Listening to Vincent Moon — Chapter 4: The fold (Part 2)
This is the fourth chapter of my PhD thesis entitled “Listening to Vincent Moon: Musical Encounters and the Cinematic Diagram.” For citations and references please use the full item record which can be found at Universitat Pompeu Fabra’s database.
To navigate through all the chapters please go the index. More information on my work can be found at http://matheussiqueira.com
The fold: the (Neo-Baroque) production of beings
The last aspect of Moon’s cinematic diagram chronologically was one of the early traits to appear and is characterized by moving sens to beyond the film object. Furthermore than an encounter-image that requires the listener’s interaction to unfreeze itself, Moon expands the place for encounters to a database, to the virtual space that each listener will have to navigate and create his own path in order to find a greater sens that emerges from this interaction.
This move to beyond the film can be seen in a later Deleuze, that starting with his book Anti-Oedipus, shifts his focus from the production of sense (as was explained in the previous chapter) to the production of beings (as I’ll explain next). In his words, “I’ve undergone a change. The surface-depth opposition no longer concerns me. What interests me now is the relationships between a full body, a body without organs, and flows that migrate.”[1]
In Moon, through the fold and the database, a similar move happens, shifting from the cinematic body to the flow between these bodies. One can no longer only study his films and ignore that they are interrelated and connected in such a way that enables for new reconfigurations each time someone comes in interaction with it. What emerges from Moon’s model of interacting with the database of films also is part of his diagram.
Žižek when remarking the difference in a later Deleuze that shifted away from the logic of sense, synthetizes the change that now the event is an effect of the “virtual intensities out of which bodies emerge through actualization (the passage from Becoming to Being).”[2]
Deleuze’s book The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1993) concerns itself with how these virtual intensities take place. An idea that, also briefly appeared in Nancy, though it takes the spotlight in Moon. Nancy used the term fold/unfold, silently quoting Deleuze’s book, to talk about the invaginating body that transforms into an echo-chamber. Additionally, Deleuze refers to his own idea in observing the isolation of the figure in Bacon and on how his triptychs work. The fold came as a response for the Cartesian notions of duality, and as a critique of his own surface/depth paradigm present in the Logic of Sense, offering instead the model of the folding/unfolding when applied to human subjectivity. The book The Fold discusses that human subjectivity transformed from a linear projection model (that can relate to the traditional cinema screen) to a model more similar to an origami, or a fold. This model of subjectivity perceives reality as endlessly folding itself into diverse meanings and signifiers. It is not broken and fragmented but a whole that can divide and unfurl itself to infinity.
To illustrate, Deleuze gives us Foucault’s analogy of the Renaissance madman that being put in a ship becomes a passenger, or “prisoner” in the interior of the exterior, the fold of the sea. In this sense, we can see examples in the Trompe l’oeil paintings from the Baroque as a way of exemplifying the inside fold as a repetition from exteriority.
Deleuze further develops the fold by saying that it is also the name for one’s relation to oneself. This gives the fold an explicitly ethical dimension, but also a political/technological one. For him, the emergence of new kinds of struggle inevitably also involves the production of new kinds of subjectivity, new kinds of fold, new kinds of beings. Although he was thinking in the political situation of France in 1968, this struggle is updated in Timothy Murray’s book Digital Baroque to reflect the subjectivity in digital technology. The explanation that Deleuze writes in his book sheds light on the concept here at stake:
A flexible or an elastic body [that] still has cohering parts that form a fold, such that they are not separated into parts of parts but are rather divided to infinity in smaller and smaller folds that always retain a certain cohesion. Thus a continuous labyrinth is not a line dissolving into independent points, as flowing sand might dissolve into grains, but resembles a sheet of paper divided into infinite folds or separated into bending movements, each one determined by the consistent or conspiring surroundings.[3]
To better understand this concept Murray discusses the fold applying it to digital arts as “a deeply significant archaeological shift from projection to fold that is emphasized, if not wholly embodied, by the digital condition. While still often inscribed in models of knowledge and representation derived from the single-point perspective and Euclidean systems of projection (whether the stuff of the cinematic apparatus or the variants of GPS tracking), the fold embodies the elasticity of seriality and the continuous labyrinth of single points (1’s and 0’s).”[4]
In his work Moon transforms the unidimensional projection experience that Rouch utilized in his ethnographic films to an intricate polydimensional experience that closely resembles the Leibniz fold. His films, while independent in themselves, suggest the existence of a greater body created in the listener ‘s mind when navigating through the various fragments/films of the databases (like Moon’s website and Híbridos database).
