Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Deleuze Special Issue
Vol. 5 No. 36, November 2001
Joseph Nechvatal
La Beauté tragique
Olkowski, Deleuze, and the 'Ruin of Representation'
Dorothea Olkowski _Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of
Representation_ Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1999 ISBN 0-520-21693-8 298 pp. 'Imagine an eye unruled by man-made
laws of perspective; an eye unprejudiced by compositional
logic . . .'. Stan Brakhage, _Metaphors on
Vision_ 'In another moment Alice was through
the glass and had jumped lightly down into the looking-glass
room.' Lewis Carroll, _Alice in Wonderland_ Dorothea Olkowski's book _Gilles
Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation_ nicely oscillates
between: a certain history of philosophy which has
accumulated around Gilles Deleuze (with emphasis placed on
Henri Bergson's influence); an overview of philo-feminist
interpretations, critiques, and uses of Deleuze and
Deleuze/Guattari (which unfortunately omits Tamsin
Lorraine's fantastic _Irigarary and Deleuze: Experiments in
Visceral Philosophy_); an examination of the art of Mary
Kelly from the 1970s and 1980s; a cursory examination of the
peremptory horizon-based three-dimensional space of our
accustomed trompe l'oeil representations; and an innovative
strategy for the active 'ruining of representation' (an
ideal objective first articulated in feminist practice by
Michele Montrelay back in 1978 [1]). She identifies
the basis of this 'ruin of representation' in the philosophy
of Deleuze, and thereupon in the work of Kelly. In
particular, Olkowski is motivated to pursue this ruining of
representation because she finds representation to be
contributive 'to the subordination of women to men' (1). In
this respect my dealing with the book in public here is less
than satisfactory. Indeed the qualms I have with the book --
which I point out below -- may not be those of women
readers, who I take it are Olkowski's primary audience. But,
in that I am a philosophically inclined contemporary artist
interested in liberational politics, the book immediately
and ferociously attracted me to itself. Indeed I read it
voraciously and carefully, and found it of maximal scholarly
merit. There is no question that it is highly informative
and that its heart is in the right place. The book's pertinence to cinema
studies though, I must say, is rather devastating. It
achieves this devastation negatively, for one might say that
the ruin of representation, as proposed here in the
abstract, equates with the disintegration of cinematic
framed space. Certainly that is all the more true if cinema
continues to adhere to its essential machinic rendering of
rational, framed, linear pointed-perspective; that
perspective which dominated the Italian Quattrocento (yes,
that perspective which called itself 'true'
point-perspective). Sure, there are edits which displace the
point of view common to cinema, but each cut usually
contains a rendering of a scene from one fixed and tapered
eye-point at a time. Moreover, cinema usually depends on
technical perspective 'framing'. Framing is intended to
eliminate what is deemed unessential in the motion picture,
to direct the spectator's attention to what is important and
to give it special meaning and force. Each frame of film,
which corresponds in shape to the image projected on the
screen, forms the basis for a graphic composition in the
same way as the frame of a painting encloses the area in
which the painting must be organized. Although some theatres
in the 1970s were enlarged and widened to accommodate 70mm
images, a trend toward smaller theatres fixed the image
ratio close to 1.85:1 in the United States and 1.66:1 in
Europe. On the contrary, the Geode in Paris, which I visit,
has a 118-foot sphere containing a cinema in which
180-degree films are projected on a hemispheric screen made
up of 3,280 square feet. In that non-representational unframed
filmatic approaches to cinema have now been fairly well
assigned to the art museum archives (and exploited/reduced
by MTV), I believe I can continue with this presumption that
Olkowski's attempt at fostering a ruin of representation
equates a substantial ruining of cinema, after citing a few
rare counter examples. Significant in these terms is Stan
Vanderbeek's 1966 _Movie Drome_: a hemispherical
