What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images, II

"The lives and loves of images, it seems clear, cannot be assessed without some rechoning with the media in which they appear. The difference between an image and a pictures, for instance, is precisely a question of the medium. An image only appears in some medium or other - in paint, stone, words or numbers. What what about media? How do they appear, make themselves manifest and understandable? It is temprting to settle on a rigorously materialist answer to this question, and to identify the medium as simply the material support in or on which the image appears. But this answer seems unsatifactory on the gace of it. A medium is more than the materials of which it is composed It is, as Raymond Williams wisely insisted, a material social practice, a set of skills, abits, techniques, tools, codes and conventions." Pg. 203

Mitchell, W. J. T. What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images. University Of Chicago Press, 2006.

What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images, I

"Art is a wonderful treatment of the notion of an artwork as a social, dialogical object. It moves through the three forms of hypervalued object relations I have described, beginning as a fetish object and thus, conversely, as a despised obscenity, a filthy waste produced. It then evolves into an idol, and finally into a totem. The picture is also a stand0in for the absent women in the play: like a woman, it plays the silent mediator 'between men,' a medium of exchange that provokes and finally settles a crisis in their relatioship." pg. 239

Mitchell, W. J. T. What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images. University Of Chicago Press, 2006.

Digital Art, I

"Recontextualization through appropriation or collaging, as well as the relationship between copy and original, are also prominent features of the digital medium. While appropriation and collaging, techniques originating wit the Cubists, Dadaists, and Surrealists at the beginning of the twentieth century, have a long history in art, the digital medium has multiplied their possibilities and taken them to new levels." pp. 27-28

Paul, Christiane. Digital Art (World of Art). Thames & Hudson, 2003.

On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, III

"Genres are definable in terms of specific combinations of features stemming from the double orientation in life, in reality, which each type of artistic 'form of the whole' commands - an orientation at once from outside in and from inside out. What is at stake in the first instance is the actual statuss of the work as social fact: its definition in real time and space; its means and mode of performance; the kind of audience presupposed and the relationshop between atuhor and audience establish; its association with social institutions, social mores and other idealogical spheres; in short - its full 'situational' definition." pp. 6-7

Volosinov's description of genre.

Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Duke University Press, 1993.

Sensory Systems: Anatomy, Physiology and Pathophysiology, I

Photoreceptors

"The cones and rods have characteristic morphological and functional differences. The outer segments of cones and rods consist of modified cilia that contain disc membranes, which contain the photopigment. The photopigment in rods is rhodopsin. Cones have three different kinds of photopigment, one for each of the three principle colors, blue, green and red. Rods account for vision in lovw light (scotopic vision). Cones have a lower sensitivity than the rods and are activated in medium and bright light (photopic vision). Because cones are the basis for color vision, a certain level of light above visual threshold is necessary to see colors. The human retina has approximately 20 times more rods than cones. The density of cones is highest density of rods is found at the location where the peripheral visual field is projected (the fovea)." pp. 377-339

Møller, Aage R. Sensory Systems: Anatomy, Physiology and Pathophysiology. Academic Press, 2002.

A. Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, VII

"To speak is not to put a word under each thought; if it were, nothing would ever be said. We would not have the feeling of living the language and we would remain silent, because the sign would be immediately obliterated by its own meaning and because thought would never encounter anything by thought - the thought it wanted to expressa dnthe thought which it would form from a wholly explicit language. We sometimes have, on the contrary, the feeling that a thought has been said - not replaced by verbal counter but incorparated in words and made available in them. And finally, there is a power of words because, working against one another, they are attracted at a distance by thought like tides by the mood, and because they evoke their meaning in this tumult much more imperiously than if each one of them brought back only a listless signification of which it was the indifferent and predestined sign." pg. 81

Indirect Language and the Voice of Silence, by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Johnson, Galen A. Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting (Spep). Northwestern University Press, 1994.

Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology, III

"The associative notions of guns/camera/trigger links all media representation to lethal weapons. America's Finest, and interactive M16 rifle, addresses these issues. Action is directly instigated through the trigger itself, which, when pulled, places the viewer/participant within the gun site (this time their entire body holding the gun). Thy see themselves fade under horrible examples in which the M16 was used, and if they wait, ghosts of the cycling images dissolve in the present." pg. 755

Lynn Hershman comments on her work, America's Finest

Wilson, Stephen. Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology (Leonardo Books). The MIT Press, 2003.

Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology, II

"We take pictures. First by our aggression, then feeling the pleasure of sharing, we rip the skin off the body of the world. This skin becomes a trophy, and our fame grows with the disappearance of the world...War is a dangerous, interactive, community undertaking. Interactive creation plays with this chaos, in which placing the body at stake suggests a relative vulnerability. The world falls victim to the viewer's glance, and everyone is involved in its disappearance. The collective unveiling becomes a personal pleasure, the boject of fetiswhistic satisfaction. We keep to ourselves what we have see (or rather, the trace of what we have seen)." pg. 707

Maurice Benayoun comments on his work, World Skin, and the concept of virtual immersive reality.

Wilson, Stephen. Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology (Leonardo Books). The MIT Press, 2003.

Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology, I

"It is no accident that social control preproduces itself into technological forms. The reduction of information to binary represenation leads to a levelling process of data...the modern machine is currently perceived as a neutral decision-making space. This image of anonymity creates a sufficient distance from events to creata situation in which we are ritually free to give up our ability to feel the consequences of our actions." pg. 686

Graham Harwood comments on his work, Rehearsal of Memory.

Wilson, Stephen. Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology (Leonardo Books). The MIT Press, 2003.

The Accident of Art, IV

"Perspective is the model of the artistic and optic revolution, which is the same time mathematical. So today what I am looking for is a persepctive that will give us a vision of the world." pg. 74

Lotringer, Sylvère, and Paul Virilio. The Accident of Art (Semiotext(E) / Foreign Agents). Semiotext(e), 2005.

The Accident of Art, III

"I say that we live in a civilization of the optical. It is optics which is at stake: the structure of the visual, the audio-visual and the audio-sens - let's just say the audio-sensitivie. So, what I am saying, and this is the critique I have made in The Vision Machine: giving vision to a mchine is the never-before-seen. When the door sees me and when it interprets my passing-by, it's the never-before-see. Klee said: 'Now objects look at me.' In the same way, by means of television, tele-surveillance, spy satellites, and the world's systems of overexposure, but not only with these, we are in the process of giving vision, hence optics, to the machine. And this is an event without equal." pp. 69-70

Lotringer, Sylvère, and Paul Virilio. The Accident of Art (Semiotext(E) / Foreign Agents). Semiotext(e), 2005.

The Accident of Art, II

"...Behind the vision machine and the failure of the plastic arts, I believe there is a substitution. It has to do with digital technology. Digital technology is a filter that is going to modify perception by means of generalized morphing, and this in real time. We are faced with something which is more than the failure of the traditional static arts, both visual and plastic: we are faced with the failure of the analogical in favor of calculation and the numerology of the image. Every sensation is going to be digitized or digitalized. We are face with the reconstruction of the phenomenology of perception according to the machine. The vision machine is not simply the camera that replaces Monet's eye - "An eye, but what an eye!" said C lemenceau - no, now it's a machine that's reconstructing sensations pixel by pixel and bits by bits. Not just visual or auditory sensations, the audio-visible, but also olfactory sensation, tactile sensations. We are faced with a reconstruction of the sensas." pp. 65-66

Lotringer, Sylvère, and Paul Virilio. The Accident of Art (Semiotext(E) / Foreign Agents). Semiotext(e), 2005.

Art and Fear, III

"From the end of the 1920s onwards, the idea of accepting the absence of words or phrases, of some kind of dialogue, became unthinkable. The so-called listening comfort of darkened cinema halls required that HEARING and VISION be synchronized. Much later, at the end of the century, ACTION and REACTION similarlywould be put into instant interaction thanks to the geats of 'tele-action', this time, and not just radop[hpmoc 'tele-listening' or 'tele-vision.'" pg. 73

Virilio, Paul. Art and Fear (Continuum Impacts). Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006.