To fold is viewed as a modus operandi in Baroque and not only as an aesthetic trace, in this sense Deleuze finishes his book saying that “we are discovering new ways of folding, akin to new envelopments, but we all remain Leibnizian because what always matters is folding, unfolding, refolding.”[5]
As of 2018, Vincent Moon’s website and his Vimeo account are the main repositories to find his films. The 538 films are archived with only a loose hierarchy (by year of creation or by the location on a map), flattening everything to the same level of importance. His feature documentaries are undistinguishable from the weekly films he published of musicians from around the world. To see everything, to fold/unfold through the database is a task that can take weeks, months or even years. Such structure also reinserts the concept of noise, similar to Cage’s piece Organ²/ASLSP (As Slow as Possible) where the music is extended to an absurd amount of time, and each note becomes intertwined with the soundscape and noises of life.[6] The listener is expected to return to the world “outside,” to let noise come in, and occasionally come back to re-enter these petites planètes.
The listener can maintain with Moon an ongoing continuous fold/unfold that can last for many years. Already in the first works, there is a stride towards a film that foregoes narrative to focus on an intensified experience that can be unlocked in a short time either in isolation or within a more extensive database.
As Deleuze’s book title indicates (The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque), there is a direct correlation between the operative fold to the Baroque; I’ll soon comeback to explore how the Neo-Baroque concept applies to Moon. Before, its noteworthy to fix in place the ways that a listener navigates this intricate database by contrasting it with Neo-Baroque artist Richard Reddaway. His installation The Wieskirche (2004) exemplifies three-dimensionally how users can find any entry point and navigate through the database opening their own sens in the gaps between.
Angela Ndalianis synthesizes in her early texts about Neo-Baroque that “Rather than providing a statically ordered perspectival arrangement, the ‘centre’ (in baroque) continually shifts, the result being the articulation of complex spatial conditions.”[7]
In the installation depictured below, Reddaway created a box-like construction that climbs the walls and ceiling of the space. It even spreads its tendrils into side rooms. The work seems to replicate itself, and there is a sense of growth as it spreads insidiously throughout the exhibition space. On the surface of each tile is a glossy surface, like the upwards side of a leaf, with fragmented blown-up photographs of ivy plants.
As photography folds into sculpture and sculpture into installation, Reddaway elicits how over history one idea folds into another and creates echoes over time. The attendee that enters the gallery can choose various entry points between the maze created in The Wieskirche. With the installation taking up the side rooms it is possible to choose either to linearly navigate the path taken by the photographs our view the installation as fragmented pieces.
Brian O’Doherty calls attention to Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau (1923–1943), who ahead of his time, resurfaced the concept of interacting with a place that continuously unfolds where one comes to interact with it to modernity. Even though it is not canonically inserted into either Baroque or Neo-Baroque periods, the Merzbau is impressive in predicating an essential change on how folding and unfolding assumes an essential position as an operative function. How the Merzbau was created already integrated the fold/unfold. In Schwitter’s words:
It grows about the way a big city does. (…) when a new building goes up, the Housing Bureau checks to see that the whole appearance of the city is not going to be ruined. In my case, I run across something or other that looks to me as though it would be right for the KdeE [Cathedral of Erotic Misery], so I pick it up. take it home, and attach it and paint it, always keeping in mind the rhythm of the whole. Then a day comes when I realize I have a corpse on my hands-relics of a movement in art that is now passé. So what happens is that I leave them alone, only I cover them up either wholly or partly with other things, making clear that they are being downgraded. As the structure grows bigger and bigger, valleys, hollows, caves appear, and these lead a life of their own within the overall structure. The juxtaposed surfaces give rise to forms twisting in every direction, spiraling upward. An arrangement of the most strictly geometrical cubes covers the whole, underneath which shapes are curiously bent or otherwise twisted until their complete dissolution is achieved.[8]
Schwitters’ work perfectly illustrates the fold as the interior of the exterior (Foucault’s analogy of a ship passenger as the “prisoner” in the interior of the exterior, the fold of the sea). For 20 years his studio space was being continuously transformed, invaginating the outside into a world of its own, an organic metamorphosis based on accumulation. O’Doherty explains that “as the structure grows bigger and bigger, valleys, hollows, caves appear, and these lead a life of their own within the overall structure.”[9]
When navigating through the Merzbau the logic is not that of a linear path, but of a swaying congruity of roads similar to how one navigates through a city. At any moment any turn can be taken, a new course can be traced or erased, one can walk through with an objective or just distractedly peruse over the details as Benjamin’s flaneur interacts with Paris. O’Doherty applies this to the transformation of the gallery space but it also is possible to view from early traces of a baroque aesthetic being reborn:
The energy powering this invasion is not recognized, though mentioned by Schwitters, for if the work had any organizing principle, it was the mythos of the city. The city provided materials, models of process, and a primitive esthetic of juxtaposition — congruity forced by mixed needs and intentions. The city is the indispensable context of collage and of the gallery space.[10]
Going even further back, at the end of the 16th-century Baroque artist Annibale Carracci used a similar method when painting his fresco at Palazzo Farnese. With various entry points the person when confronted by the fresco has various possibilities of navigating the imagery presented by Carracci.
