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A multimedia interactive art work cannot be reviewed the way a film, television
piece or video art work can be1 . A theorist such as Richard Dienst,2 if we
take his arguments regarding television to their logical conclusion, would claim
it cannot even be viewed, let alone re-viewed, as other moving - image based
works are and in fact the kind of viewer party to such a work is different,
to the point that one cannot even be called a viewer .
Before elaborating on this further, I want to explain why I would look at Brad
Miller's Digital Rhizome via Richard Dienst given that Dienst is discussing
television. What Dienst and Brad Miller have in common is Gilles Deleuze. What
Dienst explains is Deleuze's concept of the time -image as a direct presentation
of time and an image that is able to "think", what the implications
of that are for television and hints at what it might mean for newer technologies.
(This is not however to claim that one imaging format is simply the logical
extension of the laws of another). What we have to ask of Miller's work is not
only if his work operates successfully at the level of content in dealing descriptively
with Deleuze's concept of the rhizome and an essayist's approach to Deleuze's
Mille Plateaux, but whether the digital image might possibly be one that is
able to "think" in additional ways. Certainly the apparatus is added
to (and in fact incorporates) an existing array of formats but is the 'image-thought'
additional to those already available to us and if so has Miller activated it
in his work?
Dienst describes Deleuze's work on the image as a "Natural History of Images"
but this does not imply, I would argue a supercessional model of development.
For Dienst, television and video and one might hazard the multimedia interactive
come both before and after Deleuze's cinema. "They are the unthinking and
the not-yet-thought image regime that oversee his project from the outside."3
Deleuze's theories of the image in relation to cinema are by now well known:
his theoretical and historical distinctions between the movement - image and
the time - image; his arguments against Lacanian informed Metzian film semiotics
as much as against the phenomenological notions of perception; his critique
of conceptions of representation in the image and autonomous perception in the
viewer. Rather he posits via Bergson, a viewer who must always be considered
an image on the same plane as the filmic one.
How he is able to do that is via a theory that understands that within the cinema
of the movement - image, the camera apparatus is supposed to duplicate human
visuality but cannot in fact replicate a continuous movement given that it breaks
into frozen singular images.
For Deleuze what exemplifies the movement - image, (which he locates in the
cinema of the pre-war period), is the way in which sequences of images are supposed
to extend into the responses of spectators but which he will prefer to call
"living images"4 . This extension he calls the "sensory motor
link" but rather than claiming that "a given construction of images
will produce a given response, - since perception itself is only activated as
an image,- the "sensory motor link" crosses back and forth through
a set of references as its immanent principle of unity , its plane of consistency.
It motivates the structure without emanating from a single source"5 .
Deleuze can now totalise the field of images without having to refer all images
to a single point of reference (the ideal viewer) rather he proposes two parrallel
systems of reference : things as movement and perspective's as duration.
In the post war period however, the sensory motor link is uncoupled and the
time-image emerges with a new state of disorganised exchange networks.
The time-image, is that which operates within a temporal economy not organised
around a subjective reference and bears witness to what Deleuze will call cinema's
"will to art".
Now cinematic description becomes possible. For Deleuze this means there is
no longer even a place from which to ask about the distinction between the real
and the imaginary6. Further, sound is liberated from a demand for realistic
synchronisation with the image, as are camera movements, to show how the apparatus
itself emits thoughts. As Dienst summarises it, the work of cinema becomes less
montage (assembly) and more montrage (a showing) of images in their singular
opticality and sonority rather than as raw materials that show a movement .
The falseness of the time-image exposes the truth about cinema's rules of construction.
"By indescernability between real and imaginary Deleuze wants this zone
to be considered as aspect of the object character of the images, not as the
putative confusion of some viewer"7. This indescernability pivots on a
structure he calls crystalline time. A crystal -image always implies two sides.
Actual and virtual.8
The point of recounting all this is to identify just what methodology we are
using when approaching different forms of moving - image registration and for
it not to be confused with methodologies dependent upon a "spectator dialectic,
a duality of projection and introjection, an axilogy of experience or an emphasis
on desire, where desire is expressed in terms of the audience " 9 .
Having said this, in the electronic image, the indistinction between object
and image dissolves into what Dienst claims is a continuous movement, allowing
time to pass in a newly automated consistency. Unlike the cinema of the time-image,
the most salient question of which we could ask is regarding the possiblity
of thinking a "cut in - itself", with the electronic image, the possibility
of the most radical cuts are implied because the integrity of the frame is violated
and images can surge up from any part of the screen. The image never fully appears
because it is cut laterally 10 .
.
On Dienst account, TV produces a time - image the moment it is turned on regardless
of whether it is turned on for anyone in particular. Televisual time is already
in the air-time as the "infinitesimal fissuring of an interminable present".
Building on Deleuze's conception of the time image, Dienst claims television
offers the simultaneous peaks of the present and virtual loops of returning
past in its everyday segments and proposes two features of the televisual in
relation to its temporal economy that of still time and that of automatic time
.
In television the cut has been overtaken by the switch or the mix, which makes
every change of image a potential displacement. Every image begins with a mix
or switch. Although we can only talk about seeing what happens as a mixture
of still and automatic time, the mix or the switch structures seeing.
