![[the semiotic triangle]] ![[visual pleasure and narrative cinema]] ## [[Asignifying semiotics]] act on things. ... They connect an organ, a system of [[perception]], an intellectual activity, and so on, directly to a machine, procedures, and [[signs]], bypassing the [[representation]]s of a subject ([[diagrammatic]] functioning). They Play a very specific role in [[capitalism]] since "essentially,*** capitalism depends on asignifying machines."*** **The processes of digitization create new areas of [[perception]], which will lead to noticeable transformations in everyday life; Their quest […] is to re-discover the criterion of self-reflection, the awareness of inner distance and [[perception]]. Media art is, therefore, an essential component of how contemporary societies may achieve an adequate self-description and by which means they can seek to attain a critical distance to the increasing pace of change.** As if they managed to re-activate a meaning making processes that acknowledges glitches as an [[ontological]] condition, allowing us to overcome the overwhelming effects of the Myth of the accident, where errors are re-introduced as a merely aesthetic features. ^71c32d Deleuze and Guattari's three phantoms that interrupt desire as flow: "namely internal lack, higher transcendence, and ==apparent exteriority==.” Inserting an image into [[signification]] defines it as lacking in itself until it is able to emerge through an established metaphor (***an object defined***) and metonymic structure (the relations between objects). Meaning is made apparent through the function of making it appear via something else, prior to the image as event or pleasure as rupture. The compulsion to experience images and pleasures via their emergence through transcendental meaning acknowledges and circumscribes the force of all flows that exceed lack, transcendence, and a relation to established significations. <!-- kk --> ## virginia-sotiraki-glitch-art-narratives-an-investigation-of-the-relation-between-noise-and-meaning Bound with Lyotard’s notion of the ‘aesthetics of post-modernity’ and [[Virilio]]’s concept of a ‘[[vision machine]]’, Debord’s ‘[[Society of the Spectacle]]’ (1967) and the idea of a society where direct experience has been replaced by mediated representations- have been major sources of inspiration on how glitch art could be interpreted through [[semiotics]]. but not as much as Paul [[Virilio]]’s book ‘The Original Accident’ (2007). It brought to my attention the traumatic effects of techno-scientific [[Progress]]… [[Virilio]] discusses the increased ‘speed’ brought by technology and the consequent accelerated temporality, as a dangerous characteristic of our society that introduces the Accident, or even the potentiality of a [[disaster]], as inherent to any technological invention. The accident is _‘**an invention in the sense of uncovering what was hidden, just waiting to happen’ He argues for an urge to ‘expose the accidens in Time’ in order to be aware of it and allow it to become automatic. This might be the only way to avoid **‘the fatal emergence’** This thesis discusses glitch art as the sequence of certain conceptual techniques that our culture employs in order to gradually transform the confusion and uneasiness caused from glitches, into a logical method for processing [[reality]]. Through the examination of an oil [[Painting]] that imitates the visual manifestation of digital errors, I will demonstrate that there is a [[semiotic]] interrelation between glitch art and the Accident, which simultaneously redefines the ontology of the former, as glitch art is becoming the Myth of the Accident. As a result, this thesis will investigate the connections of [[ontological]] meta-narratives in contemporary art to mechanisms for acquiring knowledge and processing reality. ^12bd5d This contextualization will introduce glitch art as a metonym for reality and as a mechanism that revolutionizes our [[perception]] and reinforces our tolerance against the stress that [[Virilio]] ascribes to the unknown source of the Original Accident. These findings, combined with the analysis of distinct glitch art typologies in the second chapter, will highlight the instrumentalization of accidents as a method for processing reality. [[Post-glitch art]] is the result of a [[meaning making process]], which redefines our relation to the original accident through hybrid techniques and [[transmedia narratives]]. … virtual image spaces should be understood as a vanishing point, as an extreme, where the relationships of humans to images is highlighted with particular clarity’..::_ ==**As if in full compliance with Debord’s Spectacle, artists have started merging together digital art and physical objects, bringing us closer to realizing how immersive our technological culture is, and how our altered [[perception]] of physicality, tangibility…**== Denzler employs [[new media]] such as 3D rendering programs, at an early, conceptual stage in order to get an idea of the final composition, that he later on executes in stages through traditional media. What fascinates me the most is that this kind of [[oscillation between analogue and digital]], between newer and older media and production tools that seems to be a persistent and recurring scheme. Remember Len Lye and his noise art works, where he applied paint directly on films, creating innovative visual outcomes, or Kostas’ Tsoklis — Harpooned Fish, a video projection on a painted surface that made people start talking about ‘living paintings’ back in 1985. >**Together with his interest in [[photography]] and cinema,** **Denzler’s abstract photorealism shows, the stop-frame, the** **«** **cut** **»** **// A** **distorted frame that deconstitutes the image and shirks the image from reality, undermining the authority and possession of the real upon the movement and the human. [[Painting]]** **here is** **the tearing of the image, cutting not from the reality of the movement, but into its reality.