Absorptive Dreams

Freud interpreted dream in its three characteristics: it is primarily visual; it has a composite structure; and dream has the ability to let each element to be replaced by an associative word or syllable.

This structure could be useful in deconstructing various genres of art practices, not just installation art, but also films, fictions, paintings, and so on. Actually, all of these cultural elements could be used, manipulated and represented in a certain way to create an immersive environment within one installation work.

In reading Claire Bishop's book, Installation Art, I like the term of "physically immersive" and "psychologically absorptive" she used to describe Ilya Kabakov's work that functions as a "total installation". Besides providing an external appearance of the work, which is the primary visual in thinking about a dream-image, installation artists are supposed to create an environment to establish a composite structure to let the viewers enter into the place that is filled with elements open for free-associate. Just like interpreting a dream, viewers enter into a sphere created by the artist and read the visible to come up with a meaning, with sensory immediacy and conscious perception, also with unconscious imagination and self-reflecting. The external aspects of an installation would transfer into something like internal spirits and then enter into the inner central part of the viewers' cultural and historical memory. Memory and dream are always one step away from the spectator's presence within the moment within the space; however, they are both haunting the core of how we view the status quo despite its appearance or platforms.

So it is true to agree with John Dewey's idea that "art is experience", which functions as "heightened vitality" and "complete interpenetration of self and the world of objects and events". Environments, as moments of being with a high degree of associated meanings can always provoke or confirm the reader's sense of self-presence.

Rephotographed Fragments

When we talk about what media are and what the reality is, we will be easily confused and lost in a loop filled with glasses, mirrors, and lenses, which can transparently show real life images, reflect or distort the visible and invisibles, as well as recreate newly generated pictures at the same time. We are living in a world that constructed by multiply layers of seeing, various forms of mediated images, different levels of filtered repetition, reproduction and representation.

Technical development in photography makes it possible for people to enlarge a detail, to pause a motion, and to deconstruct a still image. We have thousands of methods and reasons to photograph a photograph. We make pictures of pictures every day in our life. Rephotographed fragments can be found everywhere in reality as well as in media. The fundamental signification implicit in the use of rephotograph technique is that there is an emphasis placed upon the materiality and processes of photography as media/medium.

Photography with its capability in rephotographing/reproduction is only one part of the big loop of contemporary media practice. Charlie Gere's argument on what today's media are is quite supportive, that is media are the production and product of digitalized endless repetition. Media are working like a big archive of represented, mediated, and filtered life-images and reality pieces. We are a part of the repetition and reproduction. We are so close to the rephotographed fragments, but somehow so remote from reality itself.

Indeed, it seems not only elementary but also essential that an inquiry into the nature of photographic representation is actually enriched through an a priori acceptance of the photographer's alienation from their subject. And it is alienation, which begins within the lens itself, for Lacan, implicit to the imposition of language, the fundamental consequence of the subject's entry into the Symbolic Order. We struggle to convey intimacy in language: it is already pulverized. We can only get to the real feeling through the artificial. Same thing happens in today's media age. We struggle to reveal the secret of life, the mysterious sacredness of reality; however the reality is already pulverized, separated, distorted into millions of layers, pieces, and various dimensions of images. We can now only try to get the sense of reality through the media world that built with repetition, representation and reflection.

"Rephotography may be conceptualized/recognized as a useful means with which to emphasize the fundamentally mediated quality of subjectivity itself." The more we want to know about the reality itself, the more repetition we make to get a sense of the original. We are in such a dilemma that we have to use the repetition/artificial as an entry way for understanding something, however making us even further away from the true materiality/objectivity itself.

This phenomenon can be explained by Jacqueline Rose, an overly Freudian perspective, in a way that repetition is an insistence, that is, as the constant pressure of something hidden but not forgotten. In her interpretations of rephotographing activities, "repetition actually becomes a valuable tool that can act to intensify and illuminate precisely through representation/pressure, which returns the reader/viewer to some element that has been repressed, removed, rejected."

Optical Unconscious

Photography as a form of art work can be so different by the ways people talk about it, make use of it, and also by the certain ideology people view the function of it. Similar to the different meanings and functions that people articulate the action of talking photographs, the significance of images can be so various according to the different purposes and methods that people use to examine them. 

Evidentiary photography can be identified by the use of a camera working as a tool to decode, explore and investigate the traces - evidence inside a picture frame. In 1924, the Hungarian photographer and writer Laszlo Moholy- Nagy noted how the photographic camera "makes visible existences which cannot be perceived or taken in by our optical instrument, the eye." Camera lens, as a mechanism optical instrument, can make the unconscious existences in human eyes visible within the development of science and technology. Walter Benjamin also commented on that point that "photography, with its devices of slow motion and enlargement, reveals the secret. It is through photography that we first discover the existence of this optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis." 

