead’ image I felt the perpetual need to integrate movements from other natural forms, such as a leaf twirling in a spider’s web, the path of ants moving backwards and forwards along a tree branch. Where natural kinetic events felt limited in their relation to objects, a re-created, motion tracked dance movement could create a tangential modification of the object. For example, the perspectival movement of the eyes looking up, down, left, right, near and far, tracing and scanning the environment, never being able to see it as a whole. This became a remote interaction with the inanimate object but was still investigating for how modification allows an engagement with phenomenological space. I was interested in how the abstract movement of sketching illuminated a relationship to inanimate material. Erin Manning’s studies of the autistic, pre-objective state

52 ibid. p.7

53 op.cit 38 where shape has no definable form refers to individuals exploring foreignness where a lack of empathy or a lack of sentient perception is a boundary which puts the individual in a state of sensory displacement, creating a gap between the living environment and the mental state. Manning’s refers to Fernand Deligny's work with autistic patients where personal subjective drawings of daily movements we able to be used as a kind of choreographic analysis of pre-verbal expression in space. The autistic's lack of empathetic perception in the degree of seeing in nature is a negotiation, in Manning’s words, of an elastic space54, where dance-like forms can be an expression for mapping space where there is a continually transgressive, subjective point of view. The focus for autistic people is often not the ‘object’ but the system of fields which surround it. Manning describes the autistic patient in a dynamic state of “coming to be” with feelings rather than senses.55 Their relation to the environment is not concrete but is continuously forming as she quotes from Deligny's writing, “We are not worldly yet”. Autism lingers in a world which is continually being shaped, a consciousness which attends to too much and disables the objective, or the original. With little concept of objectivity or origin, the line drawings of Deligny’s patients depict movements of the day as well as incidental feelings - the pure expression of a line moving through space. These traces were a graphical representation of a phenomenological position, the unquantifiable marking of subjective space outside linguistic and semiotic structures. These types of ‘feeling recollections’ of autistic patients were tested as a way of pictorialising unknowable, subjective space. These subjective lines placed another map onto the objective environmental image without a determinative association. Similar processes to these were used in Artifact Cartoons in the tracings made by the dancer in Fly Frenzy (43:50 and Fig. 14), Sandbody (7:19) and Rabbitlichen (48:10) (see fig 11.).

54 Erin Manning, Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy, MIT Press, 2009, p.30

55 Relationscapes: Into the Diagram lecture, Artspace Sydney 2012 (see https://diagramworkshop.wordpress.com/) MIT Press, 2009

39 Fig. 11.

To integrate the movements of a dancer to activate notions around the inanimate image-object drew on this kind of pseudo-autistic displacement. Lines were recorded from a dancer who was fundamentally removed from the actual and only witness to a virtual, videographic image of an environment. The dancer, herself an experienced Bodyweather dancer, was well acquainted with responding to environment. Bodyweather dance is described as “the body that measures the landscape, the body in intercourse with weather… the body in love-death relation to the day.”56 Though here she was required to engage with a virtual environment. Her movements were traced by recording led lights attached to her body: the trace of which could then interact with the composited environment. These tracings were also used as motion tracks for other photographed particles and objects. This relatively tangential aspect of movement to determine a virtual animism of the digital objects in the works had two advantages. The first freed the image from solo authorship and the second allowed the animation of movement to be determined by an external player who is primarily responding to the virtual environment. The motion tracked dance movements were used to impose human movement on nearly all the animations

56 Min Tanaka, founder of Bodyweather Dance, Bodyweather website, viewed March 2012, URL http://www.slowlab.net 40 Figure 12

(in addition to other algorithmic effects to optimise the composit). This meant that alongside of my own dedication to a symbiotic observation of environment, the work was informed only by experiences of and responses to digital forms.

Hallucinations can often occur on encounters in foreign environments, seeing more than is actually there and although this can be seen as a distortion these distortions are included as part of the animistic portrayal. When travelling to a different climate or meeting a new person, the mind continues to make associations, to some extent distortional to establish relationships. We see the world through our own eyes. Most of these associations are intuitive and accumulative. The viewing of the world from in-betweenness where awareness is a form of hallucination leads to the point where final objectivity is not important. The art of play has no real purpose apart from the impulsive drive to connect with something gained through an activity. Andre Breton pointed out that the hallucinatory only occurs under the precondition of normality, so in the case of the foreign encounter, the perpetual re-encounter of the world is a form of hallucination. In the bush, the urban artist experiences a perceptual change, being no longer in familiar surroundings. The phenomenological entanglement of camera, space and subject for the traveller infers participatory observation which can only result in emergent variations of the material environment. When an artist sees a flower, the artist is part of an entanglement with the camera and

41 the hallucination of the surroundings. The entanglement of the digital photographer is constantly at the boundary of imagining, firing off versions of the surroundings yet so little of the actual is being reproduced here. The hallucinatory is also a reassuring buffer zone to the uninitiated when considering the passage of life and death in the bush. The urban artist is bound up within the knowledge that their own life is not at risk in the bush as they have comforts and transport to remove them from the harsh reality of nature and is therefore a permanent visitor, not the same as their environment. The enormity of the surroundings is only temporarily acknowledged on these kinds of encounters.