'movie-mural' created in upstate New York, where the viewer
assumed a supine position to look upon an onslaught of
hemispheric cinematic projections. As Vanderbeek himself
described it, the _Movie Drome_ operated as follows: 'In a
spherical dome, simultaneous images of all sorts would be
projected on the entire dome-screen. The audience lies down
at the outer edge of the dome with their feet towards the
center, thus almost their complete field-of-view is the
dome-screen. Thousands of images would be projected on the
screen . . .'. [2] According to Vanderbeek, details
of this hour-long 'multi-plex' dense image flow (inherently
excessive) were not important. What was important was a
'total scale' felt in rapport with the 'rapid panoply' (what
Vanderbeek called the dome's 'visual-velocity') which
functioned so as to penetrate, exceed and ruin
representation. [3] More recently, this appetite to
penetrate, exceed, and ruin representation while filling the
field-of-view through projection was appeased in inverse
micro-fashion in a one-on-one interactive assisted
film-performance by Bradley Eros called _Movie Head Box_,
which he presented as part of _The Extremist Show_ at ABC No
Rio in New York City in 1983. Eros provided us with a
screen-box which slid over our head -- like a primitive
head-mounted-device (HMD). He then projected a color super-8
film on to the immersant's head-screen's facade (which
insinuated an erotic chronicle of alchemy), thereby
over-flooding our view with simultaneity as the
erotic/alchemical images seeped into the box, overlapped,
and were reflected off its inner sides. A walkman provided
an intimate soundscape accompaniment made up of metallic
abstract sounds. These excessive filmic configurations
conform to what Jonas Mekas has called *absolute cinema*.
Indeed, it seems to me that only an absolute cinema (in
those terms) might survive the devastation I detect for
cinema through the ruin of representation. But to do so,
filmmakers must take up her call for the use of an 'excess
of signifier' in 'perpetual displacement'/'perpetual
disequilibrium' in their practice (224). And I don't see
that happening much today. I believe that I first detected this
devastating course for cinema in the book through Olkowski's
use of the work of Mary Kelly to make her point about how to
achieve a ruin of representation. Specifically, Olkowski
chose Kelly's _Post-Partum Document_ series (1973-79) (an
installation in six consecutive sections [4]), and
her _Interim_ series from 1984-89, to make her point about
how to achieve in art a ruination of representation. But
this choice, for me, failed in that Kelly's important work
(for other reasons -- particularly its strategic
visual/intertextual impact on the discourse of sexual
difference [5]) adheres to the framing and centering
tropes indispensable to the comprehension striven for in
prototypical representation and the average book (the effect
is as if we are viewing her art through the renaissance
intentional window; the onlooker holds an exclusive singular
viewpoint and hence space becomes geometrically isotropic
and rectilinear). Clearly this centering reduction of our
actual wobbly wide peripheral vision into one bounded point
of view can only be achieved by negating our peripheral
visual attention. Only by establishing the fiction of the
viewer's partial absence and lack of extensive simultaneous
glance can enthralment by fixed representational
perspectivism be secured. The perspectivist viewer is thus
mostly excluded from any self-ruining of representation,
held at bay as it were, and invulnerable to the ruin of
representation in the interests of objectiveness through the
methods of centering and voyeurism. Correspondingly, the
representational world, as seen by this immobile and
atemporal gaze, becomes stagnant, reified, fixated, inert,
and, one might even say, deadened. So, the ruin of such
representation entails not framing and centering tropes, but
rather an ambient and simultaneous impulse which returns
framed and centered perspective to its rightful place as
contingent, and only instrumental, convention. In fact, instead of ruining
representation, I see Kelly's art as constructing new ones
(a new nomos -- in her case built on the experiences of
motherhood in confrontation with
social/political/intellectual expectations), in that she
adheres to the practice which Olkowski identifies as