Similarly, when navigating the works of Reddaway, Schwitters or Carracci when entering Vincent Moon’s series (Take Away Shows, Petites Planètes, Híbridos, etc.) I can take any path to watch the movies. Vincent Moon’s website and Híbridos collection of rituals (both screenshots below) act as a database, any random movie is turned into an entry point since each film doesn’t relate to any linear order within the series.
In the forward of Deleuze’s book The Fold, Tom Conley further connects the idea of the contemporary artist, its relation to the fold and to the baroque.
The last question that Deleuze poses involves what it means to live in the world. Our experience of a shrinking glove inflects the vision of the monad, since compressions of time and space modify ‘the difference of inside and outside and of public and private’. Thus, contemporary artists and musicians in the line of Leibniz transform monadology into nomadology. They are emigrant thinkers who deterritorialize accepted notions of space.[11]
Understanding this in light of the work of Vincent Moon and his traveling around the world, living as a nomad while attempting to record the local culture independent of any borders, symbolizes the way a contemporary artists fold, unfolds and refolds. Moon, a Neo-Baroque artist par excellence. His use of the fold, as Deleuze observes, is at the heart of the Baroque:
The Baroque refers not to an essence but rather to an operative function, to a trait. It endlessly produces folds. It does not invent things: there are all kinds of folds coming from the East, Greek, Roman, Romanesque, Gothic, Classical folds… Yet the Baroque trait twists and turns it folds, pushing them to infinity, fold over fold, one upon the other. The Baroque fold unfurls all the way to infinity.[12]
Neo-Baroque theory emerged in late 80s with Omar Calabrese, but subsequent researchers have since expanded what the term means in contemporary society.[13] One of the main theorists, Angela Ndalianis, calls attention to the ramifications that the theory took in the last decade and justifies the use of Neo-Baroque to study contemporary artists:
Yet it’s been in the last few decades that a Neo-Baroque logic has taken deeper root across diverse areas of the arts, continuing restlessly to move on to new metamorphic states and contexts while being nurtured by a culture that’s attracted to the visual and sensorial seductiveness that’s integral to Baroque form.[14]
Baroque characteristics such as seriality and polycentrism reappear anew as connection, intersubjectivity, and elasticity in digital media (as discussed in Murray). An outcome of the conceptual shift from linear projection to the fold, in part due to the initial wonder and possibility of accumulating and “freely” making available such large amount of data.[15]
Furthermore, Murray discusses that digital Baroque relies on a model of knowledge that bonds energy, possession, and mystical intensity, creating a paradoxical doubling of digital media with analogy and mysticism. The term doubling, chosen by Murray, another connection between the baroque and Moon’s idealized “doubling” of his body (of being possessed by something beyond). And even though not taking it literally as Moon does in his concept of cine-trance, Murray expands on why possession is such a strong call in the Neo-Baroque as he defines it as “a phantasm positioned analogously in the contrasting machineries of philosophy, psychoanalysis, science, and literature as a liminal figure conjoining per-version and certainty, imagination and cognition, desire and mind, along with, I would now add, subject and archive.”[16]
Moon recently echoed such views in an interview regarding one of his latest exhibitions:
A few months ago, I set up film installations on three screens at the CTM Berlin, which is a kind of temple to technological and electronic ultra-intellectualism. Not everyone is going to like what you’re doing, especially when you’re talking about spirituality — some people won’t be able to go there. But we’re trying to loosen things up a bit.
