WEEK 13: SUPERVISOR SESSION
Preparation
SERIES: More pictures and possible selection for final presentation.
Theory Stuff
Rainer Maria Rilke (1902)
Im Jardin des Plantes, Paris
Sein Blick ist vom Vorübergehn der Stäbe
so müd geworden, daß er nichts mehr hält.
Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Stäbe gäbe
und hinter tausend Stäbe keine Welt.
Der weiche Gang geschmeidig starker Schritte,
der sich im allerkleinsten Kreise dreht,
ist wie ein Tanz von Kraft um eine Mitte,
in der betäubt ein großer Wille steht.
Nur manchmal schiebt der Vorhang der Pupille
sich lautlos auf –. Dann geht ein Bild hinein,
geht durch der Glieder angespannte Stille –
und hört im Herzen auf zu sein.
//
In Jardin des Plantes, Paris
His gaze against the sweeping of the bars
has grown so weary, it can hold no more.
To him, there seems to be a thousand bars
and black behind those thousand bars no world.
The soft the supple step and sturdy pace,
that in the smallest of all circles turns,
moves like a dance of strength around a core
in which a mighty will is standing stunned.
Only at times the pupil's curtain slides
up soundlessly –. And Image enters then,
goes through the tensioned stillness of the limps –
and in the heart ceases to be.”
(English translation by Stanley Appelbaum)
Rainer Maria Rilke
Das Ereignis ist unserem Denken und unseren Ansichten so weit voraus, dass wir es niemals einholen und seine wahre Erscheinung erkennen. // The event is so far ahead of our thinking and our views that we cannot catch up with it and recognize its true appearance.
Farr, I., 2012. Memory. London: Whitechapel Gallery.
»Today, our memories almost never originate from our own decoding but are almost exclusively machine-recorded events. How will that affect our structuring of both the world and our individual psyche? How will we be remodelled by our multiplying worlds and relinquished memories? Is this what theoreticians of technological culture are talking about? When we examine the entanglement of biology and culture, are we witnessing the offloading of our phenomenology onto technology?
What are we becoming as we empty more of our memories into culture and technology? How will we perceive the world when even our most intimate memories become device-dependent?
Clearly, we already share a great number of memories that are recorded, interpreted and archived by machines alone. Memory banks are already easily accessible. Memory withdrawal from those banks is something we already often do to structure our understanding not only of world history, but more ominously, of our own personal history. […] They now belong to a collective human memory, available to all in a sort of supermarket of memories, where (as Sontag said) it is the recording of the event that becomes the memory, where memory (in the computer sense) becomes memories. We have fewer and fewer individual memories, and most of the ones we now have are shared with an every-increasing number of men and women. But memories are the colours and material of our human universe.« (Dynes 2001 in Farr 2012:77)
»The memories that we now have are ahuman, created and manipulated events, preserved outside ourselves. Our current memories, those that give us form and identity, are fabricated productions; their recording, storage, recall and modification are all operations performed by machines. We live in a world of mostly inhuman memories. If were is a memory of the world today, it is a memory of machines. Without them, I do not exist, for without them, I, personally, have no memories. Our existence, in its most intimately human structure, now belongs to machines. Machines create my past. Machines create my melancholy. Relationships among human being are now inseparable from machines and technology, and contemporary works of art reflect that.« (Dynes 2001 in Farr 2012:78)
»This multiplication and 'personalization' of representations is particularly interesting in light of the entanglement of technologies and human beings. Technologies transform phenomenology. This, I believe, is undeniable. Technologies give access to different, multiple and unknown levels of reality, and by it mere presence, this access alters the encoding of our world.« (Dynes 2001 in Farr 2012:76)
»Reflecting on the isolated worlds of those whose memories have been impaired or altered through illness, Ollivier Dynes speculates on the transformations of subjectivity and community that take place as more and more of our memories are transferred to machines of reproduction and archivization.« (Farr 2012: 21)
»I never saw this strange dwelling again. Indeed, as I see it now, the way it appeared to my child’s eye, it is not a building, but is quite dissolved and distributed inside me: here one room, there another, and here a bit of corridor which, however, does not connect to the two rooms, but is conserved in me in fragmentary form. Thus the whole thing is scattered about inside me, the rooms, the stairs that descended with such ceremonious slowness, others, narrow cages that mounted in a spiral movement, in the darkness of which we advanced like the blood in our veins.« (Rilke 1910 in Farr 2012: 59–60)
»[…] imagination, memory and perception exchange functions. The image is created through cooperation between real and unreal, with the help of the functions of the real and the unreal. To use the implements of dialectical logic for studying, not their alternative, but this fusion, of opposites, would be quite useless, for they would produce the anatomy of a living thing. But if a house is a living value, it must integrate an element of unreality. All values must remain vulnerable, and those that do not are dead. […]« (Bachelard 1969 in Farr 2012: 61)
Artist, that “explores the relationship between object, memory and identity”:
· Anna Fafaliou
· Statement with above description
· “The London-based artist now uses sculpture to explore how the body negotiates the exterior world in relation to the interior space of mind […]. Questioning both visual and physical ways of experiencing materiality, her newest exhibition, Traces of Memory at De-Re Gallery, Los Angeles, challenges how we perceive and document our immediate environment.”
