Nō Code (Deprogramming 101)

Week 1: View page source. Stare at page source. Line after line. Your eyes, the code. Paper cranes, undulating glass.
Week 2: “A code will be shown without the picture.” Load code, turn off screen. Rediscover uncodifiable mystery of the black box, its illuminations.
Week 3: Travel path of the Nō coder, blind monk of a digital age, deprogrammer of restless interactivity. Record results. Codify. Compile.
Week 4: GOTO Week 1

Preliminary course compendium (draft):

(Ian Bogost, A Slow Year)


(Neil Hennessy, Basho's Frogger)


 (Reiner Strasser & Alan Sondheim, Tao)

The tense musculature of bodies caught in an enveloping, hyperreflexive gaze. Taut statues doused in the hot glare of projections, glistening like wild beasts’ fur. Framing rectangles triangulating a target – past, present, still to come. Silent protests shot through with a chorus of camera shutters. Crickets buzzing in the brush, the sinuous chords of their flexing accord.

(CAVI, 'The Journey of Holger the Dane')


(Arnold Schönberg, Fünf Orchesterstücke op.16, III. "Farben", Mäßige Viertel.)


(Michael Haneke, Caché)


(lhfang86, 'UC Davis Chancellor Katehi walks to her car')

In considering the conundrum of coastlines, caught, as they are, in the double-bind of simultaneously writing and erasing, I came to think about, read about, and undertake walking as an embodied spatialized way of writing coastlines.

(J.R. Carpenter, Along the Briny Beach)

Teri Rueb on Drift:

The ubiquity of GPS and other tracking technologies suggests that “being lost” may itself be an experience that is being lost. However, simply knowing one’s geographical location as expressed in longitude and latitude coordinates has little bearing on one’s personal sense of place or direction. “Drift” poses the age-old question “Where am I and where am I going?” in a contemporary moment in which spatial positioning and tracking technologies provide evermore precise, yet limited, answers to this question. [...] The Watten Sea becomes a metaphor for hertzian space as visitors are invited to wander among layered currents of sand, sea and interactive sounds that drift with the tides, and with the shifting of satellites as rise and set, introducing another kind of drift.

(Teri Rueb, Drift)

Annie Gosfield on ‘Lost Signals and Drifting Satellites’:

The composition is scored for violin, accompanied by recordings of satellites, shortwaves and radio transmissions. The static, sputter and concealed melodies of these transmissions are echoed by the violin, which drifts between extended techniques and traditional writing for the instrument. Like a radio that is gradually losing and gaining reception, the music shifts between these two worlds, hovering between notes and noise, and ultimately drifts into faraway static.

(Annie Gosfield, excerpt from 'Lost Signals and Drifting Satellites')

What is that space that lies somewhere between modes of passivity and those of activism, inaction and interaction? Where might we discover interactivity’s alter ego?

We are surrounded by, live and breathe, a world of interactivity. The digitized economies and ecologies flow, wiring live streams of this and that interaction, seemingly always moving onwards, with or without. Amidst such a continuous flow of interactivity, there is a sense in which modes of passivity and activism become swept up in the process. What is it to be activist when one is always already interactive? How to enjoy a truly passive pursuit when even our passive actions are always already picked up on and made interactive? It is an almost passive aggressive trait of the interactive, the sense that we are all made to enter into a mode of simultaneously being actively passive and passively active. This is the breathless, hyphentated quality of the interactive. The wish to link everything together in the pursuit of yet more interactivity, further flow.

And so to the apostrophe that is entr’activism. Taking its cue from the 1924 René Clair short film, Entr’acte (itself an entr’acte for the Picabia & Satie ballet Relâche), entr’activism is the dangling, mischievous finger that ebbs, if only just for a moment, the flow of things. A pursuit of entr’activism might be described as a diversionary situating of oneself between the Sturms of mediation and Drangs of our own involvement. In its carving out a space of temporary tension between modes of inaction and interaction, entr’activism represents an aestheticization of the incidental, a suspension of interpretation so as to celebrate the suspense of interruption. A momentary puffing of one’s metaphorical suspenders in liberating, flexing pulses that resist, for just a moment, the eventual snapping into place of things.

Entr’activism pokes fun at our habit, so common today, of thinking ahead and considering each and every next mediation. Its value is similar to that of the doodle – bringing to the fore the act of distraction, clearing our heady heads with each casual jolt and scrawl of its diversions. Entr’activism embraces its role as supportive paratext, diverging and disconjugating in the marginalia of any genuine activism. It is the fly buzzing around the excretions of mass production and projection, a danse macabre lightening the load of mediated, carnivorous super-egos.