** **_[[Painting]] as incision into the real._** The transfer of digital qualities into a material and analogue context is what I found extremely fruitful for my thesis, as it makes even more evident that there is a generalised attempt to deal with the existential dimensions of glitches. It urges us to ponder on the >> **[[Painting]]’s [[ontological]] dimensions.**<< ^b4ae5d #### We Walked Down the Atemporal Something that was usually employed on a flat surface, in order to replicate the impression of a sculpture, is now being used in order to imitate a domination by images. Denzler and [[Post-glitch art]] seem to have already dealt with that cognitive gap. Myth has in fact a double function: it points out and it notifies, it makes us understand something and it imposes it on us. [---] Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact [---] it abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, with any going back beyond what it is immediately visible, it organizes a world which is without contradictions.  ## [[phantasmagoria]] is the fantasy of a total— and totally controlled— mental and physical environment. Hallucinations and [[phantasmagoria]] both reflect the return of myth and fate to modernity, its re-enchantment. ^85d9826 The schizoid or psychotic subject rejects abstract thinking because he rejects the whole concept of representational limitation; in hallucination, the category under which [[phantasmagoria]] falls, a thought is transformed into a sense impression that does not have meaning, … ^46m43pr They veil the production process, and—like mood pictures—encourage their beholders to identify them with subjective fantasies and dreams. Both Bion’s understanding of hallucination and Benjamin’s phantasmagoric anesthesia are defenses against the traumatic assaults of modernity on the sensorium; both emphasize the malignancy of [[phantasmagoria]], its hallucinatory and violent elements, and its link to war. ^di6rv33 Benjamin made it his task to document as well as explode the cocoon- like slumber of the nineteenth century by way of reading and re-inscription processes and to recover the intricacies of linking that constitute the experience of truly waking life. Benjaminian reading and re-inscription processes were to emerge from an experience of “martyrdom,” that is, a new sort of [[GASOLINE DREAMS/Corporeality]] experience and [[GASOLINE DREAMS/Corporeality]] thought. “Innervation” counteracts the neurological and psychiatric effects of perceptive, emotional, and cognitive anesthesia. With this concept Benjamin modifies and relieves, partially at least, the “new barbarian” ascetic response to modern over stimulation; he knew, Hansen suggests, that such asceticism could not possibly suffice to build an authentic political alternative to fascism. Alone, however, such asceticism could never stand its ground against fascism, no matter how high the moral ground, just as renunciation of [[jouissance]] is not enough for the subject to live at the end of analysis, once the fantasy has been traversed. ^84f49a Additionally, as Adorno pointed out to [[Benjamin]], such a renunciation “came close to identifying with the aggressor” (Hansen 1999, 313). The difficult, if not impossible, position in which Benjamin found him- self—a dialectic between a world from which the absolute had disappeared and the rushing in of compensations that were to carry the weight of an uncanny leftover energy—is exemplified by the reference in his “Theologi- cal Criticism” (1931b) essay to Kafka and Hofmannsthal as emblems of modernity and modern anomie. Hofmannsthal, at the heart of the collapsing Hapsburg monarchy, where, in a kind of post- historical maturity, he entirely transformed the energy on which it had thrived into formal structures. Kafka alluded to a disappeared Scripture in such a manner that the distinction between “content” and “form” itself fell away, and it was the empty shells, the physicality of the “gestures” themselves, that—allegorically, not symbolically— were to become … Benjamin thought that the [[mimetic]] faculty could open up the empty shells of the unredeemed things; traces of the absolute could be found in their folds, their “waste.” This recovery activity links the [[mimetic]] collector who performs it to the martyr-allegorist. Forms of “innervation” undermine the purely renunciatory “new barbarism.” Menke (1991) and Richter (2002), like Hansen (1999), show that Benjamin makes the realms of the [[mimetic]] —in ancient times associated with divination, magic, and enchantment —usable in emotionally significant acts of reading and writing. In secularized modernity, a fundamental displacement has taken place. Benjamin writes, “in the course of centuries, the [[mimetic]] power, and with it the gift of [[mimetic]] [[perception]], have disappeared from certain fields—perhaps in order to flow into others” (Benjamin 1933b) 111), such reading takes place in a dialectical space that involves [[GASOLINE DREAMS/Corporeality]] elements: the body is both inscribed and read, both the recipient of inscription and its reader. It emits and receives the gaze. In addition to this conspicuous, maybe even mentally disarticulating, presence of [[corporeality]], Benjamin places emphasis on the visual and aural materiality... This