Aristotelian. Practices which in Olkowski's words 'serve to
legitimate or justify certain visual, linguistic, social,
and political practices that developed around the demand for
intelligibility, rigidity, and hegemony' (25). This is really a question of form
rather than content. But as Olkowski points out on the same
page, 'the ruin of representation can be accomplished only
on the level of practice', so the question of form here is
urgent. On the level of form, Kelly's project does no more
than a film like _Baise-moi_
(Coralie Trinh Ti and Virginie Despentes, 2001) in ruining
representation. Indeed it supplants common representations
with new ones which build off the old. That is not a
'ruining' by my measure -- and might even be said to be just
another subordination to the phallocentric order. Kelly's adherence to what Olkowski
calls the 'paradigmatic norm of visual representation' (3)
is at the root of this deficiency, a deficiency nurtured by
the typical pastiche postmodern aesthetic of the era in
which the work was crafted -- the late 1970s and the mid
1980s. Kelly's use of 'borrowed' schemas and 'stock' art
supplies (11) is exactly how, in my view, the ruin of
representation is *not* effected. Kelly may disrupt the
typical reading of psychoanalytic schemas in her work, but
she hardly ruins representation. Rather, she presents her
material neatly within the boundaries of the framing
rectangle -- centered, in fact, like a typical logo -- just
like the framing window device (which is critiqued by
Olkowski here) does with its basis in Euclid's superannuated
ideas of space. Indeed, for most of the world, *reality* --
as sustained by film -- is just this centered perspective of
the logocentric apparatus which is associated with
frontality. As Olkowski entails (16), we in the
west have inherited this logocentric apparatus from the
Renaissance. The invention of photography, and the
astounding rapidity with which it spread, is closely
connected to the fact that perspective, and its specific
corresponding intellectual configuration, had pervaded
visual habit since the Renaissance. However, Renaissance
linear perspective, it must be remembered, is only a
convention which is a cultural attribute comprehensible only
for a quite specific sense of space or perception of the
world, and is definitely not an absolute perceptual
truth. In this respect, Olkowski seems to
agree with Samuel Edgerton's seminal book, _The Renaissance
Discovery of Linear Perspective_, where he explains that
today we are the exhausted descendants of the engendering of
linear perspective (the so-called rules that determine the
relative size of objects on a flat plane), and that 'the
magic of perspective illusion is gone'. [6] This
exhaustion bodes poorly for cinema if one accepts, as I do,
that a rupture (or bifurcation if you prefer) has occurred
between the capture technology of the 20th Century (straight
filmatic photography and video) and the far-more elastic and
participatory technology of the computer. Surely this is
true if cinema adheres to its central function of linear
perspective creator, with its 'celebration of the eye of
distance' (as Robert Romanyshyn calls it [7]) --
which has become elevated into a cognitive methodology. In
my view, this logocentric defect typical of the centralized
image exactly illustrates what is wrong with framed
cinematic representation. As Olkowski rightfully notes,
systems of representations operate 'by establishing a fixed
standard as the norm or model' (2). In this sense Kelly's
work, regardless of its ground-breaking treatment of subject
matter, fails to effect a ruin of representation, as
Olkowski claims it does. But then what creative art form
could? May I suggest to Olkowski and Kelly --
and those interested in pursuing Deleuzian flights of
anti-logocentric thought filmatically -- that they look for
the ruin of representation in certain artistic uses of
virtual reality (VR -- even though the term 'virtual
environment' (VE) is more accurate), specifically with VR's
advantage of presenting visual/audio information through its
fundamentally spherical, all-over, 360-degree panorama. I am
not talking about VR which remakes the rules of
representation (something to which we are accustomed), but
rather that which places the subject inside the perceptual
circuitry of a particularly lavish (i.e.
