Draft notes for keynote to The Image conference, UCLA and Common Ground, 2 December 2010. Final version will be submitted to http://ontheimage.com/journal/
A run through of the basic principles of quantum mechanics, first principles in Philosophy, deriving mathematical Platonism and informational monism, and recognizing that quantum gravity necessitates informational monism while accommodating mathematical Platonism.
Draft notes for keynote to The Image conference, UCLA and Common Ground, 2 December 2010. Final version will be submitted to http://ontheimage.com/journal/
A run through of the basic principles of quantum mechanics, first principles in Philosophy, deriving mathematical Platonism and informational monism, and recognizing that quantum gravity necessitates informational monism while accommodating mathematical Platonism.
Kníže Marek Basarab jako kandidát na udělení českého inkolátu v roce 1607. Muzejní a vlastivědná práce – Časopis Společnosti přátel starožitností českých 3-4/XLIV (CXIV), 2006, s. 208-212, ISSN 0027-5255
Course 1: Create and Prepare Debian8 VM TemplateImad Daou
The following Course will focus mainly on a private Virtual Environment such VirtualBox or VMware Station. However, if you are willing to setup straight on DigitalOcean or Vultr, then you can skip Course1 and jump to Course2. But, I highly recommend to go through Course1 to build In-house local Web Hosting Server for testing or developing purpose. After all, the concept is same on either Private or Public Virtual environment.
Lecture transcript The gaze in historical context All right, s.docxcroysierkathey
Lecture transcript :The gaze in historical context:
All right, so we're continuing our discussion of film noir, but we're really thinking about it in relation to Laura Mulvey's discussion of the gaze. So I've assigned this piece, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," because it is probably the most influential work in critical cinema studies that's been published in an academic context. If you look up "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," you'll see that it was cited tens of thousands of times since it was first published in the journal Screen in 1975. So it's an older piece, but it's very representative of the ways that ideas in film theory that have a certain theoretical construct around them can sort of make their way into popular discourse. So we're going to think about whether we agree with her take on the gaze and whether it still applies to the ways that film form works today. And we'll also look at some examples of feminist filmmakers from the period that she was writing in who tried to really combat these ideas around the gaze and experiment with what feminist film form could really look like. So when the article had its 30th and 40th anniversaries, there were retrospectives which you can find online if you're interested. There were a lot of articles published in places like The Chronicle of Higher Education, as well as the Screen journal that it was originally published in, as well as in popular media commemorating the impact of "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." And even now the idea of the gaze has been a part of popular culture and discussions of film. So you can see here, it's been talked about in relation to Magic Mike, in relation to tropes of television. And if you look up male gaze in YouTube, you'll actually see hundreds and hundreds of compilations of clips that are organized around the male gaze, the idea of the male gaze in film. So it's had some staying power. As I mentioned, the article came out in a journal called Screen, which was a really influential journal in the 1970s when film studies as a discipline was really making its way into the Academy, and thinking about ways to unify analysis of film form with some of the more philosophical theoretical ideas that were coming out of critical theory, in particular in Europe. And so Mulvey published her piece in a journal called Screen. And she was very influenced by psychoanalytic theory, which was de rigueur at the time. So if you're a psychoanalytic theorist, you'll have to sort of stay with me, because I think these ideas are a little bit controversial now. And certainly a lot of people have published responses to this article that take issue with many aspects of it, but I still think it's useful, so we'll just move through it. So if you're a psychoanalytic theorist, you take as your starting point that the world is underlined with these deep psychological structures that were studied first by Freud and then revised by Lacan. These structures surface in liter ...
Kníže Marek Basarab jako kandidát na udělení českého inkolátu v roce 1607. Muzejní a vlastivědná práce – Časopis Společnosti přátel starožitností českých 3-4/XLIV (CXIV), 2006, s. 208-212, ISSN 0027-5255
Course 1: Create and Prepare Debian8 VM TemplateImad Daou
The following Course will focus mainly on a private Virtual Environment such VirtualBox or VMware Station. However, if you are willing to setup straight on DigitalOcean or Vultr, then you can skip Course1 and jump to Course2. But, I highly recommend to go through Course1 to build In-house local Web Hosting Server for testing or developing purpose. After all, the concept is same on either Private or Public Virtual environment.