Entr’activism embraces a refusal of mastery and does not indulge in speaking on others’ behalves. Any activist overtones in the soundtrack of entr’activism are simply the effects of syncopation. Where one detects a bridging or transitional quality to the music, blowing in the direction of genuine action, it might be better to think of such instances as verging towards overture rather than entr’act. Similarly, there is also a distinction to be made in the musical root with the tension free divertimento.

The entr’activist mediation is an incidental, ambient media furniture that doesn’t mind where you sit. In fact it should encourage its audiences to move about and talk amongst themselves. This rearranging of the deck chairs is the true activism of the entr’act. Entr’activists – keep your images moving in front, behind and between screens. Be buoyant, like clouds.

The entr’activist greets the dawn of augmented reality like the return of a long lost friend. Its aspect of materializing and dematerializing doors, opening and shutting, revolving. The mediated event newly mobilized, the physical borders of frames leaking back into a hyper-reality that actualizes the nomadic qualities of being in between various acts of viewings. The screensaver was an early high-water mark for entr’activism in the digital age. From such idlewild apostrophes the entr’activist may tease out an occasional Mona Lisa smile. Not “kino-eye,” nor “kino-fist,” but kino-wink.

There is both an overt and subtle momentum at play in the shifts between media as distraction and interaction in contemporary media transactions. Several dominant schools of the industry continue with efforts at ever great immersion, but certain examples, past and present, remind us of other avenues for exploration. In a space between distraction and interaction, inaction and action, lies a potential meddling zone of entr’action.

The entr’activist embraces a thirst for change. The passive expression of something like turning the channel. The activist’s turning over of a government. Pirouetting from one to the other, the entr’activist readily doffs their cap to any such “turns,” celebrating even the slightest sense of movement in the tectonic plates of discourse. The intermissionary role of the entr’activist during such interludes is in further stirring up and seeking out this nomadic quality of inbetweenness, that unsteady feeling of a shifting in the sands, alternating tides of the common place and non-place sifting between one’s toes.

And yet entr’activism can never be a turn in its own right. It celebrates movement, but is not a movement. Recall the prescient ending of Clair’s film, where we are treated to a scene in which an actor excitedly tears through the closing ‘FIN’ screen – only to be sucked right back into it. The entr’actvist kicks the overreaching ambitions of any particular medium back into place. It could only ever be so. Entr’activism remains the act of turning itself. A turning away, as the etymological origins of apostrophe hint at, so as to cleave out alternative spaces of incidental informality and elision. Or turning on, to the blurred lines, the palimpsestic lipsticks of alter egos whose traces linger in enticing footnotes, smudged imprints, muddy margins. To turn against the continuous flow of interactivity in order to remind oneself of what it is to be truly passive and truly active. Eventually to, perhaps, turn towards something. Or just to turn over again.

(Ian Bogost - Seeing Things)

In a seven minute video entitled Seeing Things, Ian Bogost sets about the task of orienting his viewers towards an object-oriented way of seeing the world. To do so he adapts the style of a visual essay, having a slideshow of selected still photographs run in tandem with his monologue on seeing the world through the lens of object-oriented ontology (OOO).

The first half of this slideshow consists of the black and white photograps of Garry Winogrand (momentarily contrasted with a colour family snapshot and one of Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moments”), followed up by several examples from the Dear Photograph photo blog and closing with two more Winogrand photos. There is a particularly strong attention grabbing quality to images that makes them well suited to the point that Bogost seeks to make in the piece, and both Winogrand and Dear Photograph work well as touchstones from which to play OOO off of, with each bringing to the fore the relationship between “seeing” and “seeing as,” as well as emphasizing the perceived reifying power of the photographic object itself.

Images have a quality of demanding to be looked at. They call attention to themselves and we often find it hard to resist their pull. Such an interpellative hold on the viewer is what can also inject images with a further quality by which they can be suggestively said to “look back” at the viewer, in the way that one senses, in one way or another, a certain animating force in the image that endows it with a kind of gaze of its own. But this hold that images can be seen as having is not simply in their quality as image. There are image cultures, and certain viewers will be drawn to certain types of images, and certain elements within those images, more than others. A prime mover in the image cultures of recent generations is the ubiquitous “snapshot.” Bogost quotes from Winogrand’s well-known remark on this prevalent snapshot aesthetic:

The people who use the term don’t even know the meaning. They use it to refer to photographs they believe are loosely organized, or casually made, whatever you want to call it. Whatever terms you like. The fact is, when they’re talking about snapshots they’re talking about the family album picture, which is one of the most precisely made photographs. Everybody’s fifteen feet away and smiling. The sun is over the viewer’s shoulder. That’s when the picture is taken, always. It’s one of the most carefully made photographs that ever happened.
- Garry Winogrand

