Film

Visibility

In the cinema the image we see on the screen has also passed through the stage of a written text, has then been "visualized" in the mind of the director, then physically reconstructed on the set, and finally fixed in the frames of the film itself. A film is therefore the outcome of a succession of phases, both material and otherwise, in the course of which the images acquire form. During this process, the "mental cinema" of the imagination has a function no less important than that of the actual creation of the sequences as they will be recorded y the camera and then put together on the moviola. This mental cinema is always at work in each one of us, and it always has been, even before the invention of the cinema. Nor does it ever stop projecting images before our mind's eye.

...What will be the future of the individual imagination in what is usually called the "civilization of the image"? Will the power of evoking images of things that are not there continue to develop in a human race increasingly inundated by a flood of prefabricated images? At one time the visual memory of an individual was limited to the heritage of his direct experiences and to a restricted repertory of image reflected in culture. The possibility of giving form to personal myths arose from the way in which the fragments of this memory came together in unexpected and evocative combinations. We are bombarded today by such a quantity of images that we can no longer distinguish direct experience from what we have seen for a few second on television. The memory is littered with bits and pieces of images, like a rubbish dump, and it is more and more unlikely that any one form among so many will succeed in standing out.

Italo Calvino
Six Memos for the Next Millennium: Visibility
1985

studio lighting

Hadron

Latest purchase. Clearly necessary. Via http://www.super-collider.com/

Soviet design

Vera Mukhina 12 sided bevelled drinking glass

Zaporozhets Soviet subcompact car 

Picture in your mind a glass, and then a car. 

How things are supposed to look.

Standard/ideal images.

From Made in Russian : Unsung Icons of Soviet Design 

it's glorious ricketiness

I think in order to transform a work into a cult object one must be able to break, dislocate, unhinge it so that one can remember only parts of it, irrespective of their original relationship with the whole. In the case of a book one can unhinge it, so to speak, physically, reducing it to a series of excerpts. A movie on the contrary, must be already ramshackle, rickety, unhinged in itself.

A perfect movie, since it cannot be reread every time we want, from the point we choose, as happens with a book, remains in our memory as a whole, in the form of a central idea or emotion; only an unhinged movie survives as a disconnected series of images, of peaks, of visual icebergs. It should display not one central idea but many. It should not reveal a coherent philosophy of composition. It must live on, and because of, it's glorious ricketiness.

...

Each actor repeats a part played on other occasions and because human beings live not "real" life but life as stereotypically portrayed in previous films.

...

Two clichés make us laugh because but a hundred clichés move us because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion. 

Just as the extreme of pain meets sensual pleasure, and the extreme of perversion borders on mystical energy, so too the extreme of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the Sublime.

Travels in Hyperreality

Umberto Eco 

1984

Metaxy

Existence has the structure of the Inbetween, of the Platonic metaxy, and if anything is constant in the history of mankind it is the language of tension between life and death, immortality and mortality, perfection and imperfection, time and timelessness, between order and disorder, truth and untruth, sense and senselessness of existence

Eric Voegelin 

A New Refutation of Time

It is not licit to speak of the form of the moon or of it's colour; the form and colour are the moon; neither can one speak of the perception of the mind, since the mind is nothing other than a series of perceptions.

Jorge Luis Borges

Being a Mollusc...

In short, there were no limitations to my thoughts, which weren't thoughts, after all, because I had no brain to think them; every cell on it's own though every thinkable thing all at once, not through images, since we had not images of any kind at our disposal, but simply in that indeterminate way of feeling oneself there, which did not prevent us from feeling ourselves equally there in some other way.

It was a rich and free and contented condition, my condition at that time, quite the contrary of what you might think.

...

A Desperation filled me, a desire not to do anything special, which would have been out of place, knowing that there was nothing special to do, or non special either, but to respond in some way...

…

The shell in this way was able to create visual image of shells, which are things very similar – as far as we know – to the shell itself, except that the shell is here, whereas the images of it are formed elsewhere, possibly on the retina. An image therefore presupposes a retina, which in turn presupposes a complex system stemming from an encephalon. So in producing the shell, I also produced its image - not one, of course, but many because with one shell you can make as many shell-images as you want – but only potential images because to form an image you need all the requisites I mentioned before: and encephalon with its optic ganglia, and an optic nerve to carry the vibrations from outside to inside, and this optic nerve, at the other extremity, ends in something made purposely to see what there is outside, namely the eye.

…

In short, I conceived of the eye-encephalon link as a kind of tunnel dug from the outside by the force of what was ready to become and image, rather than from within by the intention of picking up any old image.

