„Neurocinema Zum Wandel der Wahrnehmung“ (1996) & „Wahrnehmung im technologischen Zeitalter“ (2000) by Peter Weibel

Published in 2000, Peter Weibel’s text „Wahrnehmung im technologischen Zeitalter“ picks up where his previous text „Neurocinema Zum Wandel der Wahrnehmung“ – written six years before – had left off. Focused on the changes perception undergoes in the technological age, both texts explore essential ideas. Namely, the loss of human perception as an anthropological domain, for human perception has been replaced by machine-backed-up perception. Secondly, that there seems to be less interest in understanding the objective changes in the „world of perception“ than in the subjective changes perception undergoes under the influence of the „world of apparatuses“.

This specific interest in the “world of apparatuses” surfaces in the 1996 text „Neurocinema Zum Wandel der Wahrnehmung“, since in it Weibel traces exactly a brief history of technical apparatuses – from photography to the computer. In it the author argues how, in the XX century, the changes in the concept of the visual occurred in parallel to the changes in the concept of the technical image, in this way advocating the importance of looking into the historical conditions of technical visuality in the XIX century. Weibel’s main thesis here is that the creation of the technical image was held under the influence of the industrial revolution, a revolution which was precisely a machine-based one.

On its turn, the postindustrial Revolution is an information-based one. In this sense, the digital image would be the postindustrial version of the moving image and correspond to the substitution of the illusion of the moving image for the illusion of the living image.

„War der Schwerpunkt in den ersten hundert Jahren dis maschineunterstützte Erzeugung von Bildern (Fotografie, Film), ist der Schwerpunkt seit den letzten 50 Jahren die maschineunterstützte Speicherung und Übertragung von Bildern (TV, Computer). Dieser Wechsel ist Fundamental und hat den Charakter des Technischen Bildes vollkommen verändert. Die neue ästhetischen Möglichkeiten der Maschineunterstützung Speicherung und Übertragung von Daten haben auch wesentlich dazu beigetragen, von Medienkunst statt Maschinenkunst zu sprechen“ (Weibel 1996: 187)

Until here the previous forms of retention of the image were of chemical or magnetic nature. These were hardly changeable, highly deletable and extremely difficult to access.
For the first time in history and completely machine created , the digital image not only unites all previous four properties of the technical image but also introduces new ones, such as virtual variability, viability and interactivity. As a dynamic system of variables, the digital image can be changed at any time.

A six moment in this development would correspond to the internet, interface systems and sensory-technologies . This moment is characterized by information reaching more people and occurring in different places (non-local), at the same time or at different times (simultaneous or successive). Weibel speaks of a neurocinema, which could be influenced through brain waves and of the possibility of coupling the human mind with the digital world directly. Having predicted today’s world of connectivity – cableless, non-local, allowing parallel events, where the monopol of the real no longer exists and “citizens look into the image screen of their own brains instead into external reality” -, he further forecasts that the brain would become lossless and be able to couple with the digital world directly.

Man in the Dark – Paul Auster

»There’s no single reality, Corporal. There are many realities. There’s no single world. There are many worlds, and they all run parallel to one another, worlds and anti-worlds, and each world is dreamed or imagined or written by someone in another world. Each world is the creation of mind.«

The medium fabricates realities within of reality, in this way producing a doubling of reality, which Luhmann has described as a “transcendental illusion”. Maintaining the illusion can only be accomplished if its veracity is not questioned. “Man in the Dark” (2009) by Paul Auster takes on an essential questioning. Fearlessly looking into America’s most recent traumas, such as a dim sense of reality after September 11th or, the schizophrenic feeling of being at war without experiencing war in its own territory, “Man in the Dark” proves to be a very interesting book. In it Auster masters a reflection on his own country and country men together with his own individual responsibility as a writer, in a self-reflexive act which joins both social and individual responsibility.