Front Row Late – Lockdown Culture with Mary Beard: Episode 7 (BBC)
· Alfred Hitchcock “The Wrong Man” (1956)
· Robert Siodmak ” The Killers” (1946)
· Martin Scorsese “What I look forward to in the future is carrying with me what I have been forced to learn in these circumstances: it is the essential. The people you love, being able to take care of them, be with them as much as you can. I remember the last time I saw Kiarostami alive, we were at a dinner in Lyon, a few year ago and he looked at me and said »Don’t do anything you don’t want to do.« He knew. He understood. One can’t depend on time. One doesn’t know. So, ultimately, that time must have been worth it. Even if it’s just existing. Even if it’s just being alive. Breathing. If you can. Under these circumstances.”
Sophie Calle
“That’s one of the challenges of her work, the discomfort we feel as she crosses the line.”
“Ich habe diese Menschen ja nicht wirklich kennengelernt. Was mich gereizt hat, war, dass ich, auch wenn sie nur für ein paar Stunden in meinem Bett geschlafen haben, intimste Dinge beobachten konnte, vielleicht intimere als ihre Partner, weil die Aufmerksamkeit im Laufe der Jahre abnimmt. Wenn man jemanden auf der Straße sieht, kann man ahnen, ob die Person arm oder reich ist, ob sie politisch eher links oder rechts steht. Ich aber habe beobachtet, ob sie seitlich oder auf dem Bauch schläft, mit offenem oder geschlossenem Mund, nackt oder im Pyjama. Der Reiz bestand darin, dass ich nichts von diesen Menschen wusste, wir uns aber für die Dauer einer Nacht extrem nahe waren.” // “I didn’t really get to know these people. What appealed to me was that even if they only slept in my bed for a few hours, I was able to observe the most intimate things, perhaps more intimate than their partners, because attention has waned over the years. When you see someone on the street, you can guess whether the person is poor or rich, whether they are politically left or right. But I have observed whether she sleeps on the side or on her stomach, with her mouth open or closed, naked or in pajamas. The attraction was that I didn’t know anything about these people, but we were extremely close for one night.”
