Ambidexterity of Video

By Jon Perez

           Some of the more provocative early names competing with video for nominal preeminence include: visual listening, hear-seeing, phototelegraphy, radiovision, radioscopy, seeing by wireless, distant electric vision, telectroscopy, telephonoscopy, audiovision, and radio movies among others. Examining this long gone multitude of terms latent in the signifier video has allowed me to abstract from a field of practices and artifacts which constitute video as art, into a turbulent hypothesis where video can be understood as an especially transformative practice of looking insofar as it functions as a perceptual prosthetic. Videated information is rightly understood in terms of outward prosthesis.[1] I’d like to provisionally extend the ambidexterity of video as a perceptual prosthetic inward, and make video available as a prosthesis of introspection and interoception under certain conditions.

           Video can act as a powerful perceptual heuristic in that it is ultimately a mechanistic problem solving system that, because it adapts in anthropotropic ways to the specific information structure of different environments, can ignore various kinds of data and amplify certain others, correlating them with human sensio-ratio perceptual cues.[2] With my work, one idea is to create a multiplicity of potential passages, or paths for thinking. Here, the importance of experimentation is supplanted by its necessity. A commitment to improvisation and methodological pluralism (anything goes) results in a desire to withdraw from the tendency towards either looking at the same thing in different ways or looking at different things in the same way, and instead initializes an attitude that tries to accomplish both feats simultaneously in one folding motion to be repeated and revised over and over again.[3] How can we think about video  as something more than evidence or document?

           Video parenthesizes its spaces of engagement. Never subtractive, every video is an additive signal in an already complete field of objects, and therein aggressively functions to amplify the sensible in a given environment. The radical anonymity of some of the videos I sample conceptually rhymes with the adage that the best photographer is anonymous, and flattens the uniquity of any token fragment, permeating the viewer with a horrifying sense that even the completely irrelevant is viable for expropriation.

           Loosely referring to post-appropriation aesthetics, Philippe Vergne suggests a concept of expropriation that is coupled with a notion of emancipation with regard to signs.[4] Expropriation sends signs free from the circumstances of their production back into the larger circulation of globalizing media where they will be consumed, digested, excreted, and made available again. But this is not necessarily a joyous affair — since with circulation comes continuous control, monitoring, recording, and querying to be completed by planetary inscription apparatuses like the internet and social media networks which increasingly use video as the preferred content provider of a swelling anti-archive.

           The anti-archive can be understood as a gathering of information that expands rather than constricts the uses and potential of information, by making extra-rational/ logical connections, using categories against themselves and exhibiting their arbitrariness.[5] For example, the systematic compilation of a particular collection of scintillating objects in Graceful Degradation is a Complicated and Expensive Goal epitomizes the arbitrariness of historically comprehensible categories by revealing them as nothing more than the subroutine of a desire to transform objects normally outside available zones of intervention into possible spaces of meaningful contact through constantly opening and reopening a dialog between the fragment and the whole. Meaning cannot be dredged through the accumulation of objects (for example, syntactically defining the inter-relations among individuals) nor by defining the relations between individuals to the whole. Instead the alien objects of the ordinary made visible themselves are mere phases in the structure of a world transforming itself inside out. (Note that it is a very small number of elements known as rare Earth metals, after all, that provide the bulk material for catalysis, which is the foundation of applied chemistry, and underlies the production of many components that define the furniture of contemporary life, from electronics to plastics). This has elsewhere been attributed to one hideous side of a distinctly hydrocarbon imagination. [6] In this light, video is endowed a considerable lot  as its centrality in global culture increases exponentially, while its visibility as a transformative technosocial force counterintuitively recedes as it gains invisibility in ubiquity.[7] The Precious Stone Industry’s bottom level serialized YouTube accounts provided the raw material for this transformation into visibility — bizarrely satisfying a set of desires which are neither my own, nor my species’, but the Earth’s itself. Video is an instrument of visibility, wherein visibilities are understood according to Orit Halpern’s definition as “sites of production constituting an assemblage of relationships, enunciations, epistemologies, and properties that render agents into objects of intervention for power.” Modestly propagating an attitude that gets articulated in systems architecture as a fail soft, graceful degradation is the same principle in internet video streaming where a bandwidth constraint initiates a degradation in resolution in order to maintain performance during a stream. Visibilities are densities of accumulated multiple strategies, discourses, and bodies in particular assemblages at specific moments, and most importantly, are not even reductively visual.[8] They, in fact can be constituted through a range of tactics from the organization of space—both haptic and aural—to the use of statistics.” In Flusser’s words:

“Discursive speech and writing is no longer appropriate; everything is calculated, and swarms of pointlike bits are indescribable. These can however be calculated and the algorithms encoded into image. Thus is the world, and we within it, becomes indescribable, but it is calculable and because of this is capable of being represented once again. To imagine it, we must mobilize a power of imagination that rests upon calculation. We possess necessary devices.”

