Digital Animism
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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 person, 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 COPYRIGHT STATEMENT ‘I hereby grant the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all proprietary rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation. I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstract International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only). I have either used no substantial portions of copyright material in my thesis or I have obtained permission to use copyright material; where permission has not been granted I have applied/will apply for a partial restriction of the digital copy of my thesis or dissertation.' Signed Date 7/10/13 AUTHENTICITY STATEMENT ‘I certify that the Library deposit digital copy is a direct equivalent of the final officially approved version of my thesis. No emendation of content has occurred and if there are any minor variations in formatting, they are the result of the conversion to digital format.’ 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 Australia 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 aesthetics 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 plane, 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 Object 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 life to objects as well as beings. In writings on child psychology, Jean Piaget’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 reality, 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 belief in souls or spirits, an expansive grouping of 'entities that are beyond empricial study'2 to Sigmund Freud's 20th Century reductive psychology of spirits and demons only being 'projections of man's own emotional impulses'3. Graham Harvey also discusses the alternative panpsychic realities 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 event. 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