Touch, Transcendence and Immanence in Film

TAKING OFF THE GLOVES: TOUCH, TRANSCENDENCE AND IMMANENCE IN FILM Beginning with excessive acts of both violence and compassion, as depicted in Martin Scorsese's Bring out the Dead (1999, USA), I attempt to sketch the play between transcendence and immanence in film. In particular, I am interested in Paul Schrader's philosophical discussion of "transcendental style", as well as his film work, and in the work of Scorsese, Yasujiro Ozu, and Gilles Deleuze concerning the film relations between transcendence and immanence. In the process I hope to foreground the role of touch in film and begin to question an aesthetic syntax in film and in philosophy. In a way the moment of bashing and compassion in Bringing Out the Dead that I shall begin with crystallises a history of ambiguity and anxiety surrounding issues of touch, immanence and transcendence. I shall try and tease out only a few moments in..

The World as Medium/ The Third Media Revolution 2020

Presented in the spirit of Open Educational Resources. Full Course Outline for The World as Medium and/vs The Third Media Revolution. Level 3 course designed across many programs (Journalism and Comms, BA, Design, PR, Screen and Sound, Law, etc). So it's a somewhat generalist course. It begins with a summary of standard approaches (from standard approaches to media and comms to the behaviourist, cybernetic, cognitivist and then embodied, extended, enactivist understandings) that inform so much of what goes on. It then moves to alternatives to these, in expanded media terms, along with the idea of "the world as medium" and a "third media revolution'. We look at affect and process understandings. Then we turn to shifts in interface and interaction technologies (VR, AR, internet of things etc), data and algorithms, Chun's concept of programmability, Artificial Intelligence, the future of work, and finally new forms of organisation (P2P, blockchain, digital democracy, commons) etc in relation to media and comms and their role in transition. There are a lot of summaries of ideas and materials, addressed to this level of work

On being affected: feeling in the folding of multiple catastrophes

How possible is it for a life of ongoing feeling to hold, given the world’s current becomings? Much of this article will consider three of the most pervasive of the current disruptions as disruptions of living and feeling: climate change, social change, and, in more detail, what I will call a ‘third media revolution’. All three of these disruptions (and many others) are themselves multiple. They all fold through each other. Living and feeling thus find themselves in the midst of catastrophic multiplicity. This catastrophic multiplicity haunts much of what’s going on. Questions concerning what can be felt within this folding of catastrophes into each other are important contemporary questions. Feeling itself—what it is, what it does, and what the future of feeling might be—has become both a field of struggle, and a complex and open-ended question. A secondary set of questions here will concern the future of studies in relation to these questions of living and feeling—of Cultural Studies, Media Studies, disciplinarity in general, and finally ‘study’, as discussed by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney (2013)

Convolving Signals: Thinking the performance of computational processes

In contemporary performance, “action” seems to include acts, emergent action and the potential for action—even sometimes non-action. Performers include the human and nonhuman, the living and the nonliving. Through all this runs a complexity of technics—technologies and techniques—and these increasingly involve computational processes. How do we think the last of these—computational processes in performance? This article gives some answers to this question by engaging with four different but overlapping examples of the way that computational processes are brought into performance: the digital signal processing technique of convolution, live coding as performance, the electronic music of Loscil and Stephan Mathieu, and Sher Doruff’s work with the collaborative network performance software, Keyworx. It suggests the necessity of understanding the imperceptible aspects of computational processes, such as signal processing, as performing, even if not always directly presented. This in turn suggests a more subtle understanding of the micro-dynamics of performance in general. Part of this might require that more attention is paid to the transformation of signals of all kinds, in and perhaps even as performance. The article concludes by proposing that we now live, at least in part, in a culture of ongoing “convolution” of signals. This is a culture working with the ongoing differentiation (and integration) of intensities. The article therefore raises questions about the general performativity of a culture and technics increasingly enmeshed with computational processes