We view things with our optical unconscious everyday. That unconsciousness would also be included inside the images we take. When photography is used/operated as an examiner, an enlarger, or a recorder, the traces/ evidence of the unconscious are not wholly imperceptible. Photography functions in reveal the secret of an image, the secret of seeing, the secret of reality, especially the reality that used to be ignored or unconsciously overlooked by our naked eyes. 

Actually, there has always been an interest in seeing evidentiary photography, such as police pictures and crime photography. Discovery the trace/evidence in a still picture with the possibility of enlargement, pause, repetitive examination, and people are attracted by the capability of revealing hidden existence, lies, and secrets. This phenomenon probably links to the popularity of reality TV and other media formats that function in showing the private parts in others' lives. People's desire to peel off the cover of privacy and the secrets of daily life when viewing a photograph demonstrates a certain anxiety about reality itself. Some people find the crime photography is beautiful and compelling because of their fascination about the sacredness of violent death. Privacy, anxiety, and the mysterious sacredness of life, all of these old taboos are now released by the power of media and capability of techniques. 

On the other hand, people examine images differently. What kinds of visual elements can be read as traces/evidence to the viewers are decided by their own understandings. The relationships between traces/evidence and meanings are different according to their cultural backgrounds, ideologies, and social norm systems. Actually, there is even a distinction between traces and evidence to some audience. People connect their personal experiences and understandings to the visual elements inside a picture frame, and then personalize their own interpretation of a pictorial investigation. These personalized reading/editing of a photograph can be done consciously and unconsciously. 

Different readers can interpret a same picture into thousands of meanings. The meanings of visual arts, just like any other kinds of existing such as politics, religions, and value systems, is forever shifting. Every picture reader is like a gatekeeper. The transition of meanings from people to people, generation to generation, culture to culture is activated by the establishment of new relationship between trace/evidence and significance. The shifting of meanings and its following reproduction are performed by new discoveries of relations and how different viewers translate those links between trace/evidence into content. 

Massage the Message

Spielmann used the Vasulkas and Paik as the examples of the two different paths of how to understand video and the electronic medium. Basically, the Vasulkas’ experimental video works were working on investigating the new electronic medium’s internal world, its transformative and “massaging” capabilities. In this path, video artists explored the medium’s manipulative potentials and tried to prove the medium’s extensibility itself. Just like how Hill used video graphics to build a new electronic vocabulary. They viewed video medium independently and demonstrated the interrelation of machines and the video medium. By exploring the structure of interrelation of video medium, those artists experimented the generation of electronic pictoriaility, and its flexibility, instability, and exchangeability. In experiencing the manipulated delay and feedback that happen exclusively in video medium, those artists were trying to achieve a conceptual understanding of the time and movement in electronic media. They explored and discovered the structure specific to video medium, and demonstrated the notion of coherence through construction as well as deconstruction of the audiovisual signal process in generating an electronic pictoriality.

However, the other path, as the work from Nam June Paik, was working more on the possible effect of multiplication on the video-television interaction and its multimedia spectacle performance. Paik had a very different attitude toward how art understand the relationship between video and its implications for conceptual creation. His major difference from the Vasulkas started from their difference views on how to differentiate video and television. Like how Paik did in his work McLuhan Caged, he was doing something more than just manipulating a fluid digital pictoriality inside a computer screen, he inserted video and other media art into his television. Television as a preprogrammed medium of transmission was not in the exploration of the first path of experimental video artists like the Vasulkas. However, Paik’s remediation of the television program as a medium did take a great part in his art approach, which was demonstrating the notion of “message as the massage”, and applied it into his television’s existing program structure.

About the idea of massage the message, the Vasulkas concentrated on the video’s structure and the fundamental matrix inside the video medium. Like what he did with the work Art of Memory, he explored the possibility to massage the shape, color, duration, implications of historical records in his video, and then presented the medium’s capability in massaging or distorting the conceptual content of imagery, in deconstructing the older media’s social functions as well as establishing a new image culture. Well, Paik’s approach to distort a television image by giving the media a magnet massage truly responded to McLuhan’s media theory. Not only the message from the media is new, but also the media’s massage on the message itself. Paik’s art approach was focused on the interference and distorting the electronic pictoriality with the regard to the basic electronic signal. The massage and manipulation and explanation of media as message itself was represented in his artwork. The electronic pictoriality, as the major art investigating point for the Vasulkas, was nothing more than a signal process to Paik, and he was using new machines to insert the electronic pictoriality into his television for displaying a more complex and complicated electronically transformation, which demonstrated his distinguished understanding toward the aesthetical concepts about the specifics of video as a new medium. 