Not undeliberately, his protagonist is a 72 year-old literary critic. Confined to his wheel chair, August Brill lives with his daughter, who was left five years ago by her husband, and his granddaughter, whose boyfriend was brutally murdered in Iraque, in a house full of grief. To cope with life he religiously watches films throughout the night together with his granddaughter, who hopes that new images may replace the infernal ones in her head of her boyfriends’ execution. In other occasions Brill makes up stories of a parallel world in which the Twin Towers still stand, the war on Iraque has never happened but America is plunged into a secession war as different states claim independence. A creation of Brill’s mind, this world will haunt him and someone will be sent out to kill him. In literary terms this enterprise “character seeks to kill author” sets a very interesting self-reflexive mechanism in motion, just the same way the hypothetical worlds rehearsed in “Man in the Dark” constituts a therapeutic mechanism for America to deal with its own recent History and responsibility.

Letters to a Young Poet – Rainer Maria Rilke

The Eight Letter
Borgeby gard, Flädie, Sweden
12 August 1904
Excerpts

“How could we be capable of forgetting the old myths that stand at the threshold of al mankind, myths of dragons transforming themselves at the last moment into princesses? Perhaps all dragons in our lives are really princesses just waiting to see us just once being beautiful and courageous“

“We must accept our existence to the greatest extent possible; everything, the unprecendent also, needs to be accepted. That is basically the only case of courage required of us: to be courageous in the face of the strangest, the most whimsical and unexplainable thing that we could encounter.
The fact that people have been cowards in that regard has cause infinite harm to life. The experiences that one calls “ghosts”, the entire spirit world, death, all these related things have been forced out of life through daily resistance to such an extent that the senses have become atrophied. And that is not even considering the question of God.
The fear of the unexplainable impoverished not only the existence of the individual, but also caused the relationship of one person to another to be limited”.

The seventh letter
Rome 14 May 1904
Excerpts:

“Everything in nature grows and struggles in its own way, establishing its own identity, insisting on it at all cost, against all resistance. We can be sure of very little, but the need to court struggle is a surety that will not leave us. It is good to be lonely, for being alone is not easy. The fact that something is difficult must be one more reason to do it.
To love is also good, for love is difficult. For one human being to love another is perhaps the most difficult task of all, the epitome, the ultimate test. It is that striving for which all other striving is merely preparation. For that reason young people – who are beginners in everything – cannot yet love; they do not know how to love. They must learn it. With their whole being, with all strengths enveloping their lonely, disquieted heart, they must learn to love – even while their heartbeat is quickening. However, the process of learning always involves time set aside for solitude.Thus to love constantly and far into a lifespan is indeed aloneness, heightened and deepened aloneness for one who loves.
Love does not at first have anything to do with arousal, surrender, and uniting with another being – for what union can be built upon uncertainty, immaturity and lack of coherence? Love is a high inducement for individuals to ripen, to strive to mature in the inner self, to manifest maturity in the outer world, to become that manifestation for the sake of another. This is a great, demanding task; it calls one to expand one´s horizon greatly”.

“Everyone loses himself for the sake of the other and losses the other and many others that would yet have wished to come. They lose perspective and limit opportunities. They exchange the softly advancing and retreating of gentle premonitions of the spirit for an unfruitful restlessness. Nothing can come of it”.

“No area of human experience is provided with as many conventions as this one [human love]: there are flotations devices of the most unusual sort; there are boats and life belts. Society has known how to create every kind of refuge conceivable. Since it is inclined to perceived love life as entertainment, it needs to display it as easily available, inexpensive, safe, and reliable, just like common public entertainment”.

“Questions of love are personal, intimate questions, from one person to another, that in every case require a new, special, and an exclusively personal answer”.

“They act [young people] from a source of mutual helplessness. If, with the best of intentions, they wish to avoid the convention that is approaching them (marriage, for example) they find themselves in the clutches of another conventional solution, one less obvious, but just as deadly. Everything surrounding them, spread wide about them, is – convention”.

“Whoever will seriously consider the question of love will find that, as with the question of death, difficult as it is, there is no enlightened answer, no solution, not the hint of a path has yet been found. And for these two concerns we carry safely disguised within us and that we pass on unresolved, for them no comforting principle will be learned, none finding general agreement”.