Bogost contrasts such a narrow focusing on the animate world of people with Winogrand’s approach to photography, in which “People, events, and social conditions… are there just because they were there. Because light bent through an aperture onto emulsion. Because Winogrand is a person and people sometimes find themselves at press conferences and zoos and rodeos. Just because.” Bogost floats the question of whether it might be possible to see beyond the people, “to see the flourescents and the dirt and the chain-link? To grasp the photographs’ ontology as flat like its surface?” Viewers might reconsider the way in which so many of the things that appear in pictures are simply overlooked. It is an object-oriented ontologist’s attempt to reorient our viewing habits so that we might bring back into focus the many glossed over things that are in fact everywhere in the world around us. And in doing so, to begin to recast the nature of our own being from such a perspective.

Doing this “requires work.” For in attempting such an orientation towards seeing a world full of non-human elements we come face to face with the subject-oriented pull that dominates our own visual habits. Bogost reminds us of just how narrowly focused our seeing tends to be, how we are indeed inclined towards a snapshot take on our surroundings, in which we almost inevitably filter out the world of inanimate objects in order to focus on a more limited spectrum of the animate.

This narrowness to our vision is unquestionably an anthropocentric expression on the part of the seeing human subject, but it is worth briefly pointing out that it also aligns with the technical specifications of our viewing mechanisms. As studies in ophthalmology and eye-tracking have shown (Duchowski, Eye Tracking Methodology: Theory and Practice), our visual attention is dictated by a limited viewing angle, in which “Central foveal vision subtends 1-5° (visual angle) allowing fine scrutiny only of a small portion of the entire visual field.” Or to quote from William James (The Principles of Psychology) speaking of “the span of consciousness” a century earlier, “When the things are apprehended by the senses, the number of them that can be attended to at once is small, Pluribus intentus, minor est ad singula sensus.”

Such a double-sided nature to our visual filtering, both culturally and physiognomically-oriented, is continuously at work. We are regularly relegating things to the periphery in every act of seeing. But to the degree that we tend to focus so entirely on the animating subject matter that we most readily relate with, one can compare such a way of seeing the world to a condition of tunnel vision, in that peripheral vision is all but blotted out by this tunneling drive of the subjective. Seen from such a perspective, we might then say that what Bogost is attempting in this example is a kind of periphery vision – a bringing to the fore, or surfacing, of those things relegated to the peripheral regions of our perceptual focus. A philosophical taughtening of the subjective aperture in order that we might experience a greater depth of field to the world as it is, with or without us. As is so often the case, it is via the help of a visual technology, in this case the photograph (not to mention the techno-visual metaphor), that one can capture and make such points regarding perception. And the visual peripheral – for the photographic print has indeed taken on characteristics of a peripheral in today’s screen-oriented landscape – makes for a particularly useful aid to the task of periphery vision.

Of prime interest here is how Bogost mobilizes this OOO rhetoric visually. On the one hand, there is a sense of the “evidentiary/memorialist/participatory” life being sucked out of the photographs, in the way that Bogost enacts an ostensibly disinterested gaze via a series of coolly recited passages and occasional pedagogic emphasis in the stamping of portions of the read text onto the images. The style of verbal delivery, with its mellow yet firmly monotone dictation (Bogost says he was “very seriously jetlagged” when recording the piece), helps to create a flattening effect on the images. Everything – man, woman, rhinocerous – is turned into still life. The Martin Luther King bus photo is punctured with a barbed Winogrand quote, and the “touching and heart-wrenching” exuberance of the Dear Photograph movement is nicely deflated via the poetically diffusive light that Bogost steadily casts over each photo that we are presented with. There is a sense in which one’s vision flattens and levels in accord with the flat-lined inanimate objects that Bogost is bringing to the surface. “The door jamb. The empty summer lawn where the fall leaves collect in autumn. The paint on a shed. The thumbs that hold photographs. The indifferent asphalt. The park bench that cradles without care. The bricks unsusceptible to sorrow.” Achieving such an effect using the Dear Photograph examples represents a minor coup de grâce in and of itself, a thoughtful yet remorseless dunking into cold philosophical waters akin to Bruegel the Elder’s Fall of Icarus painting.

