[-empyre-] cultural fissures

[Renate Ferro]

Thanks Dale for sharing this exciting work with empyre. I think that the
impetus for this month's topic was the notion of cross-disciplinarity (or
multi/interdisc) that not only encourage shifts of convergence but are a
necessity from my point of view.  I have students at Cornell working on
their final Thesis research/artistic projects.  Many of them working with
new media and the moving image must include collaborators from engineering
or computing who can enable them to accomplish their projects.  What
happens in the process is that ideas morph, shift, expand, contract as a
result of the input of others and the collaborative process.

Film is also a collaborative process but it is generated from the top down,
producer to director, etc,  whether in main-stream or independent cinema.

Earlier this month Young min very eloquently wrote about the split eye as
described by Lacan.
<My basic understanding of the eye/gaze dichotomy is from Jacques Lacan who
suggests that the eye and the gaze is the split. The function of the eye
is to see, while the gaze deceives the eye.  <snip...>
This double gaze of deception/abandonment in the form of moving image
(camera eye) can represent the unconscious of the subject by revealing the
epistemological potentiality of the unconscious truth in analysis. I would
argue that the camera eye becomes a derivative manifestation of Lacanian
aesthetics of the gaze, the aesthetics which transforms itself from the
images of the hoop nets representing the unconscious to the topology of the
klein bottle representing a new way of projection which transgresses the
borderlands of the inside/outside region of the uncanny unconsciousness.>

Tim responded:  <The issue, for me, is not whether the psychoanalytical
paradigm remains helpful, but rather, how it might be rewritten by the
convergences of medial culture, perhaps more akin to what the French
psychoanalyst J-B Pontalis calls "the visual" along the lines of vision
scanned, glanced, looped, morphed and pixellated.>

Dale it seems to me that the APPS workshop may be an excellent example of
J_B Pontalis'visual or I might suggest Massumi's proprioception/sensing
where the eye/gaze is disrupted and other senses take over.

The other work you mention that engages social conditions also may
highlight possible cultural fissures that have become evident.

<snip> Some of the work is very practical like mods of Wii consoles to help
doctors and patients with monitoring physical therapy from remote locations
and mobile-phone apps to help orphanages record data for reports to
funders, but other work is more engaged with artistic/cultural concerns,
such as arts education and counter-narratives of cultural heritage.<snip>

Dale you are reminding me of Ricardo Dominguez, Zach Blas, and Brooke
Singer's work that has been featured in many of our discussions here on
empyre where the visual becomes not only "scanned, glanced, looped, morphed
and pixellated" but displaced by the social movement and politics that
embodies it.

While Busan screened international cinema both commercial and independent
within the hallows of theaters some situated on the top floors of high-rise
department stores, in Seoul vast LED screens looped advertisements where
both the aesthetics and the ideas were pretty innovative from my point of
view. Multiple screens were perched on only on the sides of skyscrapers;
others were propped on the ground. Driving through the city from some
vantage points I saw five or six screens at once.  To take them in my eyes
and my body had twist and turn. Certainly no politics and no social
concerns were evident in content but definitely large spectacle.