In the end, one of the best gateways is for shamans and hackers to meet, because they cultivate the same relationship to the code of life. Shamans are playing on the spiritual code of life, whereas hackers are playing on the digital code of life. You quickly come to understand that digital and spiritual fields overlap — it’s amazing.[17]
Walter Moser, in the book he edited regarding the baroque resurgence, also connects possession to the baroque. Faced with the excess of aesthetic intensity, the Baroque spectator, reader, or listener is said by Moser to be enveloped in an emotional state of ecstasy or delirium well before being able to attribute to this intensity the sense of an attraction or repulsion.[18] Murray compliments, adding that, moreover, “such a machinery of possession rekindles the early modern attraction to fantasy and fancy.”[19] And lastly, this mysticism is also analyzed by Deleuze when he conveys that “The essence of the Baroque entails neither falling into nor emerging from illusion but rather realizing something is illusion itself or of tying it to spiritual presence.”[20]
To neither fall nor emerge from illusion (from the Latin in “at, upon” + lūdere “to play, mock, trick”) is then to be at the edge of the play, to balance between emerging into the chaos of what is outside and falling into the closed meaning of the world inside. It is to be always in the renvoi, folding and unfolding the resonances that echo through all the spaces of the outside (noise) and inside (meaning). To search for the creation of the encounter-image, an updated ideal of being at the edge of the illusion, always at the impasse between Actual/Virtual.
It is by navigating through the database (the endless virtuality), folding and unfolding the sens of each film, jumping through and creating a new narrative that produces the becoming of being. As the listener interacts with each unique body (the films) in the “the bodies themselves emerge, actualize themselves, from this field of virtuality.”[21]
Database
To store, accumulate and make data available is then another characteristic in Moon’s cinematic diagram that expands to outside the film and that is also intrinsically connected with the fold/unfold. Apart from his 538 films, there are full albums of his Petites Planètes recordings available to download, which include an even greater range of sound material that is not present elsewhere.
This over accumulation of material without any strict goal or objective was apparently a result from the philosophical and practical approach of Moon towards his craft, however naïve it may sound:
I do not try to refine it as, what’s my goal? My goal is to keep traveling and experience these exciting moments with people, and to share all these recordings for free. I just want to use the new technologies, the internet, in ways that I think that are strong points, and to make films that are exciting and just give them to people.[22]
Moon’s belief in the platform functioned as a reason and an end, similarly to how Walter Benjamin analyzed the authors of the German Baroque and their vision of the platform as a miracle:
For it is common in the literature of the Baroque to pile up fragments ceaselessly without any strict idea of goals and, in the unremitting expectation of a miracle, to take the repetition of stereotypes for a process of intensification. The Baroque writers must have regarded the work of art as just such a miracle.[23]
In Moon, the piling up of fragments is visible through the sheer amount of releases. During 2006–2014 this was the constant release of new films almost every week. In an event in Barcelona that I attended in 2014, Moon stated that sometimes he doesn’t even watch the edit until the end, indicating a belief that the constant flux of releasing his movies is more important than a detailed and minutiae tailoring of each movie. It also strengthens the argument of the encounter-image being ephemeral since the film is meant to be experienced through the first interaction.
This has slightly changed since Híbridos (2017). Moon and Priscilla Telmon spent three years recording and investigating before making any of the films available. Nevertheless, even if the process changed and there wasn’t a constant flow, once the feature documentary was released it was followed by a live-cinema event, an art installation, and 94 films that were made available online confirming this attraction in maintaining a database that can be accessed and navigated.
Murray further attests to this connection between Baroque ideals and new media artists strengthening the link between the miracle of the platform:
While new information systems enhance the intensity of this flow, their displacement of possessive individualism by the wonder of data accumulation evokes the very ideal of knowledge that Walter Benjamin argued to be characteristic of the Baroque: the process of storing and schemata to which the emergent libraries of the seventeenth century were a monument.[24]
Although seriality is one of the strong characteristics within Neo-Baroque, the concept of the database would better suit the series of Vincent Moon. What in the Baroque was a lure towards libraries is translated at the turn of the 21st century as attractiveness to databases, becomes the space of virtualities from which new beings emerge. Moon’s website being such a place.