Auditland

Audit—the ongoing evaluation of performance—began as a fairly narrow range of technical procedures in financial accounting. However, it has now expanded its range to “account” for a wide range of behaviours, thoughts and feelings, in the workplace and elsewhere. This article suggests that audit cultures are a response to the “abyss of the differential”. This is the abyss faced when too much generative difference threatens established interests, and thus everything these interests control. Such interests often face a double bind, because they also rely on exploiting generative difference and are thus fully immersed in it. Audit is seen as a useful response to this double bind—to the abyss of the differential. Audit technics/cultures use a flexible series of ‘controls of controls’ (Power in Shore and Wright 2000: 73) that differentially declare what is (un)acceptable. They therefore both energise and bound what counts as performance, variably and across multiple contexts. Audit also links local and global, macro and micro, pragmatically, in a combination of instrumental and ‘operational reason’ (Massumi 2002: 110). Controlling events as it does, audit can thus be seen as an expression of fantasies of neofeudalism. These are fantasies of a social order arranged in terms of a new control by the few over the individual existential territories of the many, with a global territorial reach. Finally, the article suggests that audit and related technics/cultures are only partial and transitional technics/cultures. It suggests that a more effective if problematic society of direct control is emerging, yet this in part emerges with the assistance of audit technics/cultures

Fielding Affect: Some Propositions

Capacious has wisely positioned itself as a journal for “emerging affect inquiry . . . across any and all academic disciplines”1. Yet elsewhere we find something like an attempt to coalesce—occasionally even to delimit and police—a field of study. There is now—tentatively, at times argumentatively—something we call affect studies, or perhaps as often affect theory. How can the tensions involved, between disciplinary requirements and “emerging affect inquiry,” be thought? Is a field of study, however it might be formed, a good fit for work with affect? On the other hand, would such a field of study have any future, when “categories traditionally assigned to the arts, the humanities, and the sciences are now colliding, collapsing, and converging in manners that are confusing, complex, and incoherent” (Butler 2018)? Further, what relation does all of this have to a world in which “soils and trees are not only grounds for education but figures of education” (Butler 2018, n.p.)

Technics Lifeless and Technics Alive: Activity Without and With Content

How did so much of contemporary technics become so disappointing, so deadening? How is technics being thought, and worked with, to enliven? What different assemblages and principles are involved? This chapter begins in sympathy with Michel Serres’ “aggrieved shame” and then moves to Wendy Hui Kyong Chun's discussion of an "undeadness" at the heart of technical culture. After summarising more positive pathways in interaction design and thinking, I argue that a series of Pavlovist variations on powerlessness still inhabits contemporary technics. This combines with a series of calculative assemblages to form a calculative-behavioural assemblage, both in technics generally, and in what have become "cognition" and computing in recent culture. These assemblages in fact have three aspects: actual, directly material assemblages of technologies and processes; abstract "agencements", for example, a generalised Pavlovism that infuses subsequent events; and diagrams, meant to intervene in both. I then suggest principles of escape towards other kinds of relations between technics and worlds. These relations affirm mutual care as well as mutual powers. They would be immanently attentive to the complexity and variability of the world as event

Virtual Theory: the virtual (and virtual technics) in Deleuze, Bergson, Massumi, Grosz, Žižek, Lévy, De Landa and others

Exploration, from 20 years ago, of the concept of the virtual in Deleuze, De Landa, Massumi, Grosz, Bergson, Zizek and others. This is the main concern though it is tie into VR and related technologies (as things were around 2004). I wrote this a very long time ago and never quite published it (I don't think I tried). So it's very much a draft. It's what I thought others were saying about the virtual then and how this might change thinking about working with VR technologies. If it's useful I'm glad. It may become a chapter in a book in a while

Affect, ‘subtraction’ and ‘non-performance’

Deploying the concepts of affect, subtraction, and non-performance Lone Berthelsen and Andrew Murphie argue that the strategy of subtraction (as conceived by Gilles Deleuze) and applied to the performative can lead to the emergence of new potentials and worlds wihtin ethical as well as political-aesthetic fields

Setting live coding performance in wider historical contexts

This paper sets live coding in the wider context of performing arts, construed as the poetic modelling and projection of liveness. Concepts of liveness are multiple, evolving, and scale-dependent: entities considered live from different cultural perspectives range from individual organisms and social groupings to entire ecosystems, and consequently reflect diverse temporal and spatial orders. Concepts of liveness moreover evolve with our tools, which generate and reveal new senses and places of vitality. This instability complexifies the crafting of live events as artistic material: overriding habitual frames and scales of reference is a challenge when handling infinitely scalable computational phenomena. With its generative affordances, improvised interactive programming, and notational possibilities, live coding introduces unique qualities into the performance arena. At the same time, performance history abounds in adaptive systems which anticipate certain live coding criteria. Historic performance and contemporary coding practices raise shared questions that can enhance our understanding of live art, notably to do with feedback, fixed versus on-the-fly programmable conceptual and physical frameworks, and inscriptive practices and notation methods for live action. I attempt to address such questions by setting live coding in a wider performance history perspective