#action-image

I read Adrian's Programmatic Statements for a Facetted Videography, which bring into light some nice connections between cinema editing, interactive video and affect, which helps to clarify some of the things that I have been thinking about.

The difference between hard and soft video:

The easiest way as Adrian notes is to think about editing, in making a film 'the video work is malleable and fluid in quite extraordinary ways while being edited, but once committed to publication these features are removed-it becomes resolutely and immutably flat.' To quickly elaborate the shot is the only whole in a film and these smallest units can be realistically ordered in a plethora of different ways, which is done in the editing, when shown to an audience this order of shots is fixed and is no longer malleable. 

In contrast softvideo is a 'video architecture and practice that is able to retain this granularity after publication, where videos can be created that consist of shots that no longer have a canonical sequence.' Ie. The viewer is now in the position of the editor with the means in which to create their own relationships between shots and korsakow as a software system is a means to do this.

The difference between the virtual and the actual

Adrian draws on Levy's concept of the virtual and the actual and is reminiscent of Deleuze's affection and action. 

The virtual is a 'set of possible expanding futures.' They present 'possibilities' which have not been actualised yet, and therefore exists virtually, whereas the actual is 'those aspects or trajectories within the virtual that actually come to be-that are actualised.' This in other words is Deleuze's affection and action-image within the sensory-motor-schema where affection is pure possibility, it is the possibility of action before the action has occured, and if this possibility is actualised it is no longer affection and becomes action.

What this means for my practice

Therefore, as Adrian suggests editing is the 'activity of actualising the virtual that each shot expresses.' However, what happens when the shots provide no actualisation of affection? This in some respects is my research proposal, what if only the virtual exists? In this respect can we create an affective interactive video?

The connections are not about the viewer connecting virtual elements to their actualisation but a new form of association, possibly more poetic associations, which remove affection from it's actualisation in the state of things. 

Even though I haven't quite got there yet, although I feel close, it is possible to contend that affection is an appropriate means in which to frame interactive video due to it's multi-linearity. Deleuze's sensory-motor-schema in some respects is redundant because the very nature of the system is not linear- the videos won't move from perception to affection to action within the images. This schema is displaced to that of the now spectator/editor where they perceive are affected and act, but not towards the actualisation of the affect-image they saw towards something else...

As Adrian notes as interactive video practitioners 'our role here moves from being content creator towards the architecture of poetic and possibly autopoetic systems'

References:

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement Image. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1986. Print.

I haven't blogged about Cinema 1 and Deleuze for quite a while and I think it about time that I returned to it and kept returning to it and it has been way too long of a break. In continuing my research I really need to focus on affect and Deleuze, as Adrian noted Deleuze and affect is my theory and that everything around it is fluff, well to some extent. I feel that perhaps I have sidetracked a lot and that I really need to focus on what affect is and how to talk about what affect is and therefore will be in a better position to use affect as a framework for my interactive video work.

Ok so I recently, and more importantly finally, finished Cinema 1, which I will probably have to re-read over the semester break because a lot of it I cannot understand and I also haven't summed up all the chapters in this blog. This post is going to focus on the last chapter, which is The Crisis of the Action-Image, I found that this chapter was a lot more clearer than the previous two on the action-image, which I found extremely difficult. This chapter to my understanding leads into Deleuze's second cinema book as it discusses the end of the movement-image, with particular emphasis on American cinema, Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave. What Deleuze contends is that Hitchcock brought the movement-image as far as it could possibly be stretched, and a new image has been born, where the 'sensory-motor links tend to disappear, a whole sensory-motor continuity which forms the essential nature of the action-image vanishes' (217). In other words the links between perception, affection and action are broken because these linkages are seen to be in some sense false because:

'We hardly believe any longer that a global situation can give rise to an action which is capable of modifying it-no more than we believe that an action can force a situation to disclose itself, even partially.'

(211)

Ie. the cinema image changed in terms of the organisation of montage because the realism in that a perception could lead to an action became somewhat unrealistic in that most perceptions aren't realised within the state-of-things, and more prominantly than that the SAS (situation-action-(changed) situation) becomes redundant because it was unrealistic that action could really change a situation.

In my own cinema studies experience watching Godard really reminded me of this chapter where what characters say and does not become actualised but more-or-less remains in the any-space-whatever.

In the development of my precursor project I feel as though through the fragmentation of the narrative there is a displacement of the actual state-of-things, where the contextualisation you are given at the beginning of The Passion of Joan of Arc has been removed and you are left with the emotive repercussions. The affections only belong to faces and the context in which those affections were made no longer exists. This to me suggests this form of image, which Deleuze discusses in this final chapter because the motor-schema has been displaced by pure affections. 

I guess what problemises this for me is that if the affection-image exists within the motor-schema alongside perception and action the placement of it within a fragmented non-linear narrative removes the affection from the action and perception, and leaves these pure affections somewhat outside the schema and within this other image as Deleuze notes within this chapter. Or in other words the multilinearity has allowed for the affection-image to be more pronounced. When Deleuze discusses The Passion of Joan of Arc, he views it within this light:

'It is the anger of the bishop and the martyrdom of Joan; but, all that will be preserved from the roles and situations will be what is needed for the affect to be extracted and to carry out its conjunctions- this 'power' of anger or of ruse, this 'quality' of victim or martyrdom.'

(110)

Deleuze's action-image is the easiest. I love how he leaves it till last, but it's refreshing to have chapter that goes click, click, click- oh that actually makes sense. I think this is a) because the action-image is the easiest to define and therefore the easiest to explain and b) I'm getting better at reading Deleuze (which I will come back to later). Basically, the action-image is situation-action-situation, basically the action directly changes the outcome or situation b.

What I want to claim is that this is bad for interactive video. Why do I want to claim that it is bad? 

Well, it comes back to form. For me the action-image belongs to the linearity of the cinema. There is a clear thread through the film- the film builds towards leaving nothing left over. The milieu is restored, changed, destroyed directly by the previous action of the hero, and before that the hero was building the strength to achieve that action.

Basically, interactive video should do what the cinema cannot and this is generally most accomplished through this idea of multi-linearity. The aim of my project is to slow down how we use online content and if it is just a replica of the action image- there is no room to dwell, no room for what Adrian describes as this zone of indetermination because everything makes sense- there is nothing left over.

Deleuze gives a way of thinking about the image, and how that image moves within the film. An action-image requires action and that action must make an impact within a real-time space. In a korsakow project the impact of the action is murky, undefined and moves into this idea of affection, which is in itself hard to define, almost because it is undefinable.

Reference: