Showing posts with label Repetition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Repetition. Show all posts
Gustav Deutsch. (2004) Film ist. (1-12)
CATEGORIES
Film ist.
1.Movement and Time, 2. Light and Dankness, 3. An Instrument, 4. Material, 5. A Blink of an Eye, 6. A Mirror, 7. Comic, 8. Magic, 9. Conquest, 10. Witting and Language, 11. Emotions and Passion, 12. Memory and Document.
Since 1996 Gustav Deutsch has been poring through film archives, retrieving scraps of film, including damaged ends of reel, test shots and discarded editings, and adding them to an ongoing project entitled „Film ist“. These found clips, freed from their original context, are ripe for reinterpretation. What Deutsch finds interesting is how easily new meanings can be ascribed to them, how they lend themselves in montage to new governing narratives. The brief clips, often looped to make their tiny but definitive gesture cyclical, hence satisfyingly complete in themselves, cover a century of film. The material used derives from scientific films which were made for the purposes of documentation or instruction, as well as film which originated in, or is redolent of, the overlapping realms of fairground and variety theatre, for the purposes of entertainment. - Brian Marley - http://www.index-dvd.at/php/de/reviews.php?show_review=5
FILM IST> A PRIMER FOR A VISUAL WORLD> by Tom Gunning
1. Film ist.
Film has an antagonistic relationship to theory; this goes beyond the usual opposition between theory and practice, or between words and images. It goes to the core of what cinema is, and the difficulty of defining it.
As André Basin understood, the task o film theory is to ask -continually- "What is cinema?" and allow for continuous transformations in the answer.
2. Word and Image: Making the point.
The best film theory has always, in fact been a dialogue with images.
Film ist. may be thought of as the first film theory done entirely in film.
What we see here is not a demonstration of categorization, but the power of names to point out, like an extended index fingers, aspects of our visual experience of film and to thus transform how we see these images.
3. The Lexicon and the Narrative
Not only do we see the principle of free association at its surrealist height, but we also realize the power of seeing shots in isolation, wrenched from context, twitching like amputated limbs, displaying their unique features divorced from contextual meaning.
4. The Archive of the Unconscious
At some point soon the artists and scholars of the twentieth first century will discover that the film archives of the world are not simply the repositories of the world's masterpieces of Cinematic Art, but also Aladdin caves of treasures unnamed and unnumbered.
Just how the various pieces find their own place and rhythm reminds one the modern poetry or the photo work of the American artist John Baldessari. Pictures which, from their origins, have nothing to do with each other, which don't "belong together", are compiled, tied together, fused with each other. (Alexander Horwalth)
FOUND FOOTAGE FILM : make use of pre-existing film material.
MONTAGE: Creating New Contexts of Meaning
REPETITION: From the very beginning of cinematography, repetition was a recurring motif: the juggler, the swimmer, the girl jumping rope, since taking our first breath rhythmically, repeated movement of the inner organs like heart and lungs have controlled our circulation and breathing. Thanks to rhythmically repeated movement we can move forward. Our everyday lives and jobs are characterized by repetition. Film loops permit perfect simulation of the repetition in life. They connect the beginning and the end of a scene, thereby creating a continuum. Repetition. In Life and Film. - Gustav Deutsch- Interview
Sustainability and Repetition
extract from: "Remix: The Ethics of Modular Complexity in Sustainability", By Eduardo Navas which was published in the CSPA Quarterly, Spring 2010 Issue.
