Futures and Fictions Page 22
Both Hoban’s novel and Bruckner’s postulations on time-travel and critical flicker frequency tie the experience of time to the mechanics of perception so that time might be slowed down or sped up, or even frozen, yet these interruptions are still predicated upon an idea of chronological time, time that moves forward or backwards in a linear manner — easy to envisage as a strip of film running through a film projector either fast-forwards or in reverse. Particularly in Bruckner’s example, time-travel is analogous to the action of fast-forwarding through images to get through time more quickly. Contrary to this, Fremder also speaks of the “jump” as the act of being launched into an entirely non-contiguous time and space. This could be seen to link with another film technology or, in this case, editing technique: the jump-cut, where time is advanced — or jumped forward — through the use of a non-continuous but still linked shot. DeLanda takes this even further in his film work through the violent refutation of continuity editing techniques that seek to question and ultimately break the relationship between image-movement and continuous, chronological time. Through his use of radical editing techniques in films such as Incontinence: A Diarrhetic Flow of Mismatches (1978), DeLanda creates a disjunction between image and the narrative movement of time by using editing techniques that will destroy the link between image and image, image and reaction or response, and the spatialisation of time.
In Incontinence, any sense of linear time, or, indeed, the groundedness of being-in-time, is completely ruptured, as time is cut up into a series of pieces that seem to be randomly pasted together. DeLanda’s approach focuses upon a single form of editing, in this case sightline or eyeline matching, matching in which the protagonist looks out of the frame in the direction of the next scene, thus producing continuity from one scene to the next. Through the use of repetition, DeLanda exaggerates and subverts the construction of a unified space and time to the point of the ridiculous, thus defying the homogenising possibilities of the technique and returning the “life” and “energy” to what he calls “film’s wet body”, suggesting film’s own slippery mutability (Halter 2011). The result, for the viewer, is a nauseating sense not of groundlessness but of being forcefully and constantly ungrounded from any stable connection with time and space: the notion of the “jump” therefore seems highly appropriate to explain this experience — although in film editing the jump-cut does involve a sense of connection, often through continuity of subject or only very slight variations of camera angle. Incontinence, however, violently disrupts the spatialisation of time through the misuse of matching techniques — that is, through emphasis on image-to-image movement, refusing the spatialisation of time by breaking the cause-effect relationship that links action in the present to that of the immediate future. The fact that this film is composed from scenes from the well-known play and film Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? means that an even greater sense of narrative confusion and structural incontinence is achieved. Recognisable scenes from the play are enacted repeatedly — with actors switching roles and locations, dialogue is fragmented during each replay of the same scene — undoing the expectations of gender, role and script. This fragmentation emphasises time as a series of ruptured moments.
DeLanda works through a repertoire of “crazy wipes”, pixelated transitions and other “fancy optical transitions” in his films in order to create this discontinuous time-space (Rosenbaum 2009). Mapping DeLanda’s use of these editing techniques is to understand the manner in which he approaches frames of film (he was working with 8mm, then mostly 16mm film and later video) as singular units to be pieced together in no predetermined order, and film itself as a mutable form to be freed from the constraints of an enforced linearity. Many of the effects that DeLanda uses, particularly in the early work, involve hand-painted wipes, effects that are drawn onto the film strip and which create the sense of DeLanda himself reaching into the space between images (or between frames) or of entering into the spaces between the flickering reality that Fremder experiences. Incontinence, for example, is organised into eight separate scenes, taking pieces of dialogue from Albee’s play, dialogue that is repeated within each scene (as mentioned previously). The disruption to the continuity editing technique of sightline matching is also played out through the breaking up of space and time within each scene and in the transition between scenes. This is achieved through shifting gender roles, replay, reversal and mirroring of space (people drop in and out of the frame from above and below, they speak to interlocutors in a previous or an ensuing scene and so on), and through intervention into the film strip itself in the form of the removal of frames (creating a flickering effect), as well as the use of DeLanda’s “crazy wipes” (vertical, horizontal and diagonal transitions across frames).
Slippery Pixels and Flicker-Points: Final Fabulations and the GIF
To exit time’s flow, to disrupt the continuous movement of time through a flicker of light or through the imperceptible shadows between flickering images is an impossibility for many of us in our current psycho-physical form; it is therefore what I would term a type of fabulation — a possible-impossible. Fabulation is a term often associated with literary analysis to describes forms of narrative and their relationship to time, yet here I evoke the term as an operation of possibility that is not yet possible, an action that is intimately bound up with time itself — an action that projects out of time. In this understanding, fabulation is bound up within the technical operation of the flicker to create a new time and space, and in this way the flicker-image enables a time and space that exceeds and evades the possibilities available to it and to us, and that calls forth a new understanding of time and the image that is not simply bound by the limits of “real” or already-existing. Yet fabulation, and by association, the flicker or flicker-image, is bound up with questions of “political meaning” (Bogue 2010: 14, quoting Deleuze); for to question the possibilities for an escape through time is to evoke the form of control that is inherent to a state of constant productivity and “the ends of sleep” (that Crary invokes in the title of his book), and to find a time that resists or at least disrupts the entropic space of time’s flow.
