[-empyre-] Resistance is Futile :) Addendum

[Terry Flaxton]

As an addendum to what I previously wrote: The panel I chaired at ISEA was entitled 'Moving Imaging Capabilities of the Future' which I eventually thought unwieldy and retitlted it: 'The Future of the Moving Image'.

In this panel I introduced a paper from Scott McQuire, Associate Professor, Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, I then spoke, then Leon Gutrevitch, Victoria University of Wellington. In brief, Scott spoke about manipulation of moving images on large displays, I spoke about the relationship of the moving image to human cognitive development and Leon spoke about 'Astonishment' and whether it were finite or renewable.

To begin, my first comment was that there is no such thing as a moving image: like the zen monks that discuss whether or not a flag is moving in the wind, or the wind is moving the flag, the 5th Patriarch appears and tells them - it is the mind that is moving. So still images rapidly displayed prompt a sense of external movement - but is this our only way of demonstrating reality played back to ourselves? Is the thinking mind the only way of processing the experience?

In fact, does the need to process via ratiocination inhibit our deeper selves? Is what we seem to be simply a construction of Enlightenment values and farther back Aristotle's need to measure, weigh and circumlocute the world?

So in the panel, Scott discussed our current embrace of the spectacular, I discussed the idea of clinging to ideas which would then change not only the embrace, but us, ourselves, and Leon asked whether the act of the embrace were set in its limits, or capable of being reinvented for each technological and cognitive change we will now go through.

There was a buzz at the end of our panel and I felt we'd achieved something: an excitement at creating an idea space where free flow was possible and transgression was imperative to take down the walls of our current box.

Terry Flaxton
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