As I have discussed previously (in other texts),[4] Attali’s theory of repetition and representation can help us understand how culture is increasingly bound by technology that relies on the recycling of material in all forms possible. This technology also enabled institutions of the arts and sciences to develop autonomy based on specialized languages. More importantly, Attali provides a framework in which one can begin to understand how the symbolic is linked to the material. For Attali this is best manifested in the relation between repetition and representation. He argues that representation as a variable of cultural exchange became redefined by repetition when mechanical recording was introduced with the phonograph and similar early devices. Attali’s emphasis is on music because he believes that it is in music (the domestication of noise) where we can find the folly of humans, the roots of how knowledge becomes shaped in all forms of media bound by repetition:
It is thus necessary to imagine radically new theoretical forms, in order to speak to new realities. Music, the organization of noise, is one such form. It reflects the manufacture of society; it constitutes the audible waveband of the vibrations and signs that make up society. An instrument of understanding, it prompts us to decipher a sound form of knowledge.[5]
Attali’s methodology is dialectical. He foresees various stages in how sound plays an elemental role in the development of culture. He considers representation, as it developed in music during the eighteenth and nineteenth century, to have supported modernity in its early stages. According to him, this took place when representation was overshadowed by repetition. Representation for Attali is an act of communication that already exposes the future silencing of the individual (the one that enables the expert to demand that non-experts not opine, for they do not know the proper language). According to him, when a musician performs, the audience must be willing to listen in order to let the musician exert her unique interpretation of a piece of music. This activity is culturally specific, meaning that it must take place in a space where people come together deliberately to have an experience.[6]
The necessity to attend a specific event in order to experience a musical performance changed once the performer’s interpretation became recorded with mechanical devices. The result was that the musician’s unique performance was reproduced and could be played, repeatedly, in different contexts that may not be relevant to the original circumstances in which the performance took place. Once musical recordings began to be played on the radio, live musical performances began to be compared to the recorded material. The recording, then, becomes the paradigm, the primary form of reference, even though it is not an original but a record of an event that took place in real time at one point. This is a rupture in culture when the world is defined by means of repetitive presentations of material constantly out of context—so to speak, re-contextualized, and yes, even remixed for instances where repetition is the only means of having an experience. In the early days of the radio, when the concept of the “music star” developed, fans were eager to see live performances of the songs played on the airwaves.
Repetition entered a new level when some performers opted to combine pre-recorded material with live music. This is the rise of the DJ: the meta-musician, the celebrated post-modern sound collage artist. Once repetition becomes the default form of representation, recordings can be manipulated to create unique live experiences; in turn the live performance is recorded and recycled as a remixed production that can be bought as CDs or MP3 files. Repetition effectively recycles every moment of representation, especially when such moments are already dependent on repetition. Raves, for example, glorify the live manipulation of remixed recordings by DJ’s like Sasha, Paul Oakenfeld, and Timo Maas among many others. Their performances are then sold as recordings themselves. The names I mention, which are rave stars from the mid-nineties to the mid two thousands may sound dated, since DJ’s come and go, but the power of representation through the repetition of recordings is stable; it is a system of well-orchestrated recycling around which an entire industry is in place.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the ideology of repetition that is linked to music recording devices is extended to other areas of culture. The concept of repetition originally found in the domestication of noise has become an efficient means for mass media and the global market to thrive. Like domesticated sound, recorded material of all types, not just music, is distributed throughout the world repeatedly as data-packets, streamed live for the online user to experience in every possible situation, from the comfort of the home, to an airplane ride from one continent to another. Anyone can text a message, call a person across town or the continent, view a world cup game on a giant screen, iPhone or laptop because it is data that is exchanged via a global network. Information is distributed through repetitive algorithms that support a symbolic system that permeates every conceivable space reached by communication.
Once repetition becomes embedded in all aspects of culture, one is no longer bound to contextual understanding but rather modular reinterpretation of the same material according to the multiple contexts the recording attains through repetition. This is why the job of the social critic, more often than not, is to re-contextualize, to demystify and reassure that cultural exchange does not take place with misunderstandings or misrepresentations. In this regard, Remix, is a tool of the spectacle as well as of criticism. It can both present something as new to the uncritical audience, but also make available traces for anyone who is interested in understanding how things are constructed from recycled, recombined, and repurposed material.
The domestication of noise, when extended beyond music to culture, becomes a tool of massive control. Within this paradigm, aesthetics as a cultural binder is indifferent to immediate needs of the world. It is understood as part of a process of ongoing assimilation byway of decontextualized repetition of all material that is deemed of value under a discourse that demands the separation of cultural elements, not only for the sake of efficiency of the system itself, but for the purpose of supporting simultaneously otherwise obvious conflicts that would come forth if fields did not claim an autonomous place in culture at large. This is the contention at play within sustainability at the beginning of the twenty-first century: to be autonomous while also interrelated with other areas of production. The challenge, then, is how to promote socially conscious exchange within such an interconnected framework that is defined by specialized fields that strive for autonomy.