new emphasis on materiality emerges primarily through the displacement of the spoken to the written word as it does, for example, in the *allegorical traditions* of the Baroque, *==the realm of emblems and hieroglyphs==*, as for Benjamin writing is, even if largely unconsciously, a physical gesture. Benjamin’s examples of “innervation” are, says Hansen, the best alternative to the “new barbarism,” to emotional stuntedness, and to compensatory fascistic *fusional* experiences. ## ==As “a neurophysiological process that mediates between internal and external, psychic and motoric, human and mechanical registers” (Hansen 1999,…== 313), innervation is a new mode both of [[perception]] and affect that emerges with the [[New Sensorium]] that characterizes Benjamin’s “profane illumination.” It even makes possible a new “fascination.” “Innervation” makes reading and inscription [[GASOLINE DREAMS/Corporeality]]. It is intensive (rather than referential), active, and bound up with the [[mimetic]] faculty, “the capacity to relate to the external world through patterns of similitude, affinity, reciprocity, and interplay” (Hansen 1999, 329). It is also at play, I want to point out, in the experience of the analyst when she participates in the analysand’s mental space, as we will see, “transcending the traditional subject-object dichotomy" [It is] a mode of cognition involving sensuous, somatic, and tactile forms of [[perception]]; a non-coercive engagement with the other that opens the self to experience . . I will examine instead the ways in which the messianic relates to a specifically liberating relationship to language. Shattered and fragmented, it must be retrieved from scattered objects and imagery containing in some way [[GASOLINE DREAMS/Corporeality]] experience and physical memory, as well as remnants and traces of what has been banished from modern life’s parameters that, like Ariadne’s thread, could lead out of the narcissistic cocoon of [[phantasmagoria]]. ^5jl3h2k In his short 1932 piece, “Experience” Benjamin writes, “Experiences are lived similarities”; “[experience and observation are identical,” and “[observation is based on self-immersion” (Benjamin 1931 or 1932/1999, 553). The constellations express, in similarity and difference, relationship as such—language “as such,” the explicit Benjaminian aim for a [[Revolution]] of experience. The analytic immersion in tandem into mental space is an example of what Benjamin names “non-sensuous similarity” (1933d, 722). investigated by Sandor Ferenczi, who had always been, within Freud’s immediate circle, ***the analyst most in tune with the relationship between psyche and body, the body’s abjections***, its “creatureliness”: ==the gestural body, the body in the grip of death-driven repetitions, and **the body as its own sign**.== Ferenczi’s work on “tic” (1921/1926), which I will look at below, can be correlated with a work like Rilke’s novel Malte Laurids Brigge (1910/1990), one of whose most memorable passages not only describes an anonymous by-passer in the grip of a convulsive tic, but also the traumatic encroachment on personal space typifying modernity. As for Freud, for whom [[mimesis]] and mimicry were surely involved in identificatory phenomena and ultimately originated in [[narcissism]] —which, in the most basic of ways, is defined by assimilation and absorption and the grandiose style— the [[[[mimetic]]]] for Ferenczi was closely allied with the [[death drive]]. [[mimesis]] in this wider cultural context functions as a Benjaminian “origin.” In the hands of Bion, who in turn was analyzed by Klein, “projective identification” was transformed into the phenomenon of “reverie,” a productive idea when it comes to fleshing out Benjamin’s [[THEORY]] of [[mimesis]], as we will see. The connection of Benjamin’s work to both opens up an expansive horizon of cross-fertilizations between discourses and disciplines, linked by the mimesis trope and taking place in those frenetic months before Hitler’s ascent to power. In the context of his work on mimesis in Adorno, Josef Früchtl (1986) takes what he calls the maddening and opaque concept of [[mimesis]] back, beyond Plato and Aristotle, to its darker origins, where, however, it turns out to be no more univocal: it is afflicted with over-determination and semantic emptiness simultaneously (… Its etymology includes the meaning “dark” with all of the following as well: “revelation,” “allowing to emerge from darkness,” and “switching,” “deceiving,” “tricking,” “exchanging,” and “transforming”; it is also defined as the act of showing something that presents itself—deceptively—as the original. Secondly, “mimos” refers to the actor in Bacchic cults performing a dance in which, through word, music, and movements, a story is told (8). “[[mimesis]]” is then profoundly and archaically related to physical gesture, sound, and body, all relevant to Benjamin’s [[THEORY]] of the [[mimetic]] faculty. This explosiveness may have had something to do with [[mimesis]] being inhabited by the death drive and linked to trauma; Freud had published Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1920, in which the death drive was presented, among other things, as the drive to disappear, to fold and dissolve into the primal mass,… “The end is the origin,” Freud had suggested, a phrase that, as if by [[mimetic]] magic, also appeared in works by, among others, Karl Kraus and [[Walter Benjamin]]. ==The death drive is at work in [[mimesis]] in the undoing of articulation and difference performed by mimicry.