aesthetically-informationally intense) proprioceptive
feedback-loop. [8] The key value of creative
immersion, in terms of formulating an original theory of
representation in ruins, is in its underscoring of the
fiction behind the assumed 'real' mechanistic perspective
when seen as empirically true and universally valid, instead
of as conventional and as a contingent
compliance. Olkowski does hint at such a creative
immersive approach when she writes how Deleuze/Guattari bid
us to 'open up our thinking and practices to the nomadic
nomos that creates wandering distributions of assemblages,
distributions whose plurality of centers mix perspectives
and points of view . . .' (31), for this describes
meritoriously the experience of navigating a lavish and
aesthetically-informationally intense VE. She too seems to
support this contention with her examination of Antonin
Artaud's theoretical work (187). Perhaps a further and
deeper examination of his proposals found in _Le Theatre et
son double_ (_The Theatre and its Double_) would be
beneficial to a ruin of representation, as Artaud proposes
that art (in his case drama) must become a means of
influencing the human organism and directly altering
consciousness by engaging the audience in a ritualistic-like
activity involving excess. Georges Bataille confirms this
assertion of excess as ruin in his essay 'Baudelaire',
particularly by linking Baudelaire's imagination with
notions of the impossible. [9] As immersive
360-degree-ity places us in the position of indeterminate
unknowing (indeed in the position of the impossibility of
knowing what we are to see/think in one intuitive moment)
conceptions of 'objective' or 'subjective' representational
consciousness cease from being definitive and become
omnijectively inter-relational questions; questions which
disable previous emphasis on the false objectivisms of
representation accorded to cultural production. In this
condition of arduous inter-relational questioning, what is
clarified in terms of the ruin of representation is the
human idiosyncratic ability to imaginatively convert absence
into presence. Even though in his essay 'The Theatre
of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation' Jacques
Derrida describes how Artaud's theory may be seen as
impossible in terms of the established structure of Western
thought, [10] this is precisely why immersive art
theory (with its vital connections to the representational
impossible) can be placed in parallel position to Artaud's
hypothesis. This is so in that, when inside aesthetic
immersive art, one may experience a prelude to the work's
fullness (its impossible vastness diverts the immediacy of
the art), thus stimulating a desire which bio-chemically
affects the state of the body and mind. With aesthetic
immersive desire the amount of endorphins unconsciously
released into our bio-system increases. This bio-chemical
desire involves an Artaudian prying-loose from former
representational familiarities and hence is a state where
representation is always attacked and opposed by
simultaneous excess. A keen example of this Artaudian
prying-loose notion as art is to be found in the
aforementioned Stan Vanderbeek's 1966 proposal for
telematicly connected virtual worlds. In his essay 'Culture:
Intercom and Expanded Cinema: A Proposal and Manifesto'
Vanderbeek called for the transformation of his _Movie
Dromes_ into perception banks which by 'computer inter-play'
would function as global 'communication and storage
centers'. According to Vanderbeek, 'by satellite, each dome
could receive its images from a world wide library source;
store them and program feedback presentations to the local
community . . .'. [11] Vanderbeek also went so far
as to predict that such a linking of visual 'feedback' could
'authentically review the total world image 'reality'' and
hence produce 'a sense of the entire world picture'. This
process of linking visual dome-worlds Vanderbeek labelled
'intra-communitronics'. [12] As Robert Romanyshyn has made clear,
linear perspective vision has now achieved 'a kind of
geometrisation of the space of the world, and within that
space we become observers of a world which has become an
object of observation'. [13] This 'objective'
rendering, with its emphasis on the horizon-line and
vanishing point, formed the pictorial ideals for painting
and photography of course, but the opposite is true when VR
is used to its fullest advantage as presenter of spherical,
all-over, 360-degree perspectives. Of course the vast
majority of media images (and most visual art) produced
today still cleaves to the horizon-line based Quattrocento
framing operation, as opposed to the immersive field-of-view
span where horizon and frame dissolution is
desirable. For me this alternative spherical,
all-over, 360-degree perspective was aptly demonstrated in
1996 on experiencing on a single-processor Silicon Graphics
(SGI) VGX R4000 Reality Engine a bewildering switch into
what in VR is called the 'allocentric mirror world': the
Icarian bird's-eye view of a virtual world. Here the artist
may emphasize an aesthetic immersion based on excess and
hence approach better Olkowski's desired 'nomadic nomos'
(26). In the allocentric mirror world a 360-degree
cognitive-vision enlivens receptive and organizing
attributes of peripheral awareness and, as such, intensifies
thalamic input to the cortex by making the active thalamic
neurons in that region fire more rapidly than usual. In this
connective condition, notions of a singular, discrete,
logocentric consciousness are incoherent. What such an emphasis on aesthetic
immersion does is to replace the severed eye back into the
ritual position by dragging it down into the felt 360-degree
omni-perspective of the enthusiastic and participatory. It
is through just such visual procedures (whether corporeal or
conceptual) that immersive cognition exceeds pat
representation and approaches a ruin of representation.