As I have discussed previously (in other texts),[4] Attali’s theory of repetition and representation can help us understand how culture is increasingly bound by technology that relies on the recycling of material in all forms possible. This technology also enabled institutions of the arts and sciences to develop autonomy based on specialized languages. More importantly, Attali provides a framework in which one can begin to understand how the symbolic is linked to the material. For Attali this is best manifested in the relation between repetition and representation. He argues that representation as a variable of cultural exchange became redefined by repetition when mechanical recording was introduced with the phonograph and similar early devices. Attali’s emphasis is on music because he believes that it is in music (the domestication of noise) where we can find the folly of humans, the roots of how knowledge becomes shaped in all forms of media bound by repetition:
It is thus necessary to imagine radically new theoretical forms, in order to speak to new realities. Music, the organization of noise, is one such form. It reflects the manufacture of society; it constitutes the audible waveband of the vibrations and signs that make up society. An instrument of understanding, it prompts us to decipher a sound form of knowledge.[5]
Attali’s methodology is dialectical. He foresees various stages in how sound plays an elemental role in the development of culture. He considers representation, as it developed in music during the eighteenth and nineteenth century, to have supported modernity in its early stages. According to him, this took place when representation was overshadowed by repetition. Representation for Attali is an act of communication that already exposes the future silencing of the individual (the one that enables the expert to demand that non-experts not opine, for they do not know the proper language). According to him, when a musician performs, the audience must be willing to listen in order to let the musician exert her unique interpretation of a piece of music. This activity is culturally specific, meaning that it must take place in a space where people come together deliberately to have an experience.[6]
The necessity to attend a specific event in order to experience a musical performance changed once the performer’s interpretation became recorded with mechanical devices. The result was that the musician’s unique performance was reproduced and could be played, repeatedly, in different contexts that may not be relevant to the original circumstances in which the performance took place. Once musical recordings began to be played on the radio, live musical performances began to be compared to the recorded material. The recording, then, becomes the paradigm, the primary form of reference, even though it is not an original but a record of an event that took place in real time at one point. This is a rupture in culture when the world is defined by means of repetitive presentations of material constantly out of context—so to speak, re-contextualized, and yes, even remixed for instances where repetition is the only means of having an experience. In the early days of the radio, when the concept of the “music star” developed, fans were eager to see live performances of the songs played on the airwaves.
Repetition entered a new level when some performers opted to combine pre-recorded material with live music. This is the rise of the DJ: the meta-musician, the celebrated post-modern sound collage artist. Once repetition becomes the default form of representation, recordings can be manipulated to create unique live experiences; in turn the live performance is recorded and recycled as a remixed production that can be bought as CDs or MP3 files. Repetition effectively recycles every moment of representation, especially when such moments are already dependent on repetition. Raves, for example, glorify the live manipulation of remixed recordings by DJ’s like Sasha, Paul Oakenfeld, and Timo Maas among many others. Their performances are then sold as recordings themselves. The names I mention, which are rave stars from the mid-nineties to the mid two thousands may sound dated, since DJ’s come and go, but the power of representation through the repetition of recordings is stable; it is a system of well-orchestrated recycling around which an entire industry is in place.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the ideology of repetition that is linked to music recording devices is extended to other areas of culture. The concept of repetition originally found in the domestication of noise has become an efficient means for mass media and the global market to thrive. Like domesticated sound, recorded material of all types, not just music, is distributed throughout the world repeatedly as data-packets, streamed live for the online user to experience in every possible situation, from the comfort of the home, to an airplane ride from one continent to another. Anyone can text a message, call a person across town or the continent, view a world cup game on a giant screen, iPhone or laptop because it is data that is exchanged via a global network. Information is distributed through repetitive algorithms that support a symbolic system that permeates every conceivable space reached by communication.