Excerpts from The Spiral

The Complete Cosmicomics

Italo Calvino

The Moon Milk Gatherers

Now, you will ask me what in he world we went up on the Moon for; I'll explain to you. We went to collect the milk, with a big spoon and a bucket. Moon-milk was very thick, like a kind of cream cheese. It formed in the crevices between one scale and the next, through the fermentation of various bodies and substances of terrestrial origin which had flown up from the prairies and forests and lakes, as the Moon sailed over them. It was composed chiefly of vegetal juices, tadpoles, bitumen, lentils, honey, starch crystals, sturgeon eggs, moulds, pollens, gelatinous matter, worms, resins, pepper, mineral salts, combustion residue. You had only to dip the spoon under the scales that covered the Moon's scabby terrain, and you brought it out filled with that precious muck. Not in the pure state, obviously; there was a lot of refuse. In the fermentation (which took place as the Moon passed over the expanses of hot air above the deserts) not all the bodies melted; some remained stuck in it: fingernails and cartilage, bolts, sea horses, nuts and peduncles, shards of crockery, fish hooks, at times even a comb. So this paste, after it was collected, had to be refined, filtered. But that wasn't the difficulty: the hard part was transporting it down to Earth. This is how we did it: we hurled each spoonful into the air with both hands, using the spoon as a catapult. The cheese flew, and if we had thrown it hard enough, it stuck to the ceiling, I mean the surface of the sea. Once there, it floated, and it was easy enough to pull it into the boat.

Exerpt from The Distance of the Moon, The Complete Cosmicomics
Italo Calvino

Flight 6607

"Standing before costly objects of technological beauty, we may be tempted to reject the possibility of awe, for fear that we could grow stupid through admiration. We may feel at risk of becoming overimpressed by architecture and engineering, of being dumbstruck by the Bombardier trains that progress driverlessly between satellites or by the General Electrid GE90 engines that hang lightly off the composite wings of a Boeing 777 bound for Seoul.
And yet to refuse to be awed at all might in the end be merely another kind of foolishness. In a world full of chaos and irregularity, the terminal seemed a worthy and intriguing refuge of elegance and logic."

A Week at the Airport : A Heathrow Diary

Alain De Botton

An Interview

Yet another interview with Tom McCarthy... here

Horizonless

And the sea, too, is flat. I know it sounds ridiculous to say this since all seas are flat – but this sea's flat in the most amzaing way. Picture a frozen bay extending in a pure white out from the quayside. Picture skaters endlessly circling, pirouetting, gliding around it, passing the odd ship held firmly in position by the ice. And don't picture some chocolate-box Bruegel vignette: this frozen landscape isn't social like his – it's otherworldly, shapes and movement all becoming abstract as they open out to white infinity. The land segues seamlessly into the sea, the sea into the sky, which is white too. I've just spent the pest part of two hours sitting on a bench looking for a hinge: a line to the horizon, some kind of limit. But I couldn't find one. There's just space, and then it kind of disappears into itself. I keep thinking of the ellipse into which Maňásek's saint gravitated – anit-gravitated rather.

I'm in my hotel, getting ready to go out again. I'm hooked on this horizonless horizon. When I was staring at it earlier, beside the harbour walls, a group of young men had etched out, by scraping hockey sticks against the ice, a large rectangle, twenty by ten metres, and then subdivided the rectangle into half blocks and semicircles, reclaiming from the tabula rasa of ice a hockey courts across whose surface their sticks fires a round puck towards goals that had no nets. I watched them for a while, then left my bench, stepped down onto the frozen bay an walked a little way out. The skaters' blades had inscribed coruscating gyres, spirals and intersecting circles on the ice: concentric, eccentric, irregular, you name it. As I walked out further, slipping a little but soon finding my feet, the markings grew less frequent. Still no hinge. How far out do you have to go to find one? I'm obsessed by this question. Basic visual laws require there to be some kind of edge, somewhere. I want to go and find out where it is. I've come back to my room to fetch a warm jumper – and of course to write you this letter which I'll post from a cute little mailbox on the quayside. Then it's out again into the white...

Men in Space

Tom McCarthy

Gravity/Infinity

I felt really happy. We passed through a small cloud. The cloud seen from inside like this, was gritty, liked spilled earth or dust flakes in a stairwell. Eventually the sun would set for ever — burn out, pop, extinguish — and the universe would run down like a Fisher Price toy whose spring has unwound to its very end. Then there’d be no more music, no more loops. Or maybe, before that, we’d just run out of fuel. For now, though, the clouds tilted and the weightlessness set in once more as we banked, turning, heading back, again.

Remainder by Tom McCarthy

Remainder

"Yes," I said, "but I don't think it was a straight memory. It was more complex. Maybe it was various things all rolled together: memories, imaginings, films, I don't know. But that bits not important. What's important is that I remembered it, and it was crystal clear."

Remainder
Tom McCarthy

A good find

Found by Ramsay on the bus from St. Andrews. Ramsay thinks, "Hazel will like this".

Summary of The Death of the Author

CVCS, Semester 2
Week 2 : Authorship
A summary of The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes


The passage begins with a quote from Sarrasine Balzac as an example of a piece of literature in which the narrator is unknown, we do not know who is speaking. As this is possible in the written but not the spoken word, the author Barthes claims that writing is the "deconstruction of every voice, of every point of origin."