           I approach Flusser’s imaginary calculator with deep skepticism, placing into question whether we are ever capable of operating or possessing such necessary devices, and ultimately, the necessity itself of such devices. Surely it would be more than a computer or an instrument. Maybe some practice that engages the subject in the reorganization of sense made visible instead? For Flusser, the subject is a knot of relations, an intersection of various channels of information.[9]

           Barry Sandywell, in his book, Dictionary of Visual Discourse, describes contemporaneity as fully under the heteronomy of a universe of ubiquitous media, where media are no longer understood as channels of meaning, or as intermediating forces between social agents. Instead, “... they transmute into generative social apparatuses, machines that produce the social.” The global iconosphere is one whose image economy and internal velocity of self-organizing flows are of such staggering magnitude that the result is a largely homogenized global monoculture rather than a utopian multitude invigorated by access to democratized media.[10] These metacultures transform human consciousness insofar as they “... prefigure a genuinely global dissociation of sensibility.” In describing what he refers to as the phenomenology of the new political aesthetics, Sandywell describes the character of change that was occasioned by the spread of telecommunication cables, satellites, and corresponding infrastructure as a shift that reconstituted the body itself.

“The body was once a locus of meaning. It is now information which is the site of embodiment ... Audiences are no longer the passive recipients of media messages; rather they are increasingly implicated in the flow of signs and mediated communications. The new technologies create something like a global pleasure-scape.”

QualiaMetrics or What Bodies and Videos have in Common

           Considered as an intermix of surface-level artifacts, QualiaMetrics (2014), takes seriously the notion of video as a laboratory for the eye by parodying an examination performed by a misused medical video magnification algorithm attempting to visualize blood flow. The algorithm is designed to amplify certain signals present in the video data firmly outside the purview of human cognition by rendering visible on the video surface, subtle modulations in color, luminance and speed corresponding to the relevant physiological data-target. In addition, the synthetic jargon of competing pharmaceutical web-bots is treated as the functional script of a speed reading machine used in the auto-surveilling practice of Quantified-Self.

           Problematically, video images are mediated through mental space in addition to the particularity of the material conditions of their production, whether analog or digital, industrial or amateur. Thus a video’s capacity to affect depends on the range of other images it may have absorbed in the wake of its circulation. Still, videos are more than reflective surfaces. They are complex operations, which at particular thresholds of intensity, drive sensation. But so are bodies. Despite a propensity to plug into other instruments and extend its cognition and memory through technical media, the body itself (the self itself) nevertheless remains the primordial tool for perception. Sense, in QualiaMetrics, is visualized as a co-vibration of several rhythms. In the video, an inhuman layer of automatically generated script which is an artifact of activity produced by competing pharmaceutical botnets vying for influence and access to the attention economy of meatspace. The script is fed into speed reading software where it is amplified and organized into a sequence of individual word-images. Speed reading systems like this function on the basis of a completely pseudoscientific assumption that by silencing the voice in the head that reads, one can allow the sequential stream of word-images to play autonomously and effectively watch the text as it unfolds in time like a video.