“The simple humanity of women, brought about through pain and abasement, shall then come to light when the convention of her ultra-feminism will have been stripped off, transforming her status in the world. The men, who today cannot yet feel it coming, shall be surprised and defeated by it. One day (…) the girl and the woman shall exist with her name no longer contrasted to the masculine; it shall have a meaning in itself. It shall not bring to mind complement or limitation – only life and being: the feminine human being.
This progress shall transform the experience of love, presently full of error, opposed at first by men, who have been overtaken in their progress by women. It shall thoroughly change the love experience to the rebuilding of a relationship meant to be between two persons, no longer just man and woman. And this more human love will be consummated, endlessly considerate and gentle, good and clear in its bounding and releasing; it shall resemble that love for which we must prepare painstakingly and with fervor, which will be comprised of two lonelinesses protecting one another, setting limits, and acknowledging one another.
And one more thing: Do not believe that this idea of a great love, which, when you were a boy, was imposed upon you, has been lost. (…) I believe that this idea of love remains so strong and mighty in your memory because it was your first deep experience of aloneness and the first inner work that you have done on your life”.

Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag (II)

Barbara Kruger, You Substantiate Your Horror
Photo: Mendel, flickr

Could one then oppose war just by looking at an image? Can an image change the world or at least us?

Photographing the pain of others leads us to recognize their suffering, but how is protesting against suffering different from recognizing it only? – Sontag asks. „To nominate a hell is definitely not the same thing as to say anything on how to take people out of that hell“. Images seem to tell us only what horrible things people can do to each other and with pleasure, all over the world.
So Sontag righteously asks: „what is the point in showing such images? Make us feel indignation? Cause sadness and consternation? Help us to mourn? Do we become better by watching them? Do they teach us something? Or do they confirm what we already knew?“

It has been repeatedly pointed out that we are living in a society of spectacle, in which people also aim to transform themselves in spectacle. There seems to be nothing but representations, media representations more precisely. In this state of over stimulation, the hunt for dramatic images which drives the photographic enterprise is, according to Sontag, a mere reflex of a culture in which shock has become the main stimulus for consumption and a source of value.
One of the functions of photography is to improve how things look, and this tends to diminish a moral response to what is showed. Perhaps this is why people often react against images of war and suffering, specially if they are beautiful. And when showed in a museum or art gallery, we often ask ourselves if that isn´t just unecessary exploration of the suffering of others?
It seems that in order to provoke an active response images must shock. But how long does the shock last, Sontag strikingly asks. If we are able to get used to horror in our real life we’re also able to get use to the horror of certain images, the author refers. People often criticize news´ photographers for proffiting commercially from images drawn in scenarios in which they did nothing to help, critics contemptuously call them “war tourists” often forgetting how they´ve risked their life to give us testimony.

It seems thought that our attention is being driven by the attention of the media, of the images, that in a world full with them, the ones which should interest us have hardly any effect on us and that our insensitivity to them is somehow deeply related to the way television works. Sontag sustains, that the multiplicity of images showed in TV favours a light, mobile, slightly indifference to content, for the flux of images in television excludes a privileged one. What matters in television is that we may always change the channel. Sontag also believes that people simply turn off not because they’ve become indifferent to those images but because they are scared. It is because we have the feeling that war, any war, cannot be stopped (even pacifists no longer believe war can be stopped) that people have become less sensitive to its horrors. Symptoms of apathy, moral or emotional numbness are, in Sontag´s view, nothing but full of feelings of rage and frustration.

It is not an unsufficiency that we are not touched enough or that we do not suffer enough with those images, for the way Sontad sees it, it is not photography’s job to repair our ignorance on history or the cause of pain of others which it selects and frames. For the author, those images are but an invitation to reflect, try to learn, examine, etc. in order to finally ask ourselves: is there a state of things which we’ve accepted so far and should be questioned now?

Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag

What to do with the acknowledge of the pain of others? – On the impact of Photography

To state that we are surrounded by all kinds of images – images of war, pain, misery, cruelty, beauty, pornographic or digitally produced images nowhere to be found in reality – and that this is not without consequences for us has become obvious to everyone and a cliché today. It has also been repeatedly argued that this manic flux of images is responsible for a general state of numbness regarding the Other. For this reason, Susan Sontag proposed and battled, in her famous book “On Photography“ (1977), for an ecology of images.