The play is that, when navigating this database, the listener has a certain amount of control. To fold/unfold the database is to become a composer (or compiler) that vibrates and transforms one’s own experience.
The key, for this composition (or compilation) to happen is in Thomas Elsaesser comment on this shift from linear narrative (projection) to database (fold) when researching the motives behind the rise of mind-game films, like Memento (2000), Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Dr. (2001):
It would therefore be not altogether unreasonable to assume that new technologies of storage, retrieval, and sorting, such as the ones provided so readily and relatively cheaply by the computer or internet servers, will in due course engender and enable new forms of “narrative”, which is to say, in other ways of sequencing and “linking” data than that of the story, centered on single characters, and with a beginning, a middle, and an ending.[25]
Other studies related to contemporary cinema and culture can also enlighten this shift to databases. Hiroki Azuma when studying the Japanese Otaku culture devises a theory that defines the way the world was grasped in modernity as a “tree model” or as Azuma himself adds in parenthesis “or projection model,” a term that I have previously discussed and that permeates the study of Neo-Baroque through the Leibniz fold.
While in modernity there was still a functional grand narrative it shifts to become more similar to a rhizome,[26] a “database model (or a reading-up model).” The use of the word “reading” is no mere coincidence, connecting contemporary art practice back to the miracle of the printed book. Azuma goes on to explain the difference between these two models:
An easily understandable example of this is the Internet. The Net has no center. That is to say, no hidden grand narrative regulates all Web pages. However, it is not a world established through the combination of outer signs alone, as in the case of the rhizome model. On the Internet, rather, there is a distinct double-layer-structure, wherein, on one hand, there is an accumulation of encoded information, and, on the other hand, there are individual Web pages made in accordance with the users “reading them up.” The major difference between this double-layer structure and the modern tree model is that, with the double-layer structure, the agency that determines the appearance that emerges on the surface outer layer resides on the surface itself rather than in the deep inner layer, i.e., it belongs on the side of the user who is doing the “reading up,” rather than with the hidden information itself. In the world of the modern tree model, the surface outer layer is determined by the deep inner layer, but in the world of the postmodern database model, the surface outer layer is not determined by the deep inner layer; the surface reveals different expressions at those numerous moments of “reading up.”[27]
“Reading up”, thus, is the act of organizing and appropriating the material. Through Deleuze and his study of the Baroque “reading up” becomes the act of folding/unfolding: “to have or to possess is to fold, in other words, to convey what one contains ‘with a certain power.’”[28] The viewer that “reads up” the database is given this “certain power” as a result of his efforts.
Moon, although probably not aware of these connections, also uses the database as the best method to expand and empower the listener within the universe of his films. By not assuming control over any linear and narrative experience, he exempts himself and passes to the listener the function of “reading-up” through the database.
The database enables Moon’s films to link to one another by a different manner than the story, but which one is it? It could be argued that since 2009 with the creation of Petites Planètes the link is an ethnographic interest since he shifted to record local musicians from around the world. But to assume this would be erroneous. Even though during some years Moon described his work as experimental ethnography, it would be more appropriate to understand his recent reluctance to use the term as indicating that what links them is the experience of unfolding the encounter-image, in interacting with the renvoi, and not the more common ethnographic text.
The database isn’t linked through a common subject or theme, but as a collection of experiences. And I mean experiences not as a recounter of Moon’s lived moments, but as a collection of an awaiting experience for the listener to unfreeze it.[29] It is an accumulation of sensual, spatiotemporal, directional and signifying sense. This experience-to-be as the object of the database is what distinguishes the interaction of folding/unfolding Moon’s work than that of a random database of objects (a user-created playlist on YouTube for example).
The visionary Chris Marker, in his project Ouvroir (2010), created an idealized version of how someone can fold/unfold through a virtual database. Ouvroir is an island-museum that was created inside the game Second Life. Instead of merely laying the objects inside a museum like structure, the island is full of “cat-shaped coves, roving humpbacks, a castle keep, and a downed 747; a massive red orb hovers in the pixelated cerulean firmament above…”[30] The user thus, is not there only to access and see a virtualized version of his films and installations, but also to explore, play, and find something that surpasses each object in the form that he folds and unfolds all the interactions that can be had at the island.