Immersive spherical thinking, as stimulated by the immersive
spherical perspective, opens up a territory of signification
and possibility for the creation of hybrid and
deterritorialised non-representational meanings.
Non-representational meaning in art and in life then
advances by seeing more clearly the underlying assumptions
of excess inherent in the immersive outlook, by facing up to
the radical implications of those assumptions, and by
purging itself from conventional ways of
thinking. This non-representational
consciousness suggests a sense of immense inner incomplete
excess, commensurable with the outer range of partially
perceived aorist excess, as in this state of immersive but
non-representational consciousness one is never presented
with concluded consequences, as there always remains some
further qualification to be made and some new perspective
from which an idea or percept may be observed. In this sense
total-immersion helps constitute a post-Hegelian
consciousness, as Hegel maintained that no idea has a fixed
meaning and that no form of understanding has an unchanging
validity. Indeed this post-Hegelian consciousness of excess
is how total-immersion challenges distinctive ontological
beliefs about the limits of the self and the validity of
representation. In total-immersion, self-re-programmable
thought takes over the space displayed around the
represented self (avatar) as the meta-programming ego
expands to fill by transference the vastness of immersive
aorist excess. So conceived, the ontological self ceases to
think of itself as a substance or thing or representation
and, by contrast, thinks of itself as a continuously
changing process of events in search of evermore
non-representation. That is to say it conceives of itself as
a process of becoming in all directions. From the allocentric mirror world I
experienced, one can see all of the world (including
oneself) while experiencing a fluidness of movement
concerning yaw, pitch, roll, pan, zoom, and swivel. This
allocentric occurrence was one first of disorientation and
then of reorientation into a supra-perspectivisation,
connected to joyful feelings of floating within an expanded
hyper-space of colossal dimensions. Experiencing the
hyper-space's vertiginous heights and deep abysses and vast
widths through the penetration of apparent solid confines
entailed an experiential feeling of beatific disembodiment
and placelessness. The artists group Knowbotic Research
KR+cF uses the term 'non-locations' for such spatial
experiences; terminology inspired by the concept of
deterritorialisation in the theories of Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari. Knowbotic Research KR+cF distinguish
non-locations as 'aggregates of multi-layered occurrences in
physical and electronic space' which are 'non-homogeneous,
fragmented, incomplete' while being at the same time
'continuous, hermetic and flowing'. [14] Moreover, with this immersive
non-representational vision there is a shift to a more
conscious peripheral mode of perception which entails a
deautomatisation of the perceptual process (whereby more
emphasis is placed on what is on the edges of sight and
consciousness), thus presumably adjusting the immersant up
to an expanded and fuller non-representational
consciousness. This emphasis on the peripheral utilizes the
Deleuzian broad scan: Deleuze's non-linear dynamic
conceptual displacement of a view along any axis or
direction in favor of a sweeping processes in space/time.
[15] Hence immersive non-representational vision may
acquire an increasingly computational-like encompassing
range, useful in expanding the customary (160-degree
vertical by 180-degree horizontal) field-of-view outward so
as to increase situational awareness and a ruin of
representation through excess. Will film, with its inherent framing
and linear motion, take up such a challenge and utilize
de-framed, multi-layered, non-horizontal based occurrences
the way sophisticated painting does occasionally?