16 years later and still reflecting on the modern use and meaning of images, Sontag comes to admit that the idea that our ability to react to our experiences with emotional freshness and ethical acuteness is hindered by the constant broadcast of common and disgusting images is nothing but a very conservative critique of the proliferation of such images. Focusing on the intersection between information, news, art and politics in the representation of war and catastrophe, “Regarding the Pain of Others” (2003) reexamines Sontag´s former position and admits that neither an ecology of images is doable nor it is necessarily truth that our exposure to shocking images should result in indifference. We do not become necessarily violent by witnessing images of violence.

No doubt, we are living in an age which contemplates the maximum reproducibility and broadcast of images, with few possibilities to control the context in which they disseminate. But for the most of us wo never experienced war, it remains truth that the understanding of war is only possible through the mediation of photography; something can only become real if it is photographed. From Vietnam onward we came to recognize how war images are not stagged thought everybody knows there´s nothing objective about photos which in some cases have even been used both in favour and against something. Which leads us to ask: can an image make us understanding something?

According to Sontag, if there is a year in which the ability of photography to define reality was stronger than any narrative this was 1945, with the images of the first days after the liberation from the concentration camps of Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald and Dachau, and also the images of what happened in Hiroxima and Nagasaqui.
In the fight between word and image – a very old querrel still far from its end – the problem is not, for Sontag, that we might remember events through photographies but that we only remember events through them. It is a problem that remember is no longer remember a story but being able to remember an image.Photographies do not lose their ability to shock but they do not help a lot when it is about understanding.

The Age Of Stupidity – Keep It Foolish :-) ON CELLPHONE NOVELS

nathan barley episode 1 part 1of 3

CELLPHONE NOVELS / Last January 20th the New York Times published a very interesting article about Cellphone novels. Its author, Norimitsu Onishi, reports that Cellphone novels (defined by Wikipedia as novels which are meant to be read in 1,000- to 2,000- word (in China) or 70-word ( in Japan) chapters via text message on cell phones, and which are downloaded in short installments and run on handsets as Java-based applications on a mobile phone, often appearing in three different formats: WMLD , JAVA and TXT) have immediately dominated the publishing market as soon as they hit the printed format. In fact, several sources sustain that five out of the ten best selling novels in Japan in 2007 were originally cell phone novels!!

“Deep Love”, the story of a teenage prostitute in Tokyo imagined and written by an online author called Yoshi, opened the precedent. Published as a book in 2003 with sailings hitting the 2,6 million copies it was later turned into a television series, a manga and a film.

Despising this new fiction style as “unworthy subgenre”, critics mostly fear that Cellphone novels might lead to the degradation/ disapearance of all other kinds of literature?!?
Characterized by shorter sentences, contracted words and making plenty of use of symbols and emoticons, Cellphone novels dismiss description and detail – seen as the greater attack to serious literature – in order to emphasize a characteristic which I find brilliant: the reader must read more in between the lines! Calling the viewer into responsibility in making his own interpretation of what is going on, this couldn´t agree more to Umberto Eco´s the “Opera Aperta” (1962).

But how do Cellphone novels actually work?
Written on cellphones as text messages and then sent to a website, subscribers can choose either to follow the new updates or download the entire novel for a fee, to read it on the computer or their cellphone. Given this process, another extremely important – and I would say brilliant – feature occurs. For users can post comments and/ or send reply sms in real time as the author is in the process of writing the novel. He has the unprecedented possibility of reacting by changing the course of events, accepting suggestions, etc. “‘It’s like playing live music at a club. You know right away if the audience isn’t responding, and you can change what you’re doing right then and there’”, says Yoshi quoted by the Institute for the Future of the Book.
Cellphone novels by being interactive and portable at the same time incite to a customization by the masses which isn´t necessarily bad nor a plain synonym for “being blindly corrupted by the market”, against what conservative minds might say. Cellphone novels have the advantage of opening new spaces of creativity and allowing for different democratic participatory ways. Quoted by Wired Magazine, Magic iLand (company running >>Free Novel Library community portal where users can download texts by selected authors and link to their blog) spokesman Toshiaki Itou said: “A mobile phone novel boom is definitely in place. And these are people who hardly ever read novels before, never mind written one”. At this point their devoloping software which will allow mobile phone novelists to integrate sounds and images into their story lines as well.