Another inviting exercise is to compare Moon’s work with Les Archives de la Planètes. Both databases host a collection of audiovisual material collected from all around the world but assume very distinct functions. Moon aims to blur and be at the edge of meaning, while Les Archives de la Planètes follows the ethnographic guidelines in indexing every material to make it understandable and comprehensible.
Les Archives de la Planètes was the work of French banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn, who during 1909 to 1931 collected over 72 thousand color photographs and hundreds of hours of film from 50 countries. His objective — to preserve and record practices and places that soon could disappear:
The stereoscopic photograph, the projection, and most of all the cinematograph, this is what I would like to make work on a grand scale, to fix once for all the aspects, practices and modes of human activity whose fatal disappearance is only a question of time.[31]
Ana Grgić views Kahn’s archival impulse as a response in modernity to “the disappearance of tradition and the replacing of natural memory with the institution of history.” European society at the turn of the 20th century, faced with such conditions and simultaneously amassing a great number of artifacts through colonial exploits felt the emergence of “a fear of forgetting roots and identity — a fear that can only be countered by the drive to keep everything — that is, to archive.” The initial objective then, wasn’t to make the footage available for commercial or educational purposes, but to keep them in an archive. Grgić adds the example of how the footage shot in 1912 in Albania was first seen by an audience 100 years later in 2012.[32]
Similarly to this attempt in finding a connection between the films in Moon’s database, Jean Brunhes was appointed the scientific director of Les Archives de la Planètes to also connect all the material that was being collected. His unifying link between all these fragments would be called “human geography”:
The ensemble of all these facts in which human activity has a part forms a truly special group of surface phenomena — a complex group of facts infinitely variable and varied, always contained within the limits of physical geography, but having always the easily discernible characteristic of being related more or lesser directly to man. To the study of this specific group of geographical phenomena we give the name human geography.[33]
The neatly cataloged archive, with calligraphed labels and hand-written fiches in drawers and on shelves, was planned and organized by Brunhes. In his words each piece needed to have:
-the date (day and month, and if applicable, because of certain lighting effects, time).
-the place (indication of the name of the village or place in question and also indication of the region).
-the subject (do not be afraid to develop the idea that made you choose such subject, even if your interpretation is later considered as inaccurate, it will be very useful that you have noted your first impression).[34]
After a ten-year process of digitalization, in 2016 the photographs were freely made available in an online archive (the footage still is only available in the physical archive). By using the data that Brunhes required a century before the viewer can now navigate by a map, by themes, by places or by the photographer who took the picture.
Effectively, the archive and subsequently the online database of Les Archives de la Planète operate to “mummify time as a historical object.”[35] The experience of the encounter gives way to a scientific dissection of human practice. Kahn’s archives return to the Baroque library and the recent transposition to a database to the Neo-Baroque. In both cases, the user can create and navigate through this library. The difference, when comparing to Moon, is the outcome when creating my own path through the photos. The operation of folding/unfolding has a drastically different objective when paralleling both. In Les Archives de la Planète it doesn’t end in a new sens or in a new narrative. The data is meant to be informative and provide clarification on what is being shown. Les Archives de la Planète behaves under an ocularcentric perspective, the final objective will always be to understand.
Vincent Moon’s database, conversely, operates in an otocentric manner. Moreover than knowledge, the model of thought is focused in acknowledging, in opening all senses to something that can’t be intellectually comprehended. The data, instead of being informational, is the gateway to experiences. To escape the mummification of time Moon strips everything that can indicate any historical status to what is being filmed. The human body is not seen as a site for scientific dissection but as a body to interact with. As Moon explains — “The idea is to leave behind any preconceptions so as to connect with the moment, with bodies.”[36]
Each film is frozen, expecting the listener to open its renvoi and interact with it. Furthermore, in the act of unfolding the film, the listener also resonates in the database where each data vibrates as a sonorous body and where the listener through the operative fold/unfold creates its own voice, interacting in search for sens.
Reading how the fold operates in the database together with Deleuze’s idea of becoming as production of Being implies that the operative function in folding/unfolding creates a pure being out of the intensities of the Virtual, couldn’t this be Nancy’s post-phenomenological self? Out of the intensities of the database, a new being is born through the folding and unfolding, the self in the renvoi through which the listener finds sens.