Art and Fear, II

"Contrary to appearances, REAL TIME - this 'present' that imposes itself on everyone in the speeding-up of daily reality - is, in fact, only ever the repetition of the splendid academic isolation of bygone days. A mass media academicism that seeks to freeze all originality and all poetics in the inertia of immediacy." pg. 47

Virilio, Paul. Art and Fear (Continuum Impacts). Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006.

Closely Watched Films: An Introduction to the Art of Narrative Film Technique, I

"Perhaps the ubiquity of computer screens in our lives, which demand that we switch our attention back and forth between multiple windows, to say nothing of the split-screen capacities of televisions which allow viewers to watch the action on two or more channels simultaneously, may be developing a hunger in the spectator for more complexity on the cinema screen as well. Lev Manovich in The Language of New Media predicts that the next generation of cinmea will increasingly add multiple 'windows' or split screens to its language."

Fabe, Marilyn. Closely Watched Films: An Introduction to the Art of Narrative Film Technique.
University of California Press, 2004.

Devices of Wonder, I

"I want to render the fusion of a head with its environment.
I want to render the prlongation of objects in space.
I want to mdel light and the atmosphere.
I want to transfix the human form in movement.
I want to synthesize the unique forms of continuity in space."

Umberto Boccioni, on his art show athe Galerie Boetie in Paris.

Stafford, Barbara Maria, Frances Terpak, and Isotta Poggi. Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen (Getty Trust Publications: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities). Getty Trust Publications: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 2001.

Screened Out, I

“The machine may, then, be unbeatable at all kinds of operations, but, where the essence of play is concerned, it is forever disadvantaged-forever out of the game. To have access to that essence, the machine would have had to have invented it, would have had to have been able to invent the very arbitrariness of the rules, which is unimaginable. And it is too late for this. More generally, to be a match for man, the man, the machine would have had to have invented him – and it is too late for that too. In a desperate effort to look like him, or compete with him, the only remaining possibility is accident: an accident of calculation – and making a strategy out of that. Or suicide.”

Baudrillard, Jean. Screened Out. Verso, 2002. 164-65

A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, I

“A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles. A semiotic chain is like a tuber agglomerating very diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic, gestural, and congnitive: there is no language in itself, nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages. There is no ideal speaker-listener, any more than there is a homogeneous linguistic community. Language is, in Weinreich’s words, “an essentially heterogeneous reality.” There is no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language within a political multiplicity. Language stabilizes around a parish, a bishopric, a capial. It forms a bulb. It evolves by subterranean stems and flows, along river valleys or train tracks; it spreads like a patch of oil. It is always possible to break a language down into internal structural elements, an undertaking not fundamentally different from a search for roots. There is always something genealogical about a tree. It is not a method for the people. A method of the rhizome type, on the contrary, can analyze language only by decentering it onto other dimensions and other registers. A language is never closed upon itself, except as a function of impotence.”

Deleuze, Gilles, Felix Guattari, and Brian Massumi. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press, 1987. 7-8.

Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation, I

“There is, however, also a completely different answer to the question about our distrust regarding alternative worlds. It is based on the fact that they are worlds that we ourselves have designed, rather than something that has been given to us, like the surrounding world. The alternative worlds are not givens (data), but artificially produced (facts). We distrust these worlds because we distrust all things artificial, all art. “Art” is beautiful, but a lie, something that is implied in the term “apparition.” However this answer also leads to a further question: why does the apparition deceive? Is there anything that does not deceive? This is the decisive question, the epistemological question, which the alternative worlds pose for us. If we talk about the “digital apparition,” this and no other question has to be addressed.”

Flusser, Vilém. “Digital Apparition”. In Druckrey, Timothy. Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation. Aperture, 1996. 242

Looking At Giacometti, I

“Memory is short, very short. When you look at reality, it’s so much more complex, and when you try to do the same thing again from memory, you realize how little you remember. So the work becomes simpler because there’s less of it, but at the same time you also achieve less. It’s less interesting. But there again I really don’t know where I am for the moment.”

Giacometti, Alberto. Sylvester, David. Looking At Giacometti. Owl Books, 1997.

Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche

“If you lose your ego, you lose the thread of that narrative you call your Self. Humans, however, can’t live very long without some sense of a continuing story. Such stories go beyond the limited rational system (or the systematic rationality) with which you surround yourself; they are crucial keys to sharing time-experience with others.
Now a narrative is a story, not logic, nor ethics, nor philosophy. It is a dream you keep having, whether you realize it or not. Just as surely as you breathe, you go on ceaselessly dreaming your story. And in these stories you wear two faces. You are simultaneously subject and object. You are the whole and you are a part. You are real and you are shadow. “Storyteller” and at the same time “character.” It is through such multilayering of roles in our stories that we heal the loneliness of being an isolated individual in the world.”

Murakami, Haruki. Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche. Vintage, 2001. 231.

Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation.

“In the space of simulation and virtual reality, the “user” is immersed in a dematerialized and surrogate reality that has no apparent relation to the “real world.” He functions as a component of a microworld, operating at a purely cognitive level within a closed world of reason and logic (although it seems to him that it is more than this). His existence in this alternative space is disembodied, and any engagement with the real world (that is, tele-operation) is indirect, mediated through a screen or some other imaging technology. It is as if there is a “desire to escape both the human body and the human world,” as if the obsolete human body no longer has any place in the new “datascape.” In this derealized state of being, anything and everything becomes possible, whether it is fantasy adventure in a virtual environment or pushing buttons and watching screened simulations of slaughter in real, so-called Nintendo wars.”

Robins, Kevin. “The Virtual Unconscious in Postphotography.” Druckrey, Timothy. Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation. Aperture, 1996. 162

Culture on the Brink: Ideologies of Technology (Discussions in Contemporary Culture, No 9), I

“The screen exposes the ordinary viewer to harsh realities, but it screens out the harshness of those realities. It has certain moral weightlessness: it grants sensation without demanding responsibility, and it involves us in a spectacle without engaging us in the complexity of its reality. This clearly satisfies certain needs or desires. Through its capacity to project frightening and threatening experiences, we can say that the screen provides a space in which to master anxiety. It allows us to rehearse our fantasies of omnipotence to overcome this anxiety.”

Robins, Kevin. “The Haunted Screen.” From Bender, Gretchen. Culture on the Brink: Ideologies of Technology (Discussions in Contemporary Culture, No 9). New Press, 1998. 313.

Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties, IV

"And yet the eye is so poor that it sees only chaos, without discerning directions. But when the motion speeds up to a monstrous rate, when a temporal segment of five minutes is shown in a single minute, when people, trams, street crowds start a mad rush, then the chaos of motion breaks down into diagrams, lines, directions which our eye can now watch...These memorable elements in Man with a Movie Camera are only grains of sand in the extraordinary wealth of filmed material reflecting the many sides of life, sometimes its poles, in order to produce a single coherent sensation - life." pg. 331

- Naum Kaufman, "Chelovek s kinoapparatom", Sovetskii ekran, no. 5, 1929, p. 5

Tsivian, Yuri. Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties. Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2005.

Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties, III

"There is one solution. We have to emerge from the customary circle of ordinary human vision; we have to learn to capture things with the camera outside of this circle. Then the usual monotomy will immediately disappear, as we shall see our real life, not one made up out of props, but we shall see in a way in which we have not yet been able to...The kino- and ohto-eye must create for themselves their own point of filming, not imitating but broadening the usual circle of vision of the human eye."

"What the Eye Does Not See," Osip Brik, "Chego ne vidit glaz", Sovetskoe kino, no. 2, 1926, pp. 22-23

Tsivian, Yuri. Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties. Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2005.

ines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties, II

"The camera can act independently. It can see in ways in which man is not accustomed to see. It can suggest a point of view to man. Suggest looking at things in a different way."

Tsivian, Yuri. Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties. Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2005. p. 265

Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties, I

"Vertov is right. The task of the film and photgraphic camera is not to imitate the human eye, but to see and capture what the human eye usually does not see...The kino- and photo-eye can show us things from an unexpected point of view, in an unusual configuration, and we should make use of this capability...The point from which shooting took place became more complicated, more varied, but itslink with the human eye, withits usual circle of vision, was not broken."