In parallel to giving the oportunity for a comunity to write a story together, mobile phones are also facilitating the circulation of already published books. In Germany and amond high-school girls, dowloading Charlotte Roche´s polemic book “Feuchgebiete” on their mobile has become a sort of rebellian act, meanwhile the media are too busy discussing how much of a tabu-book it actually is..

Haruki Marukami – Norwegian Wood

“Tell me how you could say such a thing,” she said, staring at the ground beneath her feet. “You´re not telling me anything I don´t know already. “Relax your body, and the rest of you will lighten up.” What´s the point of saying that to me? If I relaxed my body now, I´d fall apart. I´ve always lived like this, and it´s the only way I know how to go on living. If I relaxed for a second, I´d might never find my way back. I´d go to pieces, and the pieces would be blown away. Why can´t you see that? How can you talk about watching over me if you can´t see that?”

Haruki Marukami, excerpt from Norwegian Wood

Secret worlds!

I admit. I do have a crush for flanêurs in the Baudelairian sense, enfants terribles and all kinds of troublemakers! Right now, I am very happy to be discovering the world of Miranda July – a filmmaker, performing artist and writer, whose site is worth a visit.

In 2005 she directed “Me, You and Everyone We Know”, winner of four major film awards that year includind the Cannes Film Festival, which I plan to see real soon.
In 2007, and together with Harrell Fletcher, she edited “Learning to Love You More”, a book where several poetical, playfull and often purposeless assignments are suggested to the reader, in order to find beauty in life and learn to love oneself more. In the 11th assignment for example, you are asked to photograph a scar and write about it. Many people have joined in and the experiences of some can be followed in the official blog.

I had heard of this book but didn´t payed much attention, for this sort of thing always makes me very suspicious and sounds very cheesie. Except, last weekend an article in Der Zeit about Miranda and her work made me change my mind and run into the nearest bookshop to buy her short stories book “No One Belongs Here More Than You”, recently published in Germany under the title “Zehn Wahrheiten” (Diogenes Publishing House). Usually I do try to read books in their original language, but this time I couldn´t wait that long! By the way, I proudly admitt my little enthusiasms for other people´s creative worlds!! as this blog testefies. In fact if this would be a perfect world and we all did what we love I could make a living out of it and live happily ever after! The good news is that I just might pull it off!
Anyway, what attracted me was what I consider to be a very simple and yet so urgent motto these days: “Think Less, Feel More” – which by the way, has inspired me to add a new category to my blog.

Wie Man wird, was Man ist/ How one becomes what one is

Ecce Homo, the last book written by Nietzsche (1844-1900) before he lost his reason in early 1889, adopts an unusual megalomanic tone. At a certain point he declares: „I am not a man, I am dynamite“. For long many philosophers didn´t consider this specific work when analysing the german author´s corpus. Only recently, given several translations in the english language, the work has received more extensive attention.

In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche proposes to write his own biography, but doing so in a very unorthodox way, deliberately subverting the conventions of the genre. As observed in the introduction he fails to speak of periods of his life and is not accurate when it comes to dates. But this only happens because Nietzsche is speaking more about his ideas than about himself, and in a tone of exagerated self-esteem purposefully choosen in opposition to socratic humiliation.

Nietzsche wrote Ecce Homo as a sort of explanation for the overall of his work, in order to make some points clear enough just before the work he was projecting, which was supposed to be the major work of his carrer but never saw the day of light.

„Wie Man wird, was Man ist“, „How one becomes what one is“ is Nietzsche´s central thesis here. There´s a passage where the german philosopher states that he never fought for things in a combative manner but just learned to accept them as they came into his life. I was surprised to read this, for Nietzsche was frequently sick and achieved little recognition during his life time, which would lead one to think that he could have felt miserably.
But somehow he endured, and this is connected with his theory of the eternal recurrence and the idea of amor fati, which speaks of the acceptance of the events that occur in one´s life, despite all the suffering and pain. One needs to live life in such a way that one could accept its eternal repetion, cheerfully.