We live amidst an accumulation of now-times — live broadcasts, snapchats, insta-everything trapping us in an ever-expanding present — the “illumination” “beyond clock time” and “duration without breaks” of which Crary speaks (Crary 2014: 8-9). This is a present that is governed by the linear logic of accumulation of “now” and “next”, of moving forward and going nowhere. What then would be a contemporary equivalent for the flicker-image that updates the mostly analogue technology (both human and machine) of the flicker to the digital? And could the flicker-image with its focus upon a time-space of “points” and “cuts” offer any potential for resistance today in a world that is saturated by a constant present? Born as a marketing device at control central, the GIF is a hybrid format composed of a series of still images put into motion. The GIF’s composition and the fact that it can be broken down — slowed — to reveal its constituent parts (single still images) opens up possibilities for escape into the “black between images” or the spaces between a controlled “reality” as in that proposed by Hoban (Hoban 2003: 9). Crucial here too is the element of time and its relationship to the image, because in order to be coherent as a moving image the GIF requires a consistent run speed, therefore to slow down the run speed is to open up the spaces between the individual images from which the GIF is composed and thus undo the smooth continuity between images. Perhaps, then, entering into the time-space of the GIF — if such a world were possible — would be to enter into the discordant space of the stuttering freeze-frame (of VHS technologies) and other flicker-images in which time and time perception are remade in a way that contrasts with the constant movement and seamless flow of images.
Could the GIF offer an additional operation for the flicker-image, for the way in which it offers an alternative time-space that differs from the constantly expansionist attitude of the corporate (Co
rporation, in Hoban’s novel) production of images? For example, in a recent article, neuroscientists have reported that the rate at which the human eye can process flickers of light is much higher than previously thought — operating at a rate of up to 500hz in relation to certain forms of image display. HD screens have been working at progressively higher and higher speeds (currently operating at average speeds of 120hz), yet the demand for a higher and higher flicker fusion rates (also known as “refresh rates”) to avoid “the flicker” suggests a process of adaption and co-option across all fronts — flesh, image and digital. Similarly, GIFs, which were initially imbued with a “poor” aesthetic through their commonality and accessibility (as in what Hito Steyerl has termed the “poor image”), have become increasingly finessed — a process that has involved closing the gap between the single still images that make up the GIF and thus removing the potential for flicker and further co-opting spaces of resistance. Within contemporary imaging technologies the so-called intrusion of a flicker at the edge of a screen or through variegated transmission rates is termed an artefact; artefact suggesting the intrusion of a lag, a past time or an altertime into the endless expansionist present of corporate control. This immediately reinforces the alternative time-space of the flicker-image, if we were to think of the flicker as this undermining of the smooth spaces of control, by introducing a more complex temporality. So while digital technology works on the gathering of pixels at faster and faster speeds and smoother accumulations, the flicker-image (whether GIFs, freeze-frame or single film-frame repeated or dropped) provides us with an alternate time-space. This is a time that we might enter into and occupy through flicker-points and their multiplying effects, or through the opening of the dark matter between flickering points of light.
1. Included in volume 2 of the CD collection of Smith’s work 56 Ludlow Street 1962-4 but also recounted by Conrad in interview with MacDonald (MacDonald 2006).
2. Despite, the multi-temporalities and the inter-galactic travel that occurs in the novel, Fremder, there is an overriding sense of the containability of time and space. Although written before the advent of HD digital technologies, this rendering of time and space as smooth and containable (despite time-travel), is reminiscent of the flatness of the HD image in which there is no space outside of the frame but, instead, a continuing stream of image-code. The hyper-reality of the HD image is the result of a process of constant augmentation — the perfect of code and coding — into an ever-more seamless presence of images — a hyper horizontal state perhaps.
Works Cited
Bogue, Ronald (2010), Deleuzian Fabulation and the Scars of History. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Bruckner, René Thoreau (2008), “Travels in Flicker-Time (Madre!)”, in Spectator 28.2, Fall: 61-72.
Conrad, Tony (1966), The Flicker, 30 minutes, 16mm film, black-and-white, sound.
Crary, Jonathan (2014), 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep London and New York: Verso.
Davis, James, Yi-Hsuan Hsieh and Hung-Chi Lee (2015), “Humans perceive flicker artefacts at 500hz”, in Scientific Reports 5, Article number: 7861.
DeLanda, Manuel (1973), Incontinence: A Diarrhetic Flow of Mismatches, 18 minutes, 16mm film, colour, sound.
Deleuze, Gilles (1997), Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
——— (2005), Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. London and New York: Continuum.
Halter, Ed (2011), “Abstract Machines: Nonlinear dynamics and the films of Manuel DeLanda”, in Moving Image Source. Accessed via: http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/abstract-machines-20110304; accessed 13 February 2013.
Hoban, Russell (2003), Fremder. London: Bloomsbury.
MacDonald, Scott (2006), “Tony Conrad: On the Sixties”, in A Critical Cinema 5: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA and London, England: University of California Press: 55-76.
Metzinger, Thomas (2003), Being No One. Cambridge, MA and London, England: MIT Press.