           Authorship in the work looks more like the artist Jean-Luc Moulène’s concept of the artist as authorizer of protocol, wherein, a protocol contents itself with transforming things[11]. In this sense, protocols are generic names for embodied procedures that also instigate changes in perspective and techniques of manipulation depending on how the relationship between thought and matter evolve. With my body understood as a project and as a vessel of disassociation, I explore various ways a subject deals with incommensurate messages and responds to the increased denaturalization of the present which is best exemplified in the attitude that we can’t know the world but we can visualize it. The video makes literal the effects that follow from the historical compression of perception and cognition currently taking place, as well as the burgeoning alliance of sense and analysis that will certainly follow such a kinky transformation. Therefore it should not be a surprise that a syncretic religious reflex should emerge from the increased monitoring of populations and the increase in environmental pressures conditioning a milieu in which self-surveillance is desirable. As more and more private life is quantified, the surface area of the unquantified necessarily becomes more sacred. In QualiaMetrics, my body, offered fully available as a surface of perpetual automatic inscription, becomes emblematic of a certain kind of experience which has not always been available to self-imaging or inner perception. Insofar as contemporary life and forms of politics are fundamentally glued at the level of technical manipulation of the sensorium (best expressed through drug culture), the psychedelic is a privileged form of perception in digital environments.[12] Through speed reading what amounts to the symbolic equivalence of territorial markers of inhuman agents of global technocapitalism, the Quantified-Selfer completes modernity’s trick of transforming excrement to gold and actually begins to desire perpetual self-measurement and total quantification. Or as Barry Sandywell calls it, the videological quest for total vision. We end up having to record ourselves in order to affirm our own existence because the modern subject is already best understood as distributed probabilistically across a network. What really makes us inhuman is action without cause or meaning.[13] This nexus of understanding, witnessing, and knowing traces back all the way to the Greeks, who conceived of the subject as a self projecting rays of illumination out onto pre-formed, dark objects.[14] Language in this way was unsurprisingly understood as a reflective mirror for an external world. In other words, just another tool available for reflecting and representing the yet unquantified. This is why I shifted directions in Generic Membrane (2015), to looking at the contested practices and process of meaning.

Generic Membrane and Non-Video

           On the formal level one of the ideas in Generic Membrane is to establish a borrowed perceptual dynamic from video that elides distinctions between word, image, verbal, and visual into a generic field of total visibility. Each panel operates as a threshold and in this way function as permeable zones which mediate communicative power similar to the image of the curtain in Christian art.[15] Sites of communication and presence are positioned by objects as mediating membranes. The curtain is both closed and open, and becomes a membrane in which the divine manifests its presence in a simultaneity of directions, both meanings are to be understood at the same time. Seeing as and seeing in collapse. It should be noted that the modernist idea of translation as a confrontation of source and target is just as inadequate to translation of Latin text from AD 300 as it is to the age of electronic communication.[16] My interest in translation opened into an aesthetic technique of registration.[17]  Alexander Galloway writes, “to register means to manifest as whole, with the expectation that it would be, without remainder, the real itself.” (163) By the high point of use of the sunlight through glass metaphor in art, the epigram at the center of my translation project been registered into a mediating membrane that can best be in the words of Jennifer Kingsley as:

“… the threshold between the visible and the invisible, the material and the immaterial— the extent to which a picture plays with multiple layers of ambiguity predicated on identifying objects as both membrane and portal operating between varied poles: between the real and the imagined, the earthy and divine, the closed and the permeable, dead matter and lived presence.” [18]

           The mediating membrane is close enough to the Christian mystic Simone Weil’s concept of metaxy appropriated from Plato to be called significant, in that the metaxu is that which both separates and connects[19]. The famous example is the concrete wall isolating prisoners from each other that becomes a resonant chamber for coded taps. Weil used metaxy as a basis for a method of communication with a radically withdrawn God, whose sheer absence constitutes the very grounds of possibility for contact. Mediating membranes are operators of transformation. And with extreme ductility, they relay the signal from state to state. Weil locates what is important as the instantiation of the conditions necessary for an experience of provisional but authentic truth to emerge; for experience of the real within.

           The notion of experience I am interested in sets aside the content of the image and focuses on the subjective, inward perception of a resonant generic image within the mindfulness of the subject. After all, what makes something generic is simply that there should be nothing specific that can be attributed to it.[20] This short circuiting of the global/local relationship is best represented in the migration in the text from videtur to vidate, where vidation becomes a generic form of visibility that encompasses seeing as visioning-sensing-perceiving-feeling-understanding all at the same time.[21] In choosing not to prematurely concede that language is simply limited and successive, and cannot account for the simultaneity and instantaneity of the mystical core, it appears, as Gilbert Simondon suggests, that no pure technical device is free from symbolic meaning.[22] This means that the most technical of languages would be the most symbolic. Latin, like English belonged to no one, was used by all, could accept multiple interferences, was rich, expansive uncontrolled, and would in turn tend to be imposed on the languages of lesser ideological standing.[23] This counterintuitively positions contemporary English with Latin as prime examples of supremely symbolic technical languages that plunge those subjected to their leveling force into multitemporal, hypertextual realms with even the most aleatory of effort, as is suggested in the last panel of Generic Membrane.[24]