At the same time though there is an undercurrent of an animating force at work in these proceedings. Bogost employs the documentary technique of panning and scanning over the still images, which helps to create a slowly breathing montage of images. Or to be more precise, a slowly exhaling montage of images. For in the majority of photos Bogost opts for a gradual zooming out of the image, contrasted only in a few instances with a zooming in and, slightly more regularly, the odd “snapshot” in which there is no movement at all. But for most of the piece we are presented with this repeated, visually-oriented cue that suggests an initial highlighting of the peripheral object and then a gradual stepping back to consider the whole of the scene in relation to this reoriented part. The general pacing of the visuals and narration also helps to lend an overall rhythmic flow to the piece.

Such contrasting effects that animate and “inanimate” the images imbues the slideshow, and the “things” with which it is concerned, with a two-directional quality of its own. In one sense, the images flatten out, but at the same time there is also a sense of reestablished depth in the way that the glossed over things with which this philosophy is concerned now pop out of their own accord. It is an unusual, alien sort of vitality that things take on in this reorientation, in that what is animated is the very “empty,” “indifferent,” “unsusceptible” gaze that these objects bring to proceedings.

The image of outer space (5:23) seems vaguely out of place at first sighting (although one could go so far as to see the three Os of OOO echoed in its concentric clusters of galaxies…). But in the context of the piece, there is a sense in which Bogost is presenting us with an interesting flipside or variant on the standard method of sublime imagery. We are still made to feel the sense of ekstasis, of standing outside of oneself, typical of sublime imagery, but via a foreshortening effect that acts as almost inverse to the telescoping qualities of standard sublime images in which nature is writ large. As a periphery vision of sorts sets in, there is a way in which the things one typically doesn’t think of as sublime start to, at least to begin with, lean out with a kind of heightened prescience amidst the renewed scale that this way of seeing the world establishes. The forensic quality of this gaze may flatten, but it can also backlight such effects with this added sense of microscopic-like granularity (and even grandeur) that it imbues upon its everyday objects.

Object-oriented ontology is thus not only the name for an ontology oriented toward objects, but a practice of learning how to orient toward objects ourselves. And, mise-en-abyme-like, how to orient toward object-orientation.
- Ian Bogost, Seeing Things

And yet, mise-en-abyme like, such a reorientation can be disorienting. There is a possible wrong footing or double take to be experienced in this stepping into the gaze of the inanimate. Or to rephrase such a mixed metaphor, like the picture of the small girl trying on the oversized shoes (5:47), stepping into the pair of ontological shoes that OOO presents us with can easily make one feel rather small – an effect also common to images of the sublime. In more directly visual terms, we might speak of this as a sense of vertigo, in that there is a potential two-directional tug of war to be experienced in this particular act of vision: a pulling out of oneself in the emphasizing of a non-subjective way of seeing the world, at the same time that one might find oneself becoming self-aware as a result of the very effort required to see things in such a way. (As an aside, it could be worth considering the schizophrenic/liberating dimensions that might arise in such tussles/loosenings of subject-object dichotomies. See, for instance, Roger Caillois’ concept of subjective detumescence.)

But this is what makes OOO interesting in its visual incarnation here. It brings to the fore peripheral aspects of our vision, and in doing so highlights certain dynamics involved therein. William Blake (Europe a Prophecy) wrote of how the “fluxile eyes” of man became “two stationary orbs” after the Fall, presenting only a narrow, “petrify’d” vision of the world. The philosophical prism of OOO offers a perceptual tool that can help to destabilize what might be deemed a rather singular vision of the world, thus making possible a reexamination of the nature of vision and seeing in the world. As Bogost continues to zoom us out of one image after the next, we slowly feel ourselves orienting towards a different kind of vanishing point, one that sets into motion its own fluxile push and pull.

“. . . Look at the Chu Jan scroll in Cleveland, I can imagine all of these gestures; no film is necessary for me to locate these movements, for the silk is itself a film that has recorded them already; I cannot conceive of the image except as the trace of a performance. In part, the performance has been fully advertent, directed to the gaze of the spectator in the same way that a dancer projects his movements through the four sides of the proscenium to the audience beyond; the four sides of the scroll contain a spectacular space, where everything exists for consumption by the gaze, im Augenblick, as a scaena, a backdrop.

(Chu Jan - Buddhist Monastery by Streams and Mountains)

But in part, the performance is inadvertent, for although the strokes are so displayed that from their interlocking structure I can visualise a scene, a monastery in stream and mountain landscape, the strokes exist in another space apart from the space of spectacle; a space not so much convergent with the silk (though the silk intersects with it, it is a section of that other space) as with the body of the painter; it is his space, and in a sense it is blind; the movements executed there will, as they touch the silk, leave marks I can construct as a scaena, a spectacle, but these marks are also simply taches, traces left behind in the wake of certain gestures, but remaining below the threshold of intelligibility (recognition), blind marks which support, eventually, the sigils from which I can construct the landscape scenically, but which are also independent of the sigils they bear; as the body of the dancer exists physically for the others on stage, projecting outwards past the proscenium arch, certainly, but also here, seen by the other performers, on the ‘wrong’ side of the arch.