A review about Moon’s Rituals (2016) by Hannah Drayson enlightens the experience of someone folding/unfolding in search for understanding and instead finding something else (sens?) both inside the film and in how the work is presented:
Moon’s beautiful films are incredibly engaging and left me troubled, perhaps because of the way the selections do show us the worlds within which these rituals take place, while at the same time their informants are not able to explain from their own perspective what they mark or how we should see. The clips neither introduce their subjects nor do they acknowledge the presence of a camera; preamble, welcome and explanation are not included. The leveled view of the clips is perhaps intended to erase the differences between the apparently timeless human actions they depict. The shift between documentary and artwork makes our own troubled impulses as viewers all the more apparent; Moon leaves us with a feeling that we have stumbled across something barely understood.[37]
In Moon’s cinematic diagram, the database assumes this function of breaking the narrative seriality in ordering the films, leveling everything to the same random entry point, and especially important — the data not being something to be understood but to be experienced (to encounter sens). Having in mind this otocentric approach, the database in Moon contradicts what Deleuze nominates as the new database method in Cinema 2, a form of cine-brain where “information replacing nature, and the brain-city, the third eye, replacing the eyes of nature.”[38] It goes against Deleuze, first it circumvents the brain-city that searches for meaning and patterns. A new figure emerges, that of the “cine-ear” that listens to all images and sounds.[39] Secondly in venturing to recover nature through data, for the sound refers not to information but to the uniqueness in the sonic bodies that produced them. Additionally, the idea of the encounter-image being one to experience relates it back to nature, for, according to John Dewey, experience is always in relation to nature:
…experience is of as well as in nature. It is not experience which is experienced, but nature — stones, plants, animals, diseases, health, temperature, electricity, and so on. Things interacting in certain ways are experience; they are what is experienced. Linked in certain other ways with another natural object — the human organism — they are how things are experienced as well. Experience thus reaches down into nature; it has depth. It also has breath and to an indefinitely elastic extent. It stretches. That stretch constitutes inference.[40]
This is why Drayson’s lasting impression of Moon’s work Rituals was that of stumbling on something barely understood. The feature-documentary incorporates the database ideals by showing a collection of the rituals that were recorded with little to any connection between each segment. That is not to say that it is merely a collage of the separate rituals (that are also available in length as separate films). The edit is precise in selecting the crucial moments of each ritual, and the sound was extensively reworked, so it could be projected in 5.1 surround sound. What I mean, by Híbridos being heavily influenced by how Moon uses the database, is that in composing the final edit, each ritual remains integral without any need to resort to the next or previous segment. The sequence in which it is presented guides the listener through varying degrees of sensation and experiences, being cut to intensify what is being encountered. As for meaning and narrative, one could start the film from the end, or from any point in the film and still understand as much as someone who watched from the beginning.
For someone who grew-up interacting with databases in education, work, media and art, Deleuze’s brain-city is a natural process when encountering any non-linear data or narrative.[41] Encountering a database that evades meaning, that can’t be anatomized by logic becomes quite bothersome — a database that was created to express sens. This bypass of the brain-city is what troubled Hannah Drayson when encountering Rituals and what makes Moon’s database a vital aspect in his diagram.
With each body in the database being “at the edge of meaning” (the idealized stance of interaction posited by Nancy), dedicating time and “reading-up” the database doesn’t end in gaining more knowledge. The “certain power” that is given for the user/ listener as a reward is in the realm of experiences, of having interacted with more people, more sonic bodies; the prize is expressing the voice through the renvoi and finding one’s own singularity, of encountering a new self outside oneself.
Continue reading Chapter 4: What is There to Experience? or go the INDEX.
[1] Deleuze, G. (2004). Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974. New York: Semiotext(e), p. 261.
[2] (Žižek, 2003, p. 21)
[3] Deleuze, G. (1993). The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, p. 8.
[4] Murray, T. (2008). Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 5.
[5] (Deleuze, 1993, p. 158)
[6] Organ²/ASLSP is a piece where the performance in St. Burchardi church has begun in 2001 and will continue until 2640, the last note changed in October 5, 2013. The next change will not occur until 2020.
[7]Ndalianis, A. (1999, December 19). Architectures of Vision: Neo-Baroque Optical Regimes and Contemporary Entertainment Media. Retrieved June 2, 2018, from Media In Transition: http://web.mit.edu/m-i-t/articles/index_ndalianis.html
[8] Schwitters, K. Quoted in O’Doherty, B. (1999). Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. San Francisco: University of California Press, p. 44.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid.