"What the Eye Does Not See," Osip Brik, "Chego ne vidit glaz", Sovetskoe kino, no. 2, 1926, pp 22-23

Tsivian, Yuri. Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties. Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2005.

On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, II

"For both art and life depend wholly on the laws of optics, on perspective and illusion; both, to be blunt, depend on the necessity of error."
- Nietzsche, "A Critical Backward Glance," The Birth of Tragedy

Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Duke University Press, 1993. Pg. 171

On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, I

"The Body presents the paradox of contained and container at once. Thus our attention is continually focused upon the boundaries or limits of the body; known from an exterior, the limits of the body as object; known from an interior, the limits of its physical extension into space. Lacan has described 'erotogenic' zones of the body as those areas where there are cuts and gaps on the body's surface-the lips, the anus, the tops of the penis, the slit formed by the eyelids, for example. He writes that it is these cuts or apertures on the surface of the body which allow the sense of "edge," borders, or margins by differentiating the body from the organic functions associated with such apertures."

Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Duke University Press, 1993. Pg. 104

Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, VI

"The picture is a flat thing contriving to give us what we would see in the presence of 'diversely positioned' things, by offering sufficient diacritical signs, through height and width, of the missing dimension. Depth is a third dimension derived from the other two…It will be worth our while to dwell for a moment upon this third dimension. There is at first glance, something paradoxical about it. I see objects that hide each other and that consequently I do not see; each one stands behind the other. I see depth and yet it is not visible, since it is reckoned from our bodies to things, and we are [as Cartesians] confined our bodies. There is no real mystery there."

Johnson, Galen A. Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting (Spep). Northwestern University Press, 1994. Pg. 130

Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, V

"Essence and existence, imaginary and real, visible and invisible - painting scrambles all our categories, spreading out before us its oneiric universe of carnal essences, actualized resemblances, mute meanings...How crystal clear everything would be in our philosophy if only we would exorcise these specters, make illusions or objectless perceptions out of them, brush them to one side of an unequivocal world!"

Johnson, Galen A. Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting (Spep). Northwestern University Press, 1994. Pg. 130

Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, IV

"The painter's world is a visible world, nothing but visible: a world almost mad, because it is complete though only partial."

Johnson, Galen A. Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting (Spep). Northwestern University Press, 1994. Pg. 127

Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, III

"All my changes of place figure on principle in a corner of my landscape; they are carried over onto the map of the visible. Everything I see is on principle within my reach, at least within reach of my sight, and is marked upon the map of the 'I can.' Each of the two maps is complete. The visible world and the world of my motor projects are both total parts of the same Being...This extraordinary overlapping, which we never give enough thought to, forbids us to conceive of vision as an operation of thought that would set up before the mind a picture of a representatin of the world, a world of immanence and of ideality. Immersed in the visible by his body, itself visible, the see-er does not appropriate what he sees, he merely approaches it by looking, he opens onto the world. And for its part, that world of which he is a part is not in itself, or matter."

Johnson, Galen A. Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting (Spep). Northwestern University Press, 1994. pp. 124

Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, II

"Today we find - not in science but in a widely prevalent philosophy of the sciences - an entirely new approach. Constructive scientific activities see themselves and reprsent themselves to be autonomous, and their thinking deliberately reduceds itself to a set of data-collecting techniques which it has invented. To think is thus to test out, to operate, to transform - the only restiction being that this activity is regulated by an experimental control that admits only the most "worked-up" phenomena, more likely produced by the apparatus than recorded by it."

Johnson, Galen A. Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting (Spep). Northwestern University Press, 1994. pp. 121-122

Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, I

"'What I am trying to convey to you is more mysterious; it is entwined in the very roots of being, in the impalpable source of senstations.'" - J. Gasquet, Cezanne

Johnson, Galen A. Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting (Spep). Northwestern University Press, 1994. pg. 121

The Accident of Art, II

“if they are able to penetrate the software, I’m not worried. If the software is still the frit of anonymous programmers dependant on big corporations, I’m against it. I said as much to architects: so long as you don’t design your own software, you guys are losers. What do I expect of architects? That they do not follow the exmple of Frank O. Gehry, using the Mirage 2000 software to design the Bilbao Opera. If architects today wanted to prove themselves equal to the new technologies, like Paolo Uccello or Piero de la Francesca, they would make the software themselves, they would get back inside the machine. Whereas now they are sold the equipment, and they work with it. That’s what I can’t accept. This doesn’t mean that I am some Luddite eager to destroy machines, not at all. I have always said: penetrate the machine, explode it from the inside, dismantle the system to appropriate it. Here we come back to the phenomena of appropriation.”