Once repetition becomes embedded in all aspects of culture, one is no longer bound to contextual understanding but rather modular reinterpretation of the same material according to the multiple contexts the recording attains through repetition. This is why the job of the social critic, more often than not, is to re-contextualize, to demystify and reassure that cultural exchange does not take place with misunderstandings or misrepresentations. In this regard, Remix, is a tool of the spectacle as well as of criticism. It can both present something as new to the uncritical audience, but also make available traces for anyone who is interested in understanding how things are constructed from recycled, recombined, and repurposed material.
The domestication of noise, when extended beyond music to culture, becomes a tool of massive control. Within this paradigm, aesthetics as a cultural binder is indifferent to immediate needs of the world. It is understood as part of a process of ongoing assimilation byway of decontextualized repetition of all material that is deemed of value under a discourse that demands the separation of cultural elements, not only for the sake of efficiency of the system itself, but for the purpose of supporting simultaneously otherwise obvious conflicts that would come forth if fields did not claim an autonomous place in culture at large. This is the contention at play within sustainability at the beginning of the twenty-first century: to be autonomous while also interrelated with other areas of production. The challenge, then, is how to promote socially conscious exchange within such an interconnected framework that is defined by specialized fields that strive for autonomy.
Moving-Writing: J.Burrows & A. Heathfield.(4/10/10).Toynbee Studios
She says, “We all are just copying machines but every copy is different”
He says, “What is time? Time just is. I am time”
Thought is part of this reality. We don’t really think about it, but we are thinking it.
A copying machine (Image of an eye)
The creative act must include a subversion.
“To distract yourself from yourself so that yourself becomes more visible”
Repetition since 1970s at least. Every repetition carries difference as it takes place in time.
Experience of boredom – exhaustion.
DJ: Repetition of tracks to slow our expectation and then heighten them up.
[PROCESS]: Move away from my own thoughts and try to find writing (borrow voices) which would eco our experiences. Release from the obligation to create something new.
Re-enactment – going back
Economic, consuming culture.
BOOK: First as tragedy, then as farce. Slavoj Zizek
Redo something that is not radical anymore
Restaging old choreographies comes from curators?
Dance: crisis of movement
Liberate, transform, return histories by bringing into the present.
Acknowledge the relation between past and present.
BOOK Arts in society: Being an Artist in Post-Fordist Times. Paul de Bruyne / Pascal Gielen
Do we resist? How do we know if we resist?
On Repetition. (07/10/2010) Laban, London
Repetition is the mother of knowledge
By repetition you can stop time.
Is there such a thing as repetition?
Repetition BOOK (the only repetition is the impossibility to reproduce)
· Deleuze : 1)Naked, exact repetition 2)clothed
· J.Cage
· Getrude Stein: insistence=repetition with change that moves in time Personal/Subjective
“If a thing is worth doing once, is worth doing again”
Practice of repetition from modernism and beyond.
Late 60s shift
Carl Andre, Equivalent
Piano Phrase 1967 Steve Reich
Hannah Wilke
Relation in space 1976 - Abramovic and Ulay
Abramovic and repetition
Bruce Nauman , one hundrend live and die, 1984
· Eric Satie, Vexations, produced for 1st time by John Cage in 1963 A single page score repeated 800 times.
Attention
Stressing how people receive pleasure / perception of pleasure
Bring in sth new into sth already known.
Recognition: what is it that you might be a able to recognize but not being able to remember.
How repetition gives the identity to the original. Repetition gives to a thing an identity. (Deleuze) (J.Butler)
Subjectivity
· The status of the spectator and the performer and their experiences
Performer (J.Cage) didn’t learn the piece didn’t memorize it…
Freedom – engage in different ways
Sense of familiarity
Repetition versus duration… enduring time… stillness of time… create sense of endurance..
Duration as a sense of repetition…
Animalistic scream
15 minutes scream. Who is the winner
developing spiral going more and more…
not synchronized.. not repetitive in a sense but continuation.. developing.. acceleration… which are the rules that these performers have set for themselves. Game..
crying or scream
drift and come back to it
Live Performance or just video?
When do you decide to stop repeating and why? Is it exhaustion that makes you stop? Exhaustion in repetition and body limits
Desire, hope for them to come closer, for sth to happen
Effort of performer and of spectator
Rhythm continuous scream
Build an identity by repeating
Feeling trapped
· Connor, S. (1988), Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp. 1-15
Good introduction
Eternity is repetition (present) the eternal repetition
Why eternally return?