[11] (Deleuze, 1993, p. xvi)
[12] Ibid., p. 3.
[13] Some of the most notorious contributions has been Peter Wollen’s article Baroque and Neo-Baroque in the age of the spectacle (1993), Ndalianis book Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (2005), Kelly Wacker’s book Baroque Tendencies in Contemporary Art (2007), William Egginton’s book The Theater of Truth — The Ideology of (Neo)Baroque Aesthetics (2010), and Timothy Murray’s Digital Baroque which I previously introduced.
[14] (Ndalianis, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment, 2005, p. 13)
[15] The initial wonder in the possibility of accumulating data appears to be in a sharp decline as at the time of this writing the repercussion that the 2018 Facebook scandal took, seems to have been a landmark in raising awareness that nothing is truly free (something Jenkins already said in 2013).
[16] (Murray, 2008, p. 21)
[17] (Moon, Vincent Moon, Filmmaker and Explorer of the Invisible, 2016)
[18]MOSER, W., & GOYER, N. (2001). Résurgences Baroques: Trajectoires d’un processus transculturel. Brussels: Éditions de La Lettre Volée, p. 35.
[19] (Murray, 2008, p. 21)
[20] (Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, 1993, p. 124)
[21] (Žižek, 2003, p. 22)
[22] (Moon, ”Ethiopia didn’t need me” — Vincent Moon on Ethiopia, 2013)
[23] Benjamin, W. (1998). The Origin of the German Tragic Drama. London: Verso.
[24] (Murray, 2008, p. 7)
[25] Elsaesser, T. (2009). The Mind-Game Film. In W. Buckland (Ed.), Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema. Hoboken: Wiley, p. 22.
[26] The rhizome a figure that clearly references Deleuze’s and Guatarri’s conception explained in their book Capitalism and Scizophrenia.
[27] Azuma, H. (2009). Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 32.
[28] (Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, 1993, p. 110)
[29] The next section I’ll get into a detailed account of what experience means.
[30] Finnegan, J. P. (2010). Site Specifics: Chris Marker and Second Life. Film Comment (November/December). Retrieved June 15, 2018, from https://www.filmcomment.com/article/site-specifics-chris-marker-and-second-life/
[31] Personal translation from the original in French available at the Albert-Kahn’s Museum website: http://albert-kahn.hauts-de-seine.fr/archives-de-la-planete/presentation/presentation-detaillee/
[32] Grgić, A. (2016). The Archaeology of Memory: tracing Balkan(ist) fragments in Albert Kahn’s Albanie. KinoKultura(16). Retrieved from http://www.kinokultura.com/specials/16/grgic.shtml#6
[33] Brunhes quoted in (Grgić, 2016)
[34] Personal translation from the original available at http://albert-kahn.hauts-de-seine.fr/archives-de-la-planete/presentation/presentation-detaillee/
[35] (Grgić, 2016)
[36] (Moon, Vincent Moon, Filmmaker and Explorer of the Invisible, 2016)
[37] Drayson, H. (2017). Ritual by Vincent Moon (review). Leonardo, 50(1), 100–101. doi:10.1162/LEON_r_01364
[38] (Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 2013, p. 273)
[39] Reminding the ear-palace that the king of Calvino’s story sits in and listens to everything.
[40] Dewey, J. (1929). Experience and Nature. London: George Allen & Unwin, p. 4a-1. On the next section specifically on experience I’ll focus on Walter Benjamin instead of Dewey. The reasoning behind is how Benjamin develops the notion of experience in relation to mediums of mass communication, permitting a deeper inquiry into film as a medium of experience. For a discussion on the differences and similarities of the notion of experience between Dewey and Benjamin I recommend reading Yasuo Imai’s article Walter Benjamin and John Dewey: The Structure of Difference Between Their Thoughts on Education (Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 37, №1, 2003).
[41] Conversely, searching for meaning in data is not something new as trying to find patterns in order to better predict the best course of action is a natural human behavior. The episode Do the Patterns in Your Past Predict Your Future? from the NPR podcast Invisibilia explores this topic and how corporations and sociologists are attempting to predict long-term human behavior through big data and failing to find any possible pattern.