Lotringer, Sylvère, and Paul Virilio. The Accident of Art (Semiotext(E) / Foreign Agents). Semiotext(e), 2005. Pg. 74

The Accident of Art, I

"The word 'fixed' is not necessarily the best word. I used it with respect to the revolution of cinema, the revolution of movement. What I meant to say is a focal point. If there is no focus, no way to focus, there is no perception. Right now, however, globalization is the denial of focus. There is a kind of diaspora of sensations, a kind of fragmentation, explosion or implosion, that no longer promotes any focus, whether in theatre, or in music-you see it quite well in concrete music-or in the plastic arts; and this is equally true of architecture. So, instead, let’s call it focus. But perspective is a way to focus, we agree on that, no? The line of escape is not a fixed point, it’s focused."

Lotringer, Sylvère, and Paul Virilio. The Accident of Art (Semiotext(E) / Foreign Agents). Semiotext(e), 2005. 76

Phenomenology of Perception, III

"Suppose we construct, by the use of optics and geometry, that bit of the world which can at any moment throw its image on our retina. Everything outside its perimeter, since it does not reflect upon any sensitive area, no more affects our vision than does light falling on our closed eyes."

Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge & Kegan Paul/Humanities Press, 1966. Pg. 6

Phenomenology of Perception, II

“We are caught up in the world and we do not succeed in extricating ourselves from it in order to achieve consciousness of the world. If we did we should see the quality is never experienced immediately, and that all consciousness is a consciousness of something."

Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge & Kegan Paul/Humanities Press, 1966. pg 5

Phenomenology of Perception, I

"A visual field is not made up of limited views. But an object seen is made up of bits of matter, an spatial points are external to each other. An isolated datum of perception is inconceivable, at least if we do the mental experiment of attempting to perceive such a thing. But in the world there are either isolated objects of a physical void."

Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge & Kegan Paul/Humanities Press, 1966. pg. 4

Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age , III

"The 'Kino-Eye' school demands that the construction of the film should be based on the 'intervals' of movement between different planes, on the correct relationship of these intervals to each other and on the movement of one visual impression to another...To find the best route for the eye of the spectator to penetrate the chaos of the mutual reactions, attractions, repulsions of images on each other: to reduce these innumerable 'intervals' to one simple equation, to one spectacular formula which presents, in the best possible way, the essential theme of the film."
- Dziga Vertov in 1920, speaking about his KinoEye group

Grice, Malcolm Le. Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age (Bfi Film Classics (Paperback)). British Film Institute, 2002. pg. 48

Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age, II

"As he was violently opposed to the scenario as the basis of film and deeply committed to catching life 'unawares', it is not surprising that his main attention focused on the shooting and editing stages. Kino-Eye had never considered the camera as a substitute for the human eye, but had always affirmed it as a machine in its own terms capable of extending or creating new perception. Vertov stated: "Kino-Eye" makes use of all the new techniques for high speed representation of movement, micro-cinematography, reversed movement, multiple exposures etc.'; and: 'Kino Eye' does not regard these as mere tricks or special effects but as a normal technique which should be used as widely as possible.'" pg. 47

Grice, Malcolm Le. Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age (Bfi Film Classics (Paperback)). British Film Institute, 2002.

Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age, I

"Filmdrama is the opium of the masses...If we want to understand clearly the effect of films on the audience, we have first to agree about two things: 1. What audience? 2. What effect upon the audience are we talking about? On the movie-house abitue, the ordinary fiction film acts like a cigar or cigarette on a smoker. Intoxicated b the cine-niocotine, the spectator sucks from the screen the substance which soothes his nerves...To intoxicate and suggest - the essential method of the fiction film approximates it to a religious influence, and makes it possible after a certain time to keep a man in a permanent state of overexcited unconsciousness...[to] act upon the subconscious of the spectator or listener, distorting his protesting consciousness in every possible way." - Dziga Vertov in 1920, speaking about his KinoEye group

Grice, Malcolm Le. Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age (Bfi Film Classics (Paperback)). British Film Institute, 2002. pg. 45-46

French New Wave, VI

"I tried to make a subjective documentary about a young woman, but also about the people around her, about the Dome, Parc Montsouris, the way an eye fully conditioned by a sentiment as violent as the feat of death might see them. The time frame and geography are realistic because I wanted to show the subjectivity of mental time and the intermittent importance of place."

*Agnes Varda comments on the story behind Cleo from 5 to 7 through comparing it to the documentary form.

Le Monde, April 12, 1962
Douchet, Jean, Cedric Anger, and Robert Bononno. French New Wave. Zzdap Publishing, 1999. pg. 219

French New Wave, IV

"For many years...[a] camera operator generally carried around a complete set of the principal lenses, which he carefully tested before a shoot, one at a time...This changed with the introduction of variable-focal length lenses...[Such] lenses are now generally referred to as zoom lenses. They enable the operator to make a continuous transition between short and long focal lengths. These lenses covered an extremely wide field an, within the field of view, provided a constant change in perspective. This had a very distinct effect on the viewer's perception of the image and the incessant modulation gave the impression of movement, the illusion of moving toward or away from the subject...[The] traditional approach to news and reporting was revolutionized and the zoom lens became an essential component of journalism; it provided the ability to film, to capture, the immediacy of an event."

*This is a comment on a change in optics in the beginning of the 1960s.

Douchet, Jean, Cedric Anger, and Robert Bononno. French New Wave. Zzdap Publishing, 1999. pg. 206

French New Wave, III

"The very nature of the screen-a completely filled rectangular space that occupies a relatively narrow portion of the visual field - conditions of a gestural plasticity that is very different from the one the theater has accustomed us to...The film actor's gesture has not only gradually become more discreet but more
'self-contained,' distorted so to speak by the proximity of the screen's edge." - Rohmer

Douchet, Jean, Cedric Anger, and Robert Bononno. French New Wave. Zzdap Publishing, 1999. pg. 150-151

French New Wave, II

"In the beginning the studio was a tool. It soon became an instrument of control."

Douchet, Jean, Cedric Anger, and Robert Bononno. French New Wave. Zzdap Publishing, 1999. pg. 113

French New Wave, I

"Well, at bottom film's greatest enemy is the studio. I only use it when I have no other alternative. But as soon as I'm inside its enormous machine, I'm coerced to dress in a certain way...wear this pair of pants, that shirt, etc. The film uniform in other words. Then the great parade of machinery and technology begins. It's essential to assume the right attitude. Which means I have to start being intelligent, [taking] a closer look at the street." - Roberto Rosellini

Douchet, Jean, Cedric Anger, and Robert Bononno. French New Wave. Zzdap Publishing, 1999. pg. 120

Metropolis, I

"...Metropolis is not so much a film about machines as it is itself machine, made up of parts fitted together, whose intricate clockwork elements are as much the human passions, anxieties and aggressions as they are the pistons, flywheels as dials."

Elsaesser, Thomas. Metropolis (Bfi Film Classics, 54). British Film Institute, 2000. pg. 64

Society of the Spectacle, X

"As a negative movement which seeks the supersession of art in a historical society where history is not yet lived, art in the epoch of its dissolution is simultaneously an art of change and the pure expression of impossible change. The more grandiose its reach, the more its true realization is beyond it. This art is perforce avant-garde, and it is not. Its avant-garde is its disappearance."

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle, Black & Red, 1983. #190

Society of the Spectacle, IX

"The struggle between tradition and innovation, which is the principle of internal cultural development in historical societies, can be carried on only through the permanent victory of innovation. yet cultural innovation is carried by nothing other than the total historical movement which, by becoming conscious of its totality, tends to supersede its own cultural presuppositions and moves toward the suppression of all separation."