Still time in television is not a moment of capturing a picture and making an
object of it as in photography. Televisual stills are created by switching away
from a picture.
Automatic time, Dienst claims appears when an image is switched and left running,
so that it is no longer an image of something, it is "the time of the camera's
relentless stare", persisting beyond the movement of objects and scenery
that pass before it.
If still time slices off images and designates them as past, the automatic time
opens up to an anticipated future. The fray of instants in still-time is most
readily evident in music video and commercials, on Dienst's account. "Rapid
meanderings with erratic framings offer a fleeting glimpse of things that neither
compose nor contain one another. The rapid flight of images are however marshalled
by a single commodity (or in music video, an autonomous automatic sound-image)
that serves to reference the entire set... The instant image is the minimum
unit in televisual aesthetics, the smallest interval for the activation of sensory-motor-reactions
and the most intense fusion of subjectifying and objectifying image making processes.11
"
Automatic time is specifically televisual epistemology, evident especially in
"live" televisual situations, i.e. the pure event, the direct, the
scene that "speaks for itself12 .
Neither still nor automatic time can reach an end point of fulfillment where
each would finally become the other (although video art offers greater possibilities).
Sitcoms and series tend toward features of still time -interchangability and
repeatability -whereas serials exhibit a more automatic form, linear and incomplete.
"It is not "things" or "situations" that are reproduced,
represented or even simulated but the archaic speeds of their programming "
according to Dienst.
Still and automatic times are not forms of experience but TV tools of analysis
so that images do not need to be interpreted so much as located in their diverse
sets and series.Television Dienst claims offers disjunction as part of its apparatus
:the more complex the televisual system, the greater its powers of dispersive
flux.
The VCR and newer systems such as the multi-media interactive amount to systems
that moves away from solely representational unities toward multi-directional
technological solutions, according to Dienst.
If for Deleuze the temporal economies of the cinema, nominated as the movement
- image and the time-image and figured around the sensory motor link and the
workings of the cut, and for Dienst the still and automatic times of television
are grounded in the mix and the switch, then the temporalities of the multimedia
interactive perhaps pivots around information flow and the click and drag. What
these might be are yet to be fully figured .
But certainly we could not begin to try and understand them by confusing the
interactive with a medium the way media are traditionally understood nor with
something thay even produces an image as such. The calculated image unlike those
produced in other media is not obtain by recording but through modelling and
the computer is not itself a medium. According to Timothy Binkley13 , with media
such a painting, film or video the image information is inseperable from the
physical material storing it. But the computer provides us with a phenomenon
not found in other media. It contains a frame buffer which stores the image.
The computer by managing image memory can compute the contents of the frame
buffer and transfer it to any appropriate output device such as the video display
terminal, disk, printer and so on (Strictly speaking while computer artwork
involves a choice of output device, one could say that this is also true of
photography or film but the range of outputs is very narrow). But to claim that
the frame buffer stores an image is itself deceptive. What it stores is information
and that information cannot give rise to an image with any true identity. The
same information can produce quite different images, none of which has any priority
as the true appearance. The contents of the buffer could appear equally well
as a video image, photograph of an image or a work in any one of a variety of
other media, each looking different although derived from the same file of numbers.
Where does one find the digital image after all? A picture of the frame buffer
is just a picture of number and a picture of a number is just the number itself.
One cannot in fact make a picture of a number. A number is an abstraction with
no physical substance that could have a physical appearance14 . This is why
the frame buffer can be moved around from monitor, to disk, to printer because
they are abstract concepts and are not uniquely embodied by a particular medium.
Such an image has no identity but that does not mean it is a lack rather here
the cut is a flow (diversion to the information output).
It is the flow and the click which Brad Miller attempts work in such a way that
it operates on the model of a rhizome where the interactor can connect any point
to any point. Miller attempts to illustrate Deleuze's rhizome by building a
virtual structure based on conjunction "...and...and...and..." cued
by sound buttons that move you from screen to screen. It is composed not of
units but dimensions. One can enter the options as plateaux . He takes Deleuze's
position on language in Mille Plateaux where he claims language would have nothing
to do with the transmission of a signified content (as Derrida would have it
) but instead assembles and regulates signifying regimes, stitching bodies and
ennunciations together. Instead of resemblence there are variable links between
ever changing elements. Thus there is no representation only images and speeds
intersecting aspects of bodies in motion. With the interactor in the multimedia
work we witness a phenomenon which would perhaps be something similar to Deleuze's
"living - image" except of course that in relation to the digital
we cannot strictly speaking define it as an image. What it provides us with
is an ontological discourse based on an artificial conception of nature, a nature
that is produced in practice.
Digital Rhizome was exhibited during the "Filmmaker and Multimedia:Narrative
and Interactivity" Conference staged by the Australian Film Commission
in Melbourne in March '95. Details regarding the work can be obtain through
the artist. email Brad.Miller@unsw.edu.au.
It was also exhibited in Revue Virtuelle # 2 Centre Georges Pompidou Paris
1994 and was produced as part of a Master of Fine Arts degree in the College
of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales.
© Heather Barton writes around new imaging technologies and is undertaking
post-graduate research in the area at the University of Melbourne.
MESH#5 Summer, 1995. MESH film/video/media/art is the journal of Experimenta
Media Arts
Footnotes