Lecture transcript The gaze in historical context All right, s.docxcroysierkathey
Lecture transcript :The gaze in historical context:
All right, so we're continuing our discussion of film noir, but we're really thinking about it in relation to Laura Mulvey's discussion of the gaze. So I've assigned this piece, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," because it is probably the most influential work in critical cinema studies that's been published in an academic context. If you look up "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," you'll see that it was cited tens of thousands of times since it was first published in the journal Screen in 1975. So it's an older piece, but it's very representative of the ways that ideas in film theory that have a certain theoretical construct around them can sort of make their way into popular discourse. So we're going to think about whether we agree with her take on the gaze and whether it still applies to the ways that film form works today. And we'll also look at some examples of feminist filmmakers from the period that she was writing in who tried to really combat these ideas around the gaze and experiment with what feminist film form could really look like. So when the article had its 30th and 40th anniversaries, there were retrospectives which you can find online if you're interested. There were a lot of articles published in places like The Chronicle of Higher Education, as well as the Screen journal that it was originally published in, as well as in popular media commemorating the impact of "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." And even now the idea of the gaze has been a part of popular culture and discussions of film. So you can see here, it's been talked about in relation to Magic Mike, in relation to tropes of television. And if you look up male gaze in YouTube, you'll actually see hundreds and hundreds of compilations of clips that are organized around the male gaze, the idea of the male gaze in film. So it's had some staying power. As I mentioned, the article came out in a journal called Screen, which was a really influential journal in the 1970s when film studies as a discipline was really making its way into the Academy, and thinking about ways to unify analysis of film form with some of the more philosophical theoretical ideas that were coming out of critical theory, in particular in Europe. And so Mulvey published her piece in a journal called Screen. And she was very influenced by psychoanalytic theory, which was de rigueur at the time. So if you're a psychoanalytic theorist, you'll have to sort of stay with me, because I think these ideas are a little bit controversial now. And certainly a lot of people have published responses to this article that take issue with many aspects of it, but I still think it's useful, so we'll just move through it. So if you're a psychoanalytic theorist, you take as your starting point that the world is underlined with these deep psychological structures that were studied first by Freud and then revised by Lacan. These structures surface in liter ...
Lecture transcript The gaze in historical context All right, s.docxssuser47f0be
Lecture transcript :The gaze in historical context:
All right, so we're continuing our discussion of film noir, but we're really thinking about it in relation to Laura Mulvey's discussion of the gaze. So I've assigned this piece, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," because it is probably the most influential work in critical cinema studies that's been published in an academic context. If you look up "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," you'll see that it was cited tens of thousands of times since it was first published in the journal Screen in 1975. So it's an older piece, but it's very representative of the ways that ideas in film theory that have a certain theoretical construct around them can sort of make their way into popular discourse. So we're going to think about whether we agree with her take on the gaze and whether it still applies to the ways that film form works today. And we'll also look at some examples of feminist filmmakers from the period that she was writing in who tried to really combat these ideas around the gaze and experiment with what feminist film form could really look like. So when the article had its 30th and 40th anniversaries, there were retrospectives which you can find online if you're interested. There were a lot of articles published in places like The Chronicle of Higher Education, as well as the Screen journal that it was originally published in, as well as in popular media commemorating the impact of "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." And even now the idea of the gaze has been a part of popular culture and discussions of film. So you can see here, it's been talked about in relation to Magic Mike, in relation to tropes of television. And if you look up male gaze in YouTube, you'll actually see hundreds and hundreds of compilations of clips that are organized around the male gaze, the idea of the male gaze in film. So it's had some staying power. As I mentioned, the article came out in a journal called Screen, which was a really influential journal in the 1970s when film studies as a discipline was really making its way into the Academy, and thinking about ways to unify analysis of film form with some of the more philosophical theoretical ideas that were coming out of critical theory, in particular in Europe. And so Mulvey published her piece in a journal called Screen. And she was very influenced by psychoanalytic theory, which was de rigueur at the time. So if you're a psychoanalytic theorist, you'll have to sort of stay with me, because I think these ideas are a little bit controversial now. And certainly a lot of people have published responses to this article that take issue with many aspects of it, but I still think it's useful, so we'll just move through it. So if you're a psychoanalytic theorist, you take as your starting point that the world is underlined with these deep psychological structures that were studied first by Freud and then revised by Lacan. These structures surface in liter ...