He states how in ethnographic societies a mediator or shaman will tell stories but is not directly given credit for the story as it is a retelling, a performance. The idea of the 'Author' is a relatively recent one, "the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology which has attached the greatest importance to the 'person' of the author. The passage goes on to state that "It is language that speaks, not the author".

Barthes gives an example of how Proust played with this view of the narrative and where real life and fiction meet and which comes first. He then goes on to talk about writing from a linguistic point of view, "Linguistically, the author is never more than the instance of writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance of saying I" This therefore reinforces the idea of the "removal of the author."

So if we accept this so called "Death of the Author", this completely transforms how we read modern literature. The passage here claims that from the author creating a book, now the book and the author come into being at the same time.
"There is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now."

Barthes then goes on to say that basically, nothing is original or can be original.
"We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single theological meaning - but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture."

Therefore, just by using language, "words only explainable through other words", the author is removed. Modern writing can no longer be deciphered, only disentangled, all the multiple references from our shared culture.

The passage concludes that the Author has lost all significance. It is only when all these fragments are read by the reader that literature can mean anything,
"The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in it's destination."


You, the Reader.

If on a Winter's Night a Traveller

CVCS is the written/theory part of our course at college. And it's not my favorite. Some of it is really interesting, but most of the time it just seems like they are trying to draw imaginary circles round things, that can't actually apply, and at the end of the day don't mean anything. So this year it's all Modernism/Postmodernism. And everything seems to be to do with Modernism or Postmodernism so I should really know what they are. But a semester in, and I'm pretty much still clueless. I start to think I'm getting somewhere, but then if I had to explain it to anyone else, I wouldn't be able to at all.

Plus don't get me started on the readings they give us. For example, if this means anything to anyone, please let me know.

Anyway. I was talking about this with my studio work tutor, ie. not a CVCS tutor, and he told me some examples of Postmodern novels I should read. So I read the New York Trilogy and loved it, therefore I was looking forward to reading If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. But I feel like I've been reading it for MONTHS and I'm only just approaching half way. Maybe it's because I haven't had any time to just sit down and read, I've just had snatches of time between things, on my lunch breaks at work etc. But then the way it's written, it stops and starts and stops and starts. There is the first chapter in which you, the Reader, sit down to read the book. And then the second chapter is the first chapter of the book being read. But then there is an error with the printing of the book. So then it's the first chapter of another book. Then another book, then another book, with chapters in between about the Reader. And this Reader finds all these first chapters of books really interesting. So he is trying to find the out what all these other books are that he reads the first chapter of. Perhaps the problem is that most of these First Chapters, I don't find particularly gripping. And if they are, then that's all you get. I guess that's the point, this frustration. But it's just no fun.

I will finish it though. I'll keep going, and maybe i'll change my mind.

Sofie Calle

I love Sofie Calle. And if I could have any book in the world it would be this one.
I had seen the above images from "The Chromatic Diet" a while ago and really liked the idea. It wasn't until much more recently I paid proper attention to the text to go with it,

"In Leviathan, Paul Auster describes Maria: "Some weeks she would indulge in what she called 'the chromatic diet', restricting herself to foods of a single colour on any given day." In order to bring Maria and myself closer together during the week of December 8-14, 1997, I decided to go by the book."

Yet more coincidences, as Paul Auster wrote The New York Trilogy, which I am currently reading (see last post). Sofie Calle had enjoyed Auster's previous books, probably including the New York Trilogy, and then asked him base a character on her in his next book, which he did in Leviathan, and then she went on to make work from this. Including the "Chromatic Diet". So I should also read Leviathan.

Also coincidently, today falls into the same week that Sofie Calle followed the Chromatic Diet, December 8-14, exactly twelve years later.

I really love Sofie Calle's work, but I can also see why people would hate it. A lot of it could be viewed as being overly sentimental, but I think she gets away with it, as she is just doing what she would do naturally, and it just so happens that this can be seen as art. It therefore happens very naturally, and she doesn't worry about it being "arty" enough or or too sentimental.

"I didn't see myself as an artist. I was playing for time"

The New York Trilogy

In my current work, I have been collecting things. Objects, drawings, photographs, sentences, ideas, thoughts and so on. As I did so and began to accumulate a volume of stuff, all these connections and links started appearing. Therefore my tutor told me to read The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster as a running theme throughout all his books is coincidence.

So I was sitting in the Cameo cafe/bar the other day, reading this book. In the chapter I was reading, two men were having a conversation about books. At the same time, I was half listening in to the conversation going on at the table behind me. At this table, there were two men talking about books. So this went on for a while, half reading about two men talking about books and half listening to two different men talk about books. Then one of the men behind me started recommending books to the other; a series of books called the Millennium Trilogy.

So I think I should read those next.