Ervin Goffman: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959)
“Let us now turn from the others to the point of view of the individual who presents himself before them. He may wish them to think highly of him, or to think that he thinks highly of them, or to perceive how in fact he feels toward them, or to obtain no clear-cut impression; be may wish to ensure sufficient harmony so that the interaction can be sustained, or to defraud, get rid of, confuse, mislead, antagonize, or insult them. Regardless of the particular objective which the individual has in mind and of his motive for having this objective, it will be in his interests to control the conduct of the others, especially their responsive treatment of him. This control is achieved largely by influencing the definition of the situation which the others come to formulate, and he can influence this definition by expressing himself in such a way as to give them the kind of impression that will lead them to act voluntarily in accordance with his own plan. Thus, when an individual appears in the presence of others, there will usually be some reason for him to mobilize his activity so that it will convey an impression to others which it is in his interests to convey.” (pages 3–4)
“There is one aspect of the others’ response that bears special comment here. Knowing that the individual is likely to present himself in a light that is favorable to him, the others may divide what they witness into two parts; a part that is relatively easy for the ‘individual to manipulate at will, being chiefly his verbal assertions, and a part in regard to which he seems to have little concern or control, being chiefly derived from the expressions he gives off. The others may then use what are considered to be the ungovernable aspects of his expressive behavior as a check upon the validity of what is conveyed by the governable aspects. In this a fundamental asymmetry is demonstrated in the communication process, the individual presumably being aware of only one stream of his communication, the witnesses of this stream and one other.” (page 7)
“Society is organized on the principle that any individual who possesses certain social characteristics has a moral right to expect that others will value and treat him in an appropriate way. Connected with this principle is a second, namely that an individual who implicitly or explicitly signifies that he has certain social characteristics ought in fact to be what he claims he is. In consequence, when an individual projects a definition of the situation and thereby makes an implicit or explicit claim to be a person of a particular kind, he automatically exerts a moral demand upon the others, obliging them to value and treat him in the manner that persons of his kind have a right to expect. He also implicitly forgoes all claims to be things he does not appear to be, and hence forgoes the treatment that would be appropriate for such individuals. The others find, then, that the individual has informed them as to what is and as to what they ought to see as the “is.”” (page 13)
Ward, W. Peter. A History of Domestic Space Privacy and the Canadian Home. Vancouver: UBC, 1999. Web.
“privacy is a slippery term and it must be used with some care. Today we talk about privacy in many ways. The law protects our privacy by forbidding others to give out information about us without our consent – private information. It respects our owner-ship of property – private property. We speak of having personal secrets and conceal our nakedness from strangers – personal privacy. A business owned by an individual or a small group rather than by those who hold publicly traded shares is a private company. Adolescents keep information from their parents in the name of privacy, and families guard their secrets on the same basis. Privacy may be personal, group, or corporate, and refer to thoughts, places, experiences, or objects.Notions of privacy have always been contingent, 'constructed,'to use the cultural studies jargon of our universities today. Ideas about the nature of privacy have varied greatly from time to time, place to place, culture to culture. One clue to the relativity of the concept is that the English noun 'privacy,' with all its rich associations, has no equivalent in other major European languages. The French intimité is perhaps best translated as it appears – intimacy- while privé indicates the individual or personal. No doubt both are elements of privacy but they express only some of the many ideas linked with the English term. The German Zurückgezogenheit and Privatleben, literally 'secluded time' and 'private life,' also have related but limited meanings. Italians have solved the problem by importing the word from English but, in this instance too, shorn of most of its nuances. The concept of privacy involves boundaries if not barriers, lines separating the personal from the public, mine from yours, ours from theirs. Within these boundaries lies the zone of private matters, beyond them the world of general concern. These boundaries may be tangible – walls and fences for example. They may also be customary but nonetheless real, the comfy chair always kept for grandma. Still others may simply be implicit in human relation-ships, as in the respect we pay by not intruding into the grief of others. Whatever the situation, private matters are invariably thought to be separate from those of broader interest. We speak of them defensively, as being private from other things.Most Canadians also think of privacy as a virtue, something tobe valued, defended, perhaps even enlarged. In this sense the concept is permissive or enabling: privacy to -to read a book, to bathe, to share the company of family members, to enjoy the ownership of a piece of property. We largely ignore the proximity of the concept of privacy to that of isolation, a form of privacy that we think of in negative terms. The line dividing the two is not always clear and, indeed, may simply express a value judgment about the case at hand. Is isolation merely privacy gone bad?“
Harold Pinter: The Room (1957)
“Rose’s anxiety in The Room arises from many things that happen around her, without her knowledge and control. She doesn’t even know where her room is in the house. Somebody lets her room to somebody else. She remains helpless. Everything is manipulated according to the design of an unknown force or authority. That is the state of political affairs during the Second World War in Europe. Rose shelters herself from something that she fears outside.” (Pravindh, R., and P. Dinakaran. “Exordium of Anxiety in Harold Pinter’s The Room.” Language in India 18.10 (2018): 166. Web.)