Fatah
Abdullah Fatah
English 1110
To:Sloat
La Jetee Science Fiction Research Essay
La Jatee, a 1962 film by Chris Marker is a science fiction film that made me rethink how I see and think about science fiction. The entire film is filmed in black and white, and has been created with a series of still images. The images in the film are accompanied by a sound track and transitions. The meanings of the images in the film are explained by a narrator. One important thing about it is that it carries a lot of meaning for the viewers about science fiction and its ability to be used in different criteria’s in our daily problems in life and makes the viewers also want to think of science fiction as a solution of those problems which is what most scientists have hypothesis about. According to Kawin, the protagonist in the film acts as the film’s projectile (16). This is in fact a sensible argument considering that fact that the protagonist being referred to is a man that seems to be thrown through time, both by the power of his imagination and his captors. The elements from the movie show audience how time and statis used in this movie can influence people’s life. How it can change the future or give the guidance on how to learn from past in order to solve existing problems. The time is viewed in many dimensions and moods, which give a hint that sometimes people should view their problems through those dimensions just so they can get a fresh or different view of bothering them issue. But it is all due to the great abilities of science fiction genre.
Generally, the drama of La Jetee is cantered on a male character that seems to be living in post-World War Paris. The male character is at the time a prisoner of some unidentified captors. He is also a subject of certain experiments that are aimed at using the future to try and get some solution to deal with the problems that are being faced during the present times. In trying to accomplish his mission, the character is instead taken back to the memories of his past. In this essay the main concern is the illusion of movement and time lapse that is perceived by both the audience of the film and characters in the film. In the film, the illusion of movement and time lapse can be clearly seen to be perceived by both the characters in the film as well as the audience. The characters of the film can be seen to be trapped in time. The film begins with a young male character that is standing on the pier. He gets some impression in his memory when he sees a woman as his inspiration, moreover, “science fiction can be used for goals and ideas in life that people can achieve through their imagination and curiosity and also the relation of other visions that can be effective in our lives to solve problems”; For instance ,when you think about time travel I see a good vision of the how problems in the past can be solved in the future that also relates to our daily function in life and our interaction with science. For inst ...
Miles, Adrian. “Networked Knowledge Objects.” Association of Internet Researchers Annual Conference, Internet Research 7.0. Brisbane. 2006. Conference Paper.
Media Rich versus Rich Media (Or Why Video in a Blog Is Not the Same as a Vid...vogmae
[This is from 2005] Blogs are now a media commonplace with regular mentions and appearances in mainstream media and an apparently exponential rise in use within education, knowledge management communities, and various forms of Web based self publishing. While definitions of what constitutes a blog are, in the manner of all such definitions, problematic, videoblogs pose this problem afresh with recent and rapid developments in this nascent field.
My own views on video blogs are well documented, and have been for some time (Miles 2000). There are specific qualities or properties that a blog has which makes it different to existing forms of electronic writing and demonstrate that blogs are a medium in their own right.
There are three things that matter in relation to a networked specific practice and media production. These three terms apply to the formal attributes of digital media, and so address the qualities that practice requires, and how we participate, use, and engage with networked media. There is no hierarchy amongst these three terms, and they may prove to be insufficient. The terms are porousness, granularity, and facets. The list does not include database, user, or interactivity, as these are not causes but consequences of this triumvirate of terms.
The availability of ready to hand video technologies for recording, editing, and publishing 'everyday ephemera' has seen an explosion of content online, from the low brow populism of YouTube through to the sophisticated observational post produced work of Robert Croma. These technologies of recording, editing, and distribution provide documentary practice with an everyday, quotidian apparatus for the creation of informal, reflective, observational and autoethnographic work. This paper will examine the use of ready to hand video technologies in concert with the use of the Korsakow interactive video authoring software, to create small scale, 'ready to hand' or 'dirty media' documentaries. This provides a model to investigate and develop alternative modes of making nonfiction video online material that falls outside of the economy of spectacle that dominates YouTube or the 'personal broadcasting channels’ of Vimeo . The problem investigated is how to contextualise and author in these systems so that work created is outside of the unstructured banality of aggregative platforms and the serialised limitations of the blog. Emerging software models such as Korsakow require a creative practice of making that involves the critical curation of video ephemera into complex, emerging and multilinear constellations and clouds of associated material that let these works lie between the personal documentary, essay film, home movies and broader poetic traditions. More significantly the use of systems such as Korsakow allows for an autoethnographic methodology of personal, informal and everyday observation to produce a ‘soup’ of material that is then structured through the elucidation of emerging or unveiled patterns of relation amongst shots and sequences. These patterns create affective and poetic “lines of flight” for both maker and user and their value lies in the possibility of poesis amongst otherwise unremarkable moments.
Francesca Gottschalk - How can education support child empowerment.pptxEduSkills OECD
Francesca Gottschalk from the OECD’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation presents at the Ask an Expert Webinar: How can education support child empowerment?
Operation “Blue Star” is the only event in the history of Independent India where the state went into war with its own people. Even after about 40 years it is not clear if it was culmination of states anger over people of the region, a political game of power or start of dictatorial chapter in the democratic setup.