Pisters, Patricia (2015), “Temporal Explorations in Cosmic Consciousness: Intra-Agental Tanglements and the Neuro-Image”, in Cultural Studies Review, September, 21.2: 120-44.
Rosenbaum, Jonathan (1983), “Manuel DeLanda”, in Film: The Front Line. Denver, CO: Arden Press. Accessed via: http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=16037; accessed 29 August 2016.
Sellars, John (2007), “Aion and Chronos: Deleuze and the Stoic Theory of Time”, in Collapse, 3: 177-205.
Shirley, David (2009), “Jack Smith, Les Evening Gowns Damnées and Silent Shadows on Cinemaroc Island (Table of Elements 1997)”, in The Brooklyn Rail, 7 May 1997.
Vimal, Ram Lakhan Pandey and Christopher James Davia (2008), “How long is a piece of time? Phenomenal Time and Quantum Coherence, Towards a Solution”, in Quantum Biosystems, 2: 102-51.
Walter, W. Grey (1961), The Living Brain. Middlesex, England and Ringwood, Australia: Penguin Books.
SURFACE FICTIONS
Theo Reeves-Evison
One of the most popular exhibits in South London’s Horniman Museum is a dead walrus. Perched atop its blocky iceberg, the walrus cuts a smooth and unusually bulbous silhouette against the surrounding natural history displays. This is because the nineteenth-century taxidermist who worked on the specimen did so with neither a photograph of a walrus nor personal experience of seeing one in the flesh to help him. When others might have stopped, this taxidermist kept stuffing — not realising that a walrus’ skin usually has deep wrinkles folded into its surface. For lack of a visual comparison, the result may not have seemed unusual to visitors of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in South Kensington in 1886, where the walrus was first exhibited, but now its appearance is a source of notoriety and humour, to such an extent that the walrus has a dedicated museum guard, as well as its own personal Twitter account.
The morbid science that delivers such stuffed pleasures begins in the taxidermy workshop, where the insides of the animal are replaced by a non-perishable model that imitates the shape of the living specimen. The skin is carefully applied to this model, treated with a preservative, and the eyes are replaced with glass copies. Of all of these components, it is only the skin — the envelope of the body — that remains of the original animal. Despite its indexical link to the living beast from which it came, this surface nevertheless deceives the eye. All traces of the animal’s death are erased, and the skin is pulled into a shape that seeks to resemble the animal’s mortal pastimes: birds swoop, polar bears fish, badgers burrow. Sight is our primary mode of experiencing taxidermy, and since the eye cannot penetrate beneath the skin (unless transparent), all of the craftsman’s skill and energy are channelled into marshalling its deceptive power, thereby galvanising an age-old association between deception and an object’s visual appearance. Looks, according to this tradition of thinking, always have the capacity to deceive.
That an object’s ability to deceive the eye has a great deal to do with the way in which its surface communicates its interior is a fact both well-known and equally well-documented. Well before modern camouflage, forms of trompe l’oeil, or faux bois painting effects, in the first century AD, Pliny the Elder was already exploring the theme in his Naturalis Historia (1991: 330). The Greek naturalist and philosopher documents a painting competition that supposedly took place several centuries earlier between Zeuxis and Parrhasius to determine who could create the most convincing illusion. As the story goes, Zeuxis painted grapes that were so life-like that birds flew down to peck at them. However it was Parrhasius who won the competition by tricking everyone into thinking that his painting was concealed behind a curtain. When asked to uncover it for the judges, he revealed that it was the curtain itself that he had painted.
The painting competition between Zeuxis and Parrhasius was a competition to create an illusion, which is to say, a competition to find out who was best at deceiving the eye. The account hinges on a
link between the appearance of a surface and its power to deceive. While taxidermy also embodies this link, I want to argue that the Horniman walrus is part of a small class of objects that create a link between the appearance of a surface and its status as an object of fiction, rather than deception, and that fiction can be layered both spatially and temporally.
One distinction between fiction and deception pivots on their respective claims to the truth. According to this dichotomy, deceptive utterances (taken in the widest sense of the word) lay claim to the truth, which may subsequently be revealed to be false. For their part, fictive utterances are accompanied by a disclaimer that relinquishes their truth claims. This may be explicit, in the case of books and films that bear the legal disclaimer that “any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental”, or it may be implicit. The way in which this disclaimer acts in the world is worked out in a dialogue between an author, an artwork and its audience according to a shifting set of conventions that change over time. Needless to say, sometimes a gap emerges between the way in which the artist intends the work to be read and its actual effects. Upon publishing his foundational work Utopia in 1516, one can presume that Thomas Moore only ever intended for the book to be read as a work of fiction. However this did not stop some earnest members of the Church from discussing the possibility of sending missionaries to convert the population of the imaginary island he described (D’Israeli 1973: 23). It would be difficult to imagine this confusion resulting from the publication of a modern work of fiction, even if by some librarian’s blunder it were shelved in the non-fiction section. This highlights the fact that an artwork’s status as an object of fiction can change over time. Lies can be misread as fictions and vice-versa, depending on the conventions of the milieu in which they act, have influence, and become affective.