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle, Black & Red, 1983. #181

Society of the Spectacle, VII

"The loss of the language of communication is positively expressed by the modern movement of the decomposition of all art, its formal annihilation. This movement expresses negatively the fact the a common language must be rediscovered - no longer in the unilateral conclusion which, in the art of the historical society, always arrived too late, speaking to others about what was lived without real dialogue, and admitting this deficiency of light - but it must be rediscovered in the praxis, which unified direct activity and its language. The problem is to actually possess the community of dialogue and the game with time which have been represented by poetic-artistic works. "

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle, Black & Red, 1983. #187

Society of the Spectacle, VI

"When society loses the community of the society of myth, it must lose all the references of a really common language until the time when the rifts within the inactive community can be surmounted by the inauguration of the real historical community. When art, which was the common language of social inaction, becomes independent art in the modern sense, emerging from its original religious universe and becoming individual production of separate works, it too experiences the movement that dominates the history of the entirety of separate culture. The affirmation of its independence is the beginning of its disintegration."

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle, Black & Red, 1983. #186

Society of the Spectacle, VIII

"The world already possesses the dream of a time whose consciousness it must now posses in order to actually live it."

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle, Black & Red, 1983. #164

Society of the Spectacle, V

"The spectacle, as the present social organization of the paralysis of history and memory, of the abandonment of history built on the foundation of historical time, is the false consciousness of time."

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle, Black & Red, 1983. #158

Society of the Spectacle, III

"The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images."

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle, Black & Red, 1983. #4

Society of the Spectacle, IV

"The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished. Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation. The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the nonliving."

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle, Black & Red, 1983. #2

Society of the Spectacle, II

"What the spectacle offers as eternal is based on change and must change with its base. The spectacle is absolutely dogmatic and at the same time cannot really achieve any solid dogma. Nothing stops for the spectacle; this condition is natural to it, yet completely opposed to its inclination."

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle, Black & Red, 1983. #77

Society of the Spectacle, I

"Every given commodity fights for itself, cannot acknowledge the others, and attempts to impose itself everywhere as if it were the only one. The spectacle, then is the epic poem of this struggle, an epic which cannot be concluded by the fall of any Troy. The spectacle does not sign the praises of men and their weapons, but of commodities and their passions. In this blind struggle every commodity, pursuing its passion, unconsciously realizes something higher: the becoming-world of the commodity, which is also the becoming-commodity of the world. Thus, by means of a ruse of commodity logic, what's specific in the commodity wears itself out in the fight while the commodity-form moves toward its absolute realization."

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle, Black & Red, 1983. #66

A History of the French New Wave Cinema, III

"Astruc writes that cinema was in the process of breaking free of its limiting role as a visual anecdote or mere spectacle: 'The cinema is gradually becoming a language. By language, I mean a form in which and by which an artist can express his thought, however abstract they may be or translate his obsessions exactly as he does in the contemporary essay or novel. That is why I would like to call this new age of cinema the age of camera-stylo.'"

- Neupert, Richard. A History of the French New Wave Cinema (Wisconsin Studies in Film), University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. pg 48

A History of the French New Wave Cinema, II

About the new emergence of cinematic reality through images and sounds, Astruc comments in his article about the "Camera-Stylo"...
"Astruc helped form this 'new variety of film criticism - an activist, often theoretical discourse aimed at a new kind of cinema as yet rarely realized in images and sounds. Its critical ideal was not a cinema of reality, but cinema of authors, of creators who 'wrote' in images.'* Certainly, the most famous articulation of this new brand of criticism is Astruc's article on the 'camera-stylo,' or camera-pen."
(*Alan Williams, Republic of Images, pg 306)

- Neupert, Richard. A History of the French New Wave Cinema (Wisconsin Studies in Film), University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. pg 47

A History of the French New Wave Cinema, I

"But it was Jean-Pierre Melville who provided the initial model for post-World War II directors, proving, first that Astruc's complaints about the excessive barriers to entry into the French film industry were all too true, and second, that individuals could nonetheless manage to serve as their own producer and director and succeed despite those industrial constraints."

- Neupert, Richard. A History of the French New Wave Cinema (Wisconsin Studies in Film), University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. pg 45-46