formal abstraction

"Piet Mondriaan, 1930 - Mondrian Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow" by Piet Mondrian - [1]. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons - Wikipedia

at the very beginning of a new project on political aesthetics that at the moment concerns Truth, Beauty and the Good, with first steps into truth being made at seminars in Paris (INHA) and Oslo (Seminar of Aesthetics) trying out distinctions between truth to perception, to objects and to materials, the idea came along of

a further truth to feeling which might include (as it did for Kandinsky and Mondriaan as founders) truth to the Spirit as supra-personal subject of the cosmos. Abstraction abstracts from the perceptible its constituent elements – colour and form – in pursuit of an expression of truth pertaining to a human or super-human subject. Abstraction requires a subject to feel it. In one direction it tends towards truth to materials (Greenberg); in another it leads directly to the next part of the enquiry, beauty (where it will meet the concept from data visualisation of 'beautiful data')

Abstraction as formalism seems the least intimate, approximating to classicism (Apollonian). But consider the abstractions of spiritual arts - cathedrals, masks, groves, mosques. The anthropomorphic principle in natural religion meets the inhuman nature of gods, as of the one God as supreme abstraction. By removing the diligent approach to the extremely perceptible and enumerable world, abstract formalism can approach the noumenal, but in the guise of a subject who either is, is modelled on, or is marked by difference from the human.

The formal abstraction is close to the idea of symbol traced in the first iteration of Glitch as Labour: it is not a signifier locked into a system but a radical punctuation of semiotic structure by irruption from elsewhere (and in Beauty from else-when). Like a soul-catcher, formal abstraction arranges physical forces (masses, light) to attract divinity or other souls, to provide avenues to the noumenal beyond.

Truth to subject then because (1) it seeks out the truly immaterial (soul, self) (god, spirit) as a subject, capable of agency sufficient to complete the communication - an angelic bridge between subjects and the worlds they constitute as subjects; and (2) because the subjectivity evoked in the human maker and spectator/inhabitant is constructed in yearning for something more wonderful than all this stuff. Not therefore to be confused with the truth of science or perception (secular wonder) but of subjectivity extended to become the very principle of simultaneous inhabitance of this world and its (perfect) shadow or reflection

The form abstracted from ordinary perception is the form of the human, of the subject: and of the inhuman or otherwise-than-human, of the Subject.

Montage would fall under this description of formalist abstraction because it displaces unity into the perceiving subject on which it depends

Rewind Italia Part One

From Laura Leuzzi, links to resources in the history of Italian Video Art

The opening convivium of this new research project is in Rome in April

You can watch some videotapes online:
Michele Sambin (artist who worked at Cavallino)'s films and videotapes at
http://www.michelesambin.com/archivio;
Guido Sartorelli (artist who worked at Cavallino)'s videos at
http://www.guidosartorelli.it/opere.html;
some of Federica Marangoni (who worked at Ferrara with Lola Bonora)'s works
http://www.federicamarangoni.com/

The Story of the Kelly Gang

I dropped in to ACMI's Screen Worlds exhibit. Included there is footage from the 1906 Story of the Kelly Gang (clips available from Australian Screen), transferred to video, preserving the distorting effects where the nitrate stock has melted, burned or otherwise reacted chemically with its environment prior to its restoration.