(Hans Namuth - Jackson Pollock)

For the dancer, the space of the stage is an extension of studio space; periodically, he must move his performance to the theatre, but even then the stage retains a quality of studio space, into which the audience looks as though from a public gallery; in the Chu Jan, it is this choreographic space, behind the proscenium surface, which also we look into, studio space seen from the excluded angle of this picture gallery.

(David Dawson - Lucien Freud (non-Flash link here))

It is this other space of the studio, of the body of labour, which Western painting negates; we are given the body with an intensity of disclosure and publicity without counterpart outside Europe, but it is the body in a different guise, as picture, to be apprehended simultaneously by the Gaze: the Gaze takes the body and returns it in altered form, as product but never as production of work; it posits the body only as content, never as source.

(Tac Creative - Lucian Freud, L'atelier présentée au Centre Pompidou (non-Flash link here))

. . . What we must suspend, clearly, is the conception of the body in representation which our own tradition proffers us, as something fixed, pictorial, framed; we must attend, on one side, to the means by which the individual painting directs (rather than determines) the flow of interpretation across its surface; and on the other, to the collective forms of discourse, present in the social formation and subject to their own unfolding in time, which the painting activates: activates not as citation, but as mobilisation (the painting causes the discourses to move).

(Kseniya Simonova - Sand Animation)

. . . Since it is only by working, by transforming the signifying material provided by the painting that the process of recognition unfolds, recognition is always in movement, is always an active rotation of the annulus of signs; viewing is mobility both of the eye and of discourse, in the disseminations of the glance.

(TheDIEMProject - Eye movement peekthrough in There Will Be Blood)

. . . To understand the painting as sign, we have to forget the proscenic surface of the image and think behind it: not to an original perception in which the surface is luminously bathed, but to the body whose activity – for the painter as for the viewer – is always and only a transformation of material signs. That body may be eclipsed by its own representations; but it is outward, from its invisible musculature, rather than inwards, from its avid gaze, that all the images flow.”

(Lawrence Upton - Paintings by Carrà)

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CHAPT TAT-à-TAT

ScHrödinger’s C(H)AT – HATCHT or CAPT?
TAP TAP TAP…
(CopenHAgen PATCHT w/ PACT)

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THAT HAT PAT CHA-CHA
Hi-TeCH CATeCHism:
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ATTACH PHACT
PATCH PATCH PATCH THe PACT

reCAPT:

YOKO ENGORGED

The poem uses Nick Montfort’s streamlined and nimble Taroko Gorge code (a JavaScript port of a poetry generator originally written as a 1k Python program). All I have done is command, cup, exercise, explore, finger, flog, fondle, graze, grope, imagine, lick, manipulate, massage, plow, poke, pucker, range, reveal, ride, roam, rub, smear, soften, squeeze, stroke, suck, stimulate, tease, tickle, tongue, and trail the variables.

This follows a series of hacks of the Taroko Gorge generator and the piece even incorporates some themes from each of those adaptations. It all began with the rather awful titular play on words and just evolved/devolved from there. Hopefully at some level the spirit of Ono’s work still shines through along with the smut. But mostly it was just an excuse to gorge on some epoetry code for the first time. Yum!

Word names, crochet digs.
Goons excavating darling finds.
Bone-dry romance for bone parts.

Pentagrammatic quarry, crags of rocky sound.
Mystique of a skull – they don’t talk back.
Melody like a shovel: undead.

Theme and variations – hardly.
Cool, long-settled, prelapidarian glint.
Pebbles of contra thought.

Jefferson, Sinai: impressionable memorials.
Tablet slate. Mineral refrain.

Deconstruct – verily.
Query / Quarry / Query / Quarry.
Link – Link – Link – Link.
Quoth, “……….” Unquoth.

On the quick of quiet,
a jagged perch,
cavern colon quartz.

(exinfoam - Ryoji Ikeda - the transfinite)

The video consists of a collection of shaky digital camera clips (not to mention plenty of newbie iMovie tropes in regards to the textual insertions) captured while taking in Ikeda’s installation at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. Wasn’t intending to use the clips for a video like this but somehow the miscellaneous parts ended up coalescing into a kind of half review, half haiku on Ikeda’s piece.