A.Heathfield (idea of return)
Repetition is central
“Repetition fixes our sense of experience”
· “representations of experience” = Repetition of repetition
o :Aristotelian mimesis, representation of repetition, recording, memory, review, map,
knowledge about what its effect
Book : Out of now, A.Heathfield.
Reference to the source but includes an originality
Restage of the work of other artists work
Originality? Truth?
Restaging (eg. groups touring)
Desire can not be completely satisfied.. pleasure as unpleasure, how you take pleasure from unpleasure..
· Eco, U. (1997), ‘Innovation and Repetition: Between Modern and Post-modern Aesthetics’ in Capozzi, R. ed., Reading Eco, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 14-33,
Intertextual dialogue… Different audiences, critical audiences, cultivating audiences
Pleasure we take by repeating something, by knowing what will come next…
Anticipation..
BOOK: Arts of Impoverishment:Beckett, Rothko, Resnais
I have very little or nothing to say.. difficulty..
How much time you need to allow to experience the work fully..
Modern Aesthetics and theories of art
Metaphor novelty:Criterion
Romantic Aesthetics: Difference between major-minor Art , Art and crafts
“Scientific revolution”
Every work of modern art = a new law new paradigm
Recover what you already know, point by point and what they want to know again
P.18 the era of repetition
Repetition of mass media =/ Repetition of major arts (It’s a difficult distinction)
Post modern aesthetics
“new aesthetics of seriality” (Italy)
Not discuss repetition in the sense of Kierkegaard neither of Deuleuze
Repeat= to say sth or do sth the 2nd time or again and again
Series= a continued succession of similar things
To serialize = to repeat= make a replica of the same abstract type
“One thing is the same as an other when the former exhibits the same properties as the later at least under a certain description”
1) The Retake
is dependent on a commercial decision
not strictly condemned to repetition
ex. Different stories of the Arthurian cycle
2)The Remake
telling again a previous successful story
ex. The whole of Shakespeare is a remake of preceding stories
“Interesting” remakes can escape repetition
3) The Series
ex. TV Serials
in fact one is enjoying it because of the recurrence of a narrative scheme that remains constant.
Respond to infantile need of hearing again always the same story
The spiral (variation of series)
4) The Saga
Its genealogical, the actors do age
A history of aging of individuals, families etc
Continuous lineage ex.Dallas
Intertextual Dialogue
1. A given text echoes previous texts
2. Genre –embedding ex. Musical Broadway
3. The work that speaks of itself : not the work that of a genre to which it belongs, but a work that speaks of its own structure, and of the way in which it was made. (p.21)
Hegelian problem of the Death of Art.
Thin line between High-brow Arts and low-bow Arts
P.28 Plagiarism quotation parody the ironic retake, the intertextual joke
1) the concept of absolute originality is a contemporary one, born with Romanticism
2) Classical art was in vast measure serial
3) The Modern avant-garde (beginning of 20th century) challenged the Romantic idea of “creation from nothingness”
(Collage, art about art, mustache of Mona Lisa etc)
· ‘After the Fall: Dance-theatre and Dance-Performance,’ in Kelleher, J. and Ridout, N. eds. (2006), Contemporary Theatres in Europe: A Critical Companion, London: Routledge, pp. 188-98
pp.188 Pina Bausch mot how but why the body moves
The repetition of falling
Press hard against psychic and physical limits, finding insights and new means of articulating the dynamics of gender, sex, sexuality and human relations.
Relay personal and cultural resonances of independence: presence-absence, masculinity-femininity, sex-death, attainment-loss
The body performing: Means to access and articulate this wound/ means of cure/ means of resistance.
The other can’t catch the FALL = Imperative to Recognize, remember, and repair.
Repair, Resolution, ending, read another layer, being familiar with the work.
Time. Desire. Memory.
P.190 An After-space: A space of remembrance and re-enactment within the present
p.194: “interlude on writing Bausch. He know he writes this relation too. To bare his wait, to … and so it begins again.
Memory
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