As a coincidence, I just saw Aeschylus´ “Oresteia” on stage this week. A theater play that speeks of the ethic of revenge, revenge being exactly the opposite of accepting one´s life calmly. In Aeschylus´ play, our deepest sense of any possibility for enduring justice in our community is deeply violated, we are submitted to a never-ending cycle of retributive killing and over-killing. And this had the interesting effect on stage, of making me think how theater is sometimes stronger than life itself.
Thought written before the advent of Christianismus but ruled by a similar metaphysical logic, the “Oresteia” seeks to come in terms with it. Aeschylus proposes that traditional goddessess of vengeance be incorporated in the justice system and not ruled out. He also says that though justice should move beyond pure personal emotion, ultimatelly it will not work if it doesn´t take our personal feelings into consideration somehow.

While Aeschylus is convinced that we cannot remove the Furies from our lifes, Nietzsche´s cut is of course of a radical kind, as he proclaims himself as the Antichrist for announcing what is to come, the transvaluation of all values. Interesting and coincidentilly, they seem to share the same view that we must move beyond our brutal and unworkable traditions. And this point revealed very important to me, as lately I am wondering about how one can be free, think and act freely.

NICHTS ALS GESPENSTER – the film and the book

Manchmal es ist so… Everything comes together. And books and movies find me, giving me clues on what intrigues me, on how life and the world in general work.
“Nichts als Gespenster“ (2007) by Martin Gypkens is a road movie based on Judith Hermann´s short stories. She was the first german author whose book I read entirely in the original language.

Five different stories, that don´t intersect, except for they speak of relationships between people and life in general, are interwined in a clever way. They meet in harmony due to the director´s sense of landscape and photography. By turning Judith Hermann´s stories into a genre – a road movie – a uniformity between the heterogeny of the stories is achieved in the film. And amazing image compositions together with great dramatic interpretations help visualizing the search for love and the beauty of melancholy, always present in Judith Hermann´s writing.

Of course it is about love. What else… But also, about much more than just that. Lately, I´ve been thinking about road movies – the nomadic condition is one of my dearest themes -, people encountering other people and the death of beloved ones. This film has come to meet me on exactly such a crossroad…
Travel becomes here an oportunity for freedom and revolution to take place in one´s life, an escape from routine that, interesting enough, works both ways.

People take journey´s for different reasons. Because they want change to happen or, because they want to prevent it from taking place. It´s either a running away from something or, a wish to take the bull by the horns.
Travelling becomes then, a breach in time, that can both prevent forthcoming events to happen, installing interruption and delay in one´s routine. Or, it can occasionate change and surprise, hastening difference.
Either travel suspends change or, reinforces it.
This is exactly where Ellen and Felix stand at. Their travel throughout the Nevada desert is a postpone of the invitabilty of the separation between the both. Their problems lie heavily, as ghosts, in the air throughout the entire travel. They are travelling together but not with each other really.
Just the same, Nora by avoiding returning to her life on purpose, is living a special time, a time outside her normal routine. She is trying to gain courage to pursue an unusual love.

All the stories are about how people deal with what destiny presents them, what they decide to make with this. It is about people finding strong and passionate connections. They immediately recognize the other with no need for words. The question is what to do with these encounters, how people handle them.
Should one break the rules or not? If one does so, do moral principles apply? Because miracles as such – connection on such a level – doesn´t happen every day…
One thing is for sure, and both the film and the writing have allowed me to realize just that, one cannot help to connect with others. One has only a limited choice of pursuing the full consequences of such connection or, on the contrary, leave it alone.
In this last case, to control it, takes a lot of disciplin, and in my opinion a strong refusal of what makes us truly human… I guess, that despite all the hurting and suffering, I still believe our higher purpose is, to move others with our passions, bringing them into our world or / and be moved by other´s passions just the same.