== Mimicry emerges as the dominant modern perversion of [[mimesis]], and, as its sub- category, must be differentiated from it. Mimicry, object of fascination in these years for anthropologists, psychologists, and biologists and onto which they latched as if they were grasping for a disappearing [[mimetic]] faculty within the epidemic of its very perversion—can be seen as the death drive in action: in its various manifestations, the same phenomenon emerges—fear, shock, and petrification allow an organism to blend and… for example, the objective always seeming to be ensnarement by fascination. Additionally, it seems that mimicry is after all not a tool of utility, but is bizarrely self-destructive: [25]) for his intuition regarding the archaic and regressive nature of [[mimesis]] as mimicry, which is not only “primitive,” not just tragically counterproductive, but also a horrifying reality of entrapment, a spell: “an incantation fixed at its culminating point and having caught the sorcerer in his own trap” (27)… What Caillois is tracing in the world of insects and plants (later he would reach even farther back to stones, minerals, stalactites [1964]) is the “beyond the pleasure principle,” “a sort of instinct of renunciation that orients [the creature] toward a mode of reduced existence, which in the end would no longer know either consciousness or feeling—the inertia of the élan vital, so to speak”… Distance is obliterated, and every- where living beings stand petrified, mimicking an encroaching threat, He describes tic as “an unconscious reminiscence of [a] real sensation”… that had irrupted traumatically. As reminiscence, however, it is characterized by having taken the shape of a “physiological reflex [rather] than . . . repression,” an “[a]breaction [which] is a more archaic method of relieving accrued stimulation” ==— and mimicry in general: the tic repeats the attitude the body was in at the moment of shock (156).== As the function of the tiqueur’s “imitation mania” is both to blend catatonically into a threatening external world (and thus supposedly undo the threat) and, ironically thus to cover up this regression into the farthest reaches of a disappearing ego, the … It announces the emergence of that traumatic onslaught of materiality that Benjamin describes in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, when history spreads out, time becomes space, and when Kant’s “solution” to the problem of the thing itself, the reduction o… In Mallarmé, the disappearance of meaning exacts not thought (on the disappearance of meaning), but rather the rec- ognition that something far more primal is called for: a sort of [[GASOLINE DREAMS/Corporeality]] confrontation. With the disappearance of meaning, subjective knowledge and the power to represent too fall away, their blind, illusory truths forcing their disappearance, and what is left is “pure [[perception]]”… >of language (which remains nothing but an “eve”), the senses are victori- ous, what Lacan called the “lamella,” the undead object, the life that cannot be given support in the symbolic order (Žižek 1993, 176–82). Mallarmé’s choice is to “look as [[photography]] looks,” says Bonnefoy, like a “new barbarian,” but also enacting a sensory immersion into the phenomena. ## Mallarmé wants to accomplish consciously — wants to accomplish as an ultimate act of consciousness, at the threshold of a new age—what the photographic machine does outside any consciousness . . .” *Even the word is to become visual ,...* ## So that from the absolute an absolute of absence flowers before his eyes and ours. >[Igitur] listens to the tick-tock of the pendulum. ==He descends so far in his listening to each sound that the expectation of the next sound is effaced with the memory of its meaning, and this beat—this “hesitant oscillation”—seems to stop, an instant of the outside of time after which time will not start again, at once interminable and, if I dare say it, atemporal, but only as the same invisible and omnipresent reverse side of the human thing that the eye also foresees.== Imaginary captation (vision anchored in control and totality—control of totality) fizzles out into thin air, and what is left is the heavy thing, the obstacle of the unknown and uncontrolled, non-imaginary body: What then?  --- ## The [[mirror]] Here things are simultaneously “full” ==(producing anxiety and [[jouissance]]) and forever fleeing, present in the moment of their, and the viewer’s, evanescence.== ^696de9 The immersion is productive—for Bonnefoy, in terms of [[photography]], but for my purposes simply as an example of where and how looking awry, and playing with points and lines; it is possible to emerge out from under the concept_ One notion emerges from Warburg’s work as fundamental to both his philosophy and methodology and as the phenomenon that he claimed was fundamental to a life-affirming and tolerant culture: this is the notion of *Denkraum*, literally “thinking space,” critical distance (Brosius 1997;… Viewing and experiencing art means “reading” it— again, no matter how unconsciously—through an immersion into psychic expression, and doing so in an especially delimited space. Warburg remained fascinated with their intrusions and the kinetic elements all his life and insisted on their curative function: they provide a door, he claimed, to an archaic dispossessedness (the primal moment of threat and a point of origin where human creation first takes place)… Presenting the gist of this legendary lecture provides me with a way of visualizing more concretely the way in which Benjamin’s “[[mimetic]] faculty” is to have a curative function within traumatically encroached upon psyches. --- [[Virilio - Crepuscular Dawn_ANNOTATIONS]]