Superimpositional layering has been tried of course in the
60s/70s (as I noted above, plus one thinks here of the
expanded theatre ideal of Milton Cohn's late-60's _Space
Theatre_; the essence of which was a rotating assembly of
mirrors and prisms mounted on a flywheel, around which were
arranged a battery of light, film, and slide projectors --
essentially it was an expanded version of Laszlo
Moholy-Nagy's famous _Space-Light Modulator_ into which one
may enter), but is the film world today ready to make
substantial use of multi-layering with its inherent loss of
coherence and representational ruin? I really don't think
so. No, that would be too big a shift for cinematic
convention to bare, and thus be its ruin. With framed film
we are stuck with a detached transcendental subject
constructed by ignoring the holo-optic characteristics of
immersive space and by repressing peripheral attention to
the encircling atmosphere. However, artistic VEs are
capable, due to their all-over field approach, of
articulating just such a sublime expanse (the sublime is
identified by Olkowski as being important to the ruin of
representation as instigated by Arthur Rimbaud's poetic
formula based on the 'derangement' of all the senses (180))
because they may have no solitary representational
subject-matter and no central representational focus. In
aesthetic gesamtkunstwerk immersion we are essentially
challenged to find new expanded boundaries of
self-representation within a shifting
non-representationality. Surely the exceeded, expanded, and
thus ruined representations which I have been suggesting
here extol Artaud's theory of cruelty, as hinted at by
Olkowski, as they challenge us to find new expanded
boundaries of self-representation. Through temporary loss of
self-consciousness -- due to the immoderate excess of
perceptual possibilities in an aesthetic immersion (which
involves a more active and continuously searching situation)
-- one enters and thus understands through experience
Deleuze's virtual state (nicely summarized here by Olkowski
(232-233)); a state which circumvents the current
representational view of the self in the world which has
been built into the structures underpinning visual
representation. Undoubtedly, we need ruined representations
to live fully now, and just such sublimely ruined
representational shifts are far easier to contribute to the
public in the form of artistic VEs than in film houses, as
artistic VEs may display in 360-degree artistic data of a
non or (if you like) ruined representational nature; replete
with a newness based on a long preparatory gestational
development. [16] Effectively, such an artistic and
perceptual shift in our self-representational ontology (a
shift which involves fundamental changes in aesthetic
perception) can also be expected to engender extraordinarily
deep artistic -- and departmental -- conflicts. This will
entail a review of past and present approaches towards both
non-representational and representational aesthetics which
_Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation_ certainly
advances, for our imagined representations of a possible
cultivated future depends on the kinds of astute and
discriminating questions we seek to construct in our
aesthetic philosophy and artistic practices right
now. Paris, France Footnotes 1. Michele Montrelay, 'Inquiry into
Femininity', _m/f_, no. 1, 1978, pp. 83-101. 2. Stan Vanderbeek, 'Culture: Intercom
and Expanded Cinema: A Proposal and Manifesto', _Film
Culture_, no. 40, Spring 1966, p. 16. 3. Ibid., p. 17. 4. _Post-Partum Document_ -- The
Complete Work (1973-79). Documentation I -- Analyzed fecal
strains and feeding charts: 28 February 1974. Documentation
II -- Analyzed utterances and related speech events: T2 6
February 1975. Documentation III -- Analyzed markings and
diary-perspective schema: 10S2 28. MOs. Documentation IV --
Transitional objects, diary, diagram: T5 20 May 1976. Age
2.6. Documentation V -- Classified specimens, proportional
diagrams, statistical tables, research and index: L4, Fig.
4a, Fig. 4b. Documentation VI -- Pre-writing alphabet,
exerque and diary: 4.515 B. 5. _Post-Partum Document_ is a seminal
work of the seventies in which the mother-child motif is
addressed in a completely new way and from a female
perspective. The work consists of 139 individual parts and
has been exhibited in edited versions on numerous occasions.
In _Post-Partum Document_ Kelly uses the conceptualist
procedure of documentation to introduce an interrogation of
the subject. In the 'Introduction' and the six following
sections the relationship of the working mother with her
male child are dealt with. The artist observes the emergence
of gender difference and broaches the controversial topic of
female fetishism. Psychoanalysis, in particular its
linguistic reformulation by Jacques Lacan, represents an
important reference for this work. The discussion of these
insights in consciousness raising groups, as well as the
collective activism of the women's movement in London in the
seventies, form the practical backdrop. 6. Samuel Edgerton, _The Renaissance
Discovery of Linear Perspective_ (New York: Harper and Row,
1976), p. 4. 7. Robert Romanyshyn, _Technology as
Symptom and Dream_ (London: Routledge, 1998), p.