           The text on this panel was generated by the same Markov chain text algorithm that created the botnet script of QualiaMetrics by treating each letter in the translation as an independent function of itself, stochastically generating combinations of letters into words as each letter mutates from state to state in a sequence of memoryless transition.  From vidsonics we know that sound becomes tangible when the visible becomes audible. The text spoken from inside the wall is physically rendered in a kind of vacuscript, or writing of absence.[25] The content of the text, is not there in space, but is instead, sonically poured out over the entire room despite only being rendered visible in absence. Media unfold as converging, but (mostly) diverging streams of multiform perceptual events manifesting conflicting and contradictory attributes in the subject.  Therefore the text as media suggest as much, and since language is an attribute, something we have, it paradoxically precedes meaning. As Henry Munn suggests, “Language is an ecstatic activity of signification.” (92) The apparent obscurity of the post-translation text addresses Flusser’s remarks in Natural:Mind on the problem of how to distinguish between the obscurity of reality itself and the obscurity of obscurantism. [26] For myself, and for Munn, words are materializations of consciousness; language is after all, a privileged vehicle of our relation to reality.[27] The function of the speaker is to implore, and the transition from non-verbal to verbal expressions makes it possible to express an ordered and intelligible form of the real that would otherwise be chaotic and inexpressible — which induces certain physiological processes that end in the reorganization of vision itself as realization or ‘getting real’.

[1] “Video, with its extremely fast read-and-write time and instant replay, assists us in perceiving our immediate environments. In an era when common-sense ‘perception’ is programmed and force-fed into populations by corporations and government agencies, the prosthesis of video is necessary to fill the absence of independent, individual perceptual reasoning.”

 Sherman, Tom. "Video is a Perceptual Prosthetic." Ed. Mireille Bourgeois. (2012): 126-49. Centre for Art Tapes.

[2] Used here  to describe media that are becoming more suited to human use and consumption.

[3] Feyerabend, Paul, 1924-1994. Against Method. New York; London: Verso, 1988.

[4] Raymond, Yasmil,  Jean-Luc Moulène: Opus + One. The Hammer without a Master. 1955, and Dia:Beacon (Art museum). New York: Dia Art Foundation, 2012.

[5] Griffis, Ryan. Anti-Archive, part of Lexicon. Web. http://www.further-field.org/lexicon/anti-archive

[6] Bozak, Nadia. The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2012.

[7] “Today video proliferates at phenomenal speed, affecting perception wherever it is employed to cultural advantage. Video is now ubiquitous and transparent, some would even say it is common and mundane. People focus on the things that video depicts, not on the way it is transforming perception.”

Sherman, Tom. "Video is a Perceptual Prosthetic." Ed. Mireille Bourgeois. (2012): 126-49. Centre for Art Tapes.

[8] Halpern, Orit. Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945. Durham: Duke UP, 2014.

[9] Flusser, Vilém. The City as Wave-Trough in the Image-Flood. Critical Inquiry 31.2 (2005): 320

[10] Sandywell, Barry. Dictionary of Visual Discourse: A Dialectical Lexicon of Terms. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2011.

[11] Reza Negarestani, Torture Concrete – Jean-Luc Moulène and the Protocol of Abstraction,

September 2014, NY: Sequence Press

[12] Halpern, Orit. Psychedelic Vision. BioSocieties 8.2 (2013): 238-42.

[13] Ramey, Joshua. Inhuman Already? Zombies, Vampires, and the Accelerationist Moment. <http://itself.wordpress.com/2013/06/27/inhuman-already-zombies-vampires-and-the-accelerationist-moment/

[14] Sandywell, Barry. Ibid.

[15] Kingsley, Jennifer P. Picturing the Treasury: The Power of Objects and the Art of Memory in the Bernward Gospels. Gesta 50.1 (2011): 19-39.

[16] Pym, Anthony. The Medieval Postmodern in Translation Studies. (2014).

[17]Galloway, Alexander R., Laruelle: Against the Digital. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

[18] Kingsley, Jennifer P.

[19] Hughes, Glenn. Transcendence And History : The Search For Ultimacy From Ancient Societies To Postmodernity. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003.

[20] Alexander R. Galloway, TenTheses on the Digital, lastmodified September 2012, http://vimeo.com/48727142 

[21]Bohm, David. Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Boston; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981.

[22] Protevi, John.  Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

[23] Pym, Anthony. The Medieval Postmodern in Translation Studies. (2014).

[24] Chaudhuri, Sukanta. The Metaphysics of Text. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

[25] Bök, Christian. Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 2002.

[26]Flusser, Vilém. Natural:Mind. Minneapolis, MN: Univocal, 2013.

[27]  Munn, Henry & Harner, Michael J. The Mushrooms of Language, Hallucinogens and Shamanism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.