From Stage to Camera

Consider how an actor might perceive the value of his work in a film or video environment as opposed to live stage. A personalized experience?  A unique performance?  How does the actor estimates his relationship to the not present audience, when playing only to other actors, the simulated environment of the sound stage, mechanical devices that record the performance and the, technicians necessary to the apparatus?  How do these mediated spaces affect the perception of our own experience of reality?

Compared to a live performer on a stage, the screen actor, which is presented by a camera, has many different things need to notice when he perceive the value of his work in a film or a video.

First of all, instead of facing live audience, or say real people, a screen actor is performing in front of a camera lens. Despite the first strangeness or weirdness facing the camera, the “film actor lacks the opportunity of the stage actor to adjust to the audience during his performance”. However, the screen actor is facing the real public eventually, so he has to response to real human emotions when he’s doing performance. On the hand, the extant of “acting” is kind of tricky in contemporary film criteria, since in today’s film industry “the greatest effects are almost always obtained by acting as little as possible”.

Secondly, compared of doing a linear and continued performance on stage, a screen actor’s work can be several separated shootings that may take hours inside a studio, which provides various lighting conditions and fancy effects. Now in a film or a video, what audiences see are the reflected images that become separable and transportable.

Another thing that is very different from doing live performance is that “the camera that presents the performance of the film actor to the public need not respect the performance as an integral whole”. Compared with a stage actor that has fully control of his body and play, the imagery or performance of a screen actor is controlled by cameraman. By giving a different camera position and another angle, a film actor can be manipulated by a certain expressing reason. So besides thinking about how to estimate his relationship to the not present audience when playing, the screen actor also need to response to the cameramen, to other actors, to the simulated environment, as well as to the mechanical devices that record the performance.

Moreover, with the improving mechanical reproducibility and other fancy techniques, it is very easy for modern cameras to capture the smallest facial movements or little noise made by the screen actor or other objects in a film or a video. The mediated images about time and spaces definitely affect the perception of our own experience of reality. “By close-up of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the other hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action”. Therefore, a screen actor must be aware of that capacity brought by modern technology and make adjustments to that. “Hence, the performance of the actor is subjected to a series of optical tests”.

Reproductivity of Art

How does the ability to mechanically reproduce a medium change the idea what constitutes art is a crucial issue in art making these days.  When talking about new forms of art creation or new features of art regime, how does reproducibility create a system of relations that differs from that of a one-of-a-kind object must be concerned.  

In principle, I agree with Benjamin’s argument that “a work of art has always been reproducible”. From script to print, graphics to lithography, and finally to the technique of photography and film, mechanical reproduction of a work of art can always represent something new in human history. The improvements in mechanical reproducibility of artwork, in Benjamin’s mind, may damage the “aura” of a work of art; however in my opinion, the increasing reproducibility sometimes brings more possibilities to human’s art practice.

In this essay, Benjamin established his theory of aura, which means the “here and now” of a work of art. Aura is always tied with unique historical circumstances. However, massive reproduction brings human’s concerns about the authenticity of a work of art.  Since the most perfect reproduction of an art piece is lacking one important element: “its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be”. In other words, it lacks its aura. On the other hand, aura is alive and extremely changeable. The relationship between the two values of a work of art: its cult value and exhibition value will change in different auras. For instance, nowadays the exhibition value of an artwork becomes a creation with entirely new functions. Some photography artworks’ exhibition value begins to displace their cult value all along the line. That’s no wonder because contemporary masses always want to bring things “closer” and overcome the uniqueness of everything, even art, in the belief of “universal equality”. By accepting the mechanical reproduction, people start to “pry an object from its shall, to destroy its aura”.

I’m not sure if I agree with Benjamin on this point. Because aura is changeable, and may be the massive mechanical reproducibility is part of the aura of our time. Apparently the mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art. And that is how we embrace new formats of fine art practice. Relational art is a good example. With the mechanical reproducibility, everything can be art today. On the other hand, the mechanical reproduction released the work of art from its dependence on its ritual basis. Relational aesthetics projects just “break with the traditional physical and social space of the art gallery and the sequestered artist studio or atelier”. Relational aesthetics takes as its subject the entirety of life as it is lived, or the dynamic social environment, rather than attempting mimetic representation of object removed from daily life; or say the exhibition value exceeds the cult value of a work of art in this new possibility brought by mechanical reproduction.