33. 8. In almost all of Knowbotic Research
KR+cF projects (see: http://io.khm.de)
we encounter highly abstract aesthetically-informationally
intense VR space, for example in their work _Simulation
Mosaik Data Klaenge_ from 1993. Knowbotic Research KR+cF
(principally Yvonne Wilhelm, Christian Habler, and Alexander
Tuchacek) have experimented with so called 'intelligent
agents', applications which can conglomerate diaphanous
information by themselves (also called knowbots), and
intelligent virtual spaces (flexible
information-environments distributed in electronic
networks). Also relevant are the VE works _Osmose_ and
_Ephemere_, from 1995 and 1998 respectively, by Char Davies
(see: http://www.immersence.com/osmose.htm),
which are exemplary of aesthetically-informational
intensity, as they are highly immersive pieces which utilize
a HMD (head-mounted-device) with modified optics to produce
a 105-degree field-of-view (with 40-degrees of stereo
overlap). Her VEs present to the immersant an evocation of a
quasi-naturalistic realm. Scene complexity is managed
through the use of segregated worlds with transition portals
which bring the immersant to particular 'zones' within the
greater VE. For me, the deepest and most aesthetically
satisfying substratum is 'Code World', found deep in
_Osmose_, where the 20,000 lines of 'C' code of which
_Osmose_ is constructed rise up in immense colonnades. 'Code
World' is also exemplary in that it attempts to explore the
inter-relation between exterior nature, inner code and
interior self. The work utilizes stereoscopic 3D computer
graphics and spatialized sound activated with real-time
interaction. The participant wears a stereoscopic HMD and a
motion-capture vest with a breathing and balance sensor to
enter into the environment. 9. Georges Bataille, _Oeuvres
Completes: Lascaux: La Naissance de l'Art_ (Paris:
Gallimard, 1978), pp. 200-202. 10. Jacques Derrida, 'The Theater of
Cruelty and the Closure of Representation', in _Writing and
Difference_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978),
pp. 232-250. 11. Stan Vanderbeek, 'Culture:
Intercom and Expanded Cinema: A Proposal and Manifesto',
_Film Culture_, no. 40, Spring, 1966, p. 17. 12. Ibid. 13. Robert Romanyshyn, _Technology as
Symptom and Dream_ (London: Routledge, 1998), p.
33. 14. Knowbotic Research KR+cF,
_Interfacing Realities_, ed. C. Hoekendijk (Amsterdam: V2
Organisatie, 1977), p. 3. 15. For more on this see Ronald Bogue,
'Word, Image and Sound: The Non-Representational Semiotics
of Gilles Deleuze', in Ronald Bogue, ed., _Mimesis, Semiosis
and Power_ (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1991), pp.
83-84. 16. For more on this gestation see the
Introduction to my Ph.D. dissertation 'Immersive
Ideals/Critical Distances: A Study of the Affinity Between
Artistic Ideologies Based in Virtual Reality and Previous
Immersive Idioms'. My research into Virtual Reality
technology -- and its central property of immersion -- has
indicated to me that immersion in Virtual Reality electronic
systems is a significant key to the understanding of
contemporary culture, as well as considerable aspects of
previous cultures, as detected in the histories of
philosophy and the visual arts. The Introduction to the
thesis, entitled 'Frame and Excess', can be read on-line at:
<http://www.eyewithwings.net/nechvatal/ideals.htm>. Copyright © _Film-Philosophy_
2001 Joseph
Nechvatal, 'La Beaute
tragique: Olkowski, Deleuze, and the 'Ruin of
Representation'', _Film-Philosophy_, Deleuze Special Issue,
vol. 5 no. 36, November 2001
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol5-2001/n36nechvatal>.
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