Sabbadini, Andrea, Kogan, Ilany, and Golinelli, Paola. Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Virtual Intimacy and Communication in Film. London ; New York, New York: Routledge, 2019. The International Psychoanalytical Association Psychoanalytic Ideas and Applications Ser. Web.
“Black Mirror, produced by Charlie Brooker, is a British miniseries which deals with the impact of contemporary life, especially the intensive use of the internet or virtual reality, on the future of humanity. The first episode of Season 2, “Be Right Back”, is the story of Martha (Hayley Atwell), recently widowed, whose young husband Ash (Domhnall Gleeson) has died […]. In Despair, she decides to use a special new service […]: a company scans the “virtual personality” and produces a computer program that constitutes an exact simulacrum of him. […] The doll looks like Ash (though, Martha admits, younger and more handsome, but this is because the photographs on whose basis the virtual effigy was made were “flattering” ones of the kind that people tend to put on Facebook, and on which they look better and younger); […] What stands out especially is the virtual Ash’s perfect coherence – something the real man was lacking. This coherence of the virtual figure, where private and public are seamless, gives Martha a sense of artificiality, fake and emptiness, and makes her long even more for the incoherence that was so typical fo Ash’s human character, including the somehow endearing discrepancies between his public and private statements. […]
One might think of this story as a science-fiction fantasy. It would be more accurate however to say that it takes existing reality to an extreme: it occurs in a world in which human relations and communication are increasingly replaced by virtual relations, managed by digital mean that make the simple human touch increasingly redundant.”
Jia Tolentino: Trick Mirror (2019)
“Online reward mechanisms beg to substitute for offline ones, and then overtake them. This is why everyone tries to look so hot and well-traveled on Instagram; this is why everyone seems so smug and triumphant on Facebook; this is why, on Twitter, making a righteous political statement has come to seem, for many people, like a political good in itself.” (Leininger, Alex. Jia Tolentino’s “Trick Mirror” is a Studied Index of Contemporary Ills.” PopMatters (2019): PopMatter.Web)
Conversation pieces
I prefer the left one, as the dog fits better into the series of phlegmatic laziness but Shane prefers the dog looking at the camera. As we don’t agree, Shane suggests to get a third opinion. To make it short, Alison agrees with Shane.
Rainer Maria Rilke (1902)
Im Jardin des Plantes, Paris
Sein Blick ist vom Vorübergehn der Stäbe
so müd geworden, daß er nichts mehr hält.
Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Stäbe gäbe
und hinter tausend Stäbe keine Welt.
Der weiche Gang geschmeidig starker Schritte,
der sich im allerkleinsten Kreise dreht,
ist wie ein Tanz von Kraft um eine Mitte,
in der betäubt ein großer Wille steht.
Nur manchmal schiebt der Vorhang der Pupille
sich lautlos auf –. Dann geht ein Bild hinein,
geht durch der Glieder angespannte Stille –
und hört im Herzen auf zu sein.
//
In Jardin des Plantes, Paris
His gaze against the sweeping of the bars
has grown so weary, it can hold no more.
To him, there seems to be a thousand bars
and black behind those thousand bars no world.
The soft the supple step and sturdy pace,
that in the smallest of all circles turns,
moves like a dance of strength around a core
in which a mighty will is standing stunned.
Only at times the pupil's curtain slides
up soundlessly –. And Image enters then,
goes through the tensioned stillness of the limps –
and in the heart ceases to be.”
(English translation by Stanley Appelbaum)
This poem by Rainer Maria Rilke is extremely famous in Germany. I probably heard it for the first time in 5th or 6th grade. It's easy to understand and also speaks very visually about captivity and the effect of imprisonment.
Unfortunately, the English translation does not transfer the rhythm and feeling quite as well.
Therefore Shane suggests me to use the German version. But that would be too bad, as no one will understand what it's about. So the question comes up if it might work to merge German and English?