The result is a video which constantly oscillates between faithful reproduction of a filmed drama and the broiling deformations of the decayed filmstrip. The resulting video is a viscously attractive palimpsest of natural and historical process, a suture of fiction and material over which, once instigated, neither chemist nor filmmaker have no control. The telecine transfer must have proceeded frame by frame, given the deformity and fragility of the original, and therefore stands as a remediation which has as purpose to reconstruct an imagined ideal, reconstructing frame rate, aspect ratio, contrast levels and steadiness of illumination, so preserving as much as possible of the original while at the same time demonstrating both the archivists' art and the necessity and urgency of practicing it on the Australian visual heritage. Yet it is a profound and beautiful visual experience in itself, one is none the worse because, for want of an identifiable author and therefore of an identifiable intent, we cannot be justified in calling it a work of art. It is exactly that boundary of justification that takes us to the boundary of the 'uncanny valley' in a-life where rationalist conceptions of the posthuman meet its actuality, that marks a-life as significant even though it is a-signifying, or even (as chora) pre-signifying, even when post-human. It is the fact that the distortions in the ACMI Ned Kelly do not 'signify', in the sense of constructing meaningful differences inside an agreed system for the production and syntagmatic-paradigmatic management of signs. But this fact is itself significant, in Bateson's sense of 'a difference that makes a difference', that creates information, that occurs not within a system but at that boundary where system breaks out of its structural stasis and embraces the dimension of time. This is a proto-cinematic artefact of the uncanny imbrication of intentional human design (the 19th century realist drama and photographic record of the original Kelly) and processes unleashed (chemical or code) which operate in the medium, as medium, beyond the borders of human intent. It is an artificial life form, one that has evolved on a set of initiating chemical conditions according to its own un-human logic, remodelling one code in form of another, or to borrow from Metz, from a language without a code to a code without a language. There are lessons here for our understanding of the analog media.

The World is Everything That Is The Case

The page for our ISEA show of Australian artists is up on the ISEA site.

See you there

Interview

In the course of recording interviews for the Genealogies of Digital Light project, I got interviewed myself. Terry Flaxton included a two-part interview in his Verbatim History of High Definition Technology and Aesthetics. Seeing Terry's artworks in hi-def was a real highlight of the trip: see the Somerset Carnivals and Glastonbury Portraits documentation on his site, and check his blog, High Definition - No Mercy, listed on the right.

In memoriam Thierry Kuntzel

there is the awful leaden weight of death over the thought of Heidegger. what is so depressing about it is the absurdity which he gives it: the meaninglessness. I don't mean that deatth is intrinsically meaningful, but that it has many meanings, for specific dyings. And each is embedded in a locale, in a world, among the living and the dying, for whom it means immensely

Thierry Kuntzel's Nostos is currently showing at ACMI in the Beaubourg touring video retrospective. It is a lovely thing, the inhabitance of a room with light, recorded in greyscale, on a bank of (memory supplying details) nine monitors in a 3x3 grid (might be 4x4). They are heritage boxes, and the light trap is excellent, so you are alert to the fading of light, the flare in the camera - which would have been a tube camera, liable to comet tails and saturation - and the sluggish decay of the phosphors in the old tubes, longer and slower than the modern ones, and longer and slower than the simple line scan overwriting a flare of brightness. Because the light trap is so good you're aware of the blaze of light - you are basically in night-vision mode, all rods, few cones, straining after the photons, but when they burst your rods flare out and carry the afterimage.

These beautiful artefacts (as engineers will call them - unexpected or unwanted products of the technology) are integral to the devices it is shown on (I recall seeing a single channel version years ago at the Institut Francais in London, in a dimmed but ambient-lit room, very differently - i recall a blue tone to the image there, but that might be a trick of memory). These screens will eventually lose the capacity to show the work, and it will be reconstructed, in a new form on new screens. With luck it will be around for years to come, transferred to new storage media. Perhaps the archivists will try to register some of these artefacts - tone the screens with an ambient grey to denote, or point towards, the off-black quality of video black back in the day.

The archive of digital materials points us always to the fundamental ephemerality of this seeing, this version, this event, this mounting and staging, this moment of viewing which is so tragically tied to time, but which makes its statement against panic by offering, as the obverse of tragedy, the utterly now.

Kuntzel's Nostos is its own tribute to the way electronic media more perhaps than any other except performance -- which Nostos records in the actions of the woman in the room we see passing light over the walls -- , or the media of everyday interactions, kisses, kindnesses - the way electronic media can, if they wish, announce their own fading as integral to their experience.

In this way Nostos teaches us not to mourn, or to mourn in the knowledge that life is for the living, but dying is for the living too.

(post to empyre list 27 April 07)