Fig 14

42 Conclusion

“a color is in the company of its kin—all its potential variations. The spectrum is the invisible background against which ‘a’ color stands out. It is the ever-present virtual whole of each color apart”57

Throughout this project I have been interested in the paradoxes between body, camera and the inanimate components of the environment. The work Artifact Cartoons considered to what extent we can know or perceive life in nature if there are boundaries that make it unfamiliar to us, we don’t see it move nor have a tangible connection to us. It also asks to what extent to we can design a phenomenological experience of life through digital mediation. This work is bound within the perplexities of observation (and experience) that come only via the lens, commonly termed the “apperception of the camera”.58 The ‘naïve’ approach to understanding the environment as foreign assumes that the environment is separate to us which is a contradiction to phenomenology. The videographic process can remain closely bound to natural processes by being reconciled through ‘play’ in the bush like a child, capturing images, developing them for our own purposes. This kind of play binds us back into the complexity of nature. To grasp an enmeshed subject-camera- environment is attempt to embrace the mutable perceptions which are simultaneously taking place. As David Abram writes,

“There is more to any thing, or to the world, than I can perceive at any moment. Besides that which I can directly see as a particular oak tree or building, I know or intuit that there are also those facets of the oak or building that are visible to another perceiver that I see. I sense that that tree is much more than what I directly see of it, since it is also what the others, whom I see perceive of it.”59

57 Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts, MIT Press, 2011, p.87

58 Paul Virillio, The Art of the Motor, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1995, p.65

59 David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, Vintage Books, New York, 1996, p.39 43 Figure 13

Artifact Cartoons showed the dilemma between photographic essence (phenomenology) and virtual space’s progressive hybridity (morphogenesis). In the observation/shooting stage a photographer can be conscious of spatial awareness, time and sense of a rock or a tree, but once an image is captured it instantly becomes non-sacred and morphogenic. This work also considered Deleuze’s proposal that the actual is mere an apparition of virtual parts, and that the virtual object is an entity itself, capable of forming relationships to other objects. The hybridity of the image found paradoxical relationships in dealing with the varieties of aesthetic sense in each image, dealing with attractions and repulsions to other images in the collection. Within phenomenological encounter and play with animation we can end up with paradoxical contexts of aesthetics. However, the point of considering life in an animated image was noted as being able to be activated by a remote catalyst, namely, the filmed body. The video ‘object’ could be seen to be in a kind of fission of software algorithms, and the combinatorial foundation point of an emergent event. The experiments in Artifact Cartoons used ‘artifice’ or artificial processes of media to parallel digital operation with natural operation. Mastering the medium is to a large extent indicative of what we can 'know by acquaintance' (). This acquaintance is founded on the basis that as children we begin life animistically, endowing objects with desire and developing relationships with them, projecting our awareness and engagement into the shadowy areas of the visible. The videographic image inherently contains the virtual signature of the person who took it, indicating ‘I 44 am here, I saw this or this is a version of what I know.’ The evocative, ambiguous image suggests the in-betweenness of people in the world and the virtual image cloud that surrounds us. The outcome of these re-combined video entities was to make an expression of the perpetual virtualisation of the actual. After compositing around sixty animation sequences, I could no longer see any fundamental difference between the visualisations of desert or the visualisations of forest. All images could ultimately be reduced to the vibration of the digital particle, of which the original source was variously indeterminable - whether it was originally digital or dust. This work explored how intersubjectivity and phenomenology are involved in the apperception of nature. In Deleuzian terms, the ‘plane of imminence’ is achieved when the actual is dissolved and both object and image become virtual. However another aspect of animism is that it must connect to an actual object to prevent it, from becoming hyperreal: “the real divested of the anti-real becomes hyperreal, more real than real, and vanishes into simulation”60 The outcome is ideally to see the work as a series of interlinked perceptual artifacts which are serial derivatives of the actual. Digital animation only has the intention of acting as a catalyst and is a reasoning in itself, addressed by Baudrillard as “object thought” - the acknowledgement that the world and subject reciprocally think each other into being. The animated mind is in constant play with the world around it like light reflecting off surfaces, the object's reflection bounces back at us giving a partial view.

“Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow; Nought may endure but mutability!”61

60 Impossible Exchange, Jean Baudrillard, Translator: Chris Turner, London: Verso, 2001, p.12

61 Mary W. Shelley, Frankenstein’s Monster, first published 1831, republished by eBooks@adelaide, Adelaide University Library, Chapter 10, URL http://www.gutenberg.org/files/84/84-h/84-h.htm#chap10 45 BIBLIOGRAPHY

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46 Krauss, Rosalind, A Note on Photography and the Simulacral, October, Vol 31, MIT Press, 1984, p.58 Levinas, Emmanuel, Discovering Existence with Husserl, Northwestern University, 1998 p.22

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47 Verwoert, Jan, The Other Side, Frieze, Issue 93, September 2005 (http://www.frieze.com/ issue/article/the_other_side1/)

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48 contact: Samuel James email: [email protected] website: www.shimmerpixel.blogspot.com

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