The people of Punjab felt alienated from main stream due to denial of their just demands during a long democratic struggle since independence. As it happen all over the word, it led to militant struggle with great loss of lives of military, police and civilian personnel. Killing of Indira Gandhi and massacre of innocent Sikhs in Delhi and other India cities was also associated with this movement.
June 3, 2024 Anti-Semitism Letter Sent to MIT President Kornbluth and MIT Cor...Levi Shapiro
Letter from the Congress of the United States regarding Anti-Semitism sent June 3rd to MIT President Sally Kornbluth, MIT Corp Chair, Mark Gorenberg
Dear Dr. Kornbluth and Mr. Gorenberg,
The US House of Representatives is deeply concerned by ongoing and pervasive acts of antisemitic
harassment and intimidation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Failing to act decisively to ensure a safe learning environment for all students would be a grave dereliction of your responsibilities as President of MIT and Chair of the MIT Corporation.
This Congress will not stand idly by and allow an environment hostile to Jewish students to persist. The House believes that your institution is in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, and the inability or
unwillingness to rectify this violation through action requires accountability.
Postsecondary education is a unique opportunity for students to learn and have their ideas and beliefs challenged. However, universities receiving hundreds of millions of federal funds annually have denied
students that opportunity and have been hijacked to become venues for the promotion of terrorism, antisemitic harassment and intimidation, unlawful encampments, and in some cases, assaults and riots.
The House of Representatives will not countenance the use of federal funds to indoctrinate students into hateful, antisemitic, anti-American supporters of terrorism. Investigations into campus antisemitism by the Committee on Education and the Workforce and the Committee on Ways and Means have been expanded into a Congress-wide probe across all relevant jurisdictions to address this national crisis. The undersigned Committees will conduct oversight into the use of federal funds at MIT and its learning environment under authorities granted to each Committee.
• The Committee on Education and the Workforce has been investigating your institution since December 7, 2023. The Committee has broad jurisdiction over postsecondary education, including its compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, campus safety concerns over disruptions to the learning environment, and the awarding of federal student aid under the Higher Education Act.
• The Committee on Oversight and Accountability is investigating the sources of funding and other support flowing to groups espousing pro-Hamas propaganda and engaged in antisemitic harassment and intimidation of students. The Committee on Oversight and Accountability is the principal oversight committee of the US House of Representatives and has broad authority to investigate “any matter” at “any time” under House Rule X.
• The Committee on Ways and Means has been investigating several universities since November 15, 2023, when the Committee held a hearing entitled From Ivory Towers to Dark Corners: Investigating the Nexus Between Antisemitism, Tax-Exempt Universities, and Terror Financing. The Committee followed the hearing with letters to those institutions on January 10, 202
Read| The latest issue of The Challenger is here! We are thrilled to announce that our school paper has qualified for the NATIONAL SCHOOLS PRESS CONFERENCE (NSPC) 2024. Thank you for your unwavering support and trust. Dive into the stories that made us stand out!
Palestine last event orientationfvgnh .pptxRaedMohamed3
An EFL lesson about the current events in Palestine. It is intended to be for intermediate students who wish to increase their listening skills through a short lesson in power point.
Instructions for Submissions thorugh G- Classroom.pptxJheel Barad
This presentation provides a briefing on how to upload submissions and documents in Google Classroom. It was prepared as part of an orientation for new Sainik School in-service teacher trainees. As a training officer, my goal is to ensure that you are comfortable and proficient with this essential tool for managing assignments and fostering student engagement.
Welcome to TechSoup New Member Orientation and Q&A (May 2024).pdfTechSoup
In this webinar you will learn how your organization can access TechSoup's wide variety of product discount and donation programs. From hardware to software, we'll give you a tour of the tools available to help your nonprofit with productivity, collaboration, financial management, donor tracking, security, and more.
2. I’ve written 5000 words, another 2 or 3000 to go to get this figured out.
The web specific short films of Robert Croma. They matter because they’re worth writing about and
there is a lack of writing about this sort of work. That’s a small ‘h’ hermeneutics. They also make some
propositions that are worth speculating about and with.
I want to get the ‘slow’ out of the way up front. These films rely on an implicitly slow method of
observing, recording and crafting. They are also slow because they routinely use forms of slow motion.
They are also slow because, certainly for the best ones, you need to watch and wait for what they want
to show. (They are the antithesis of YouTube’s attention economy.)
Their explicit slowness is, I think, the least interesting thing to say about these films. I’m more interested
in how they relate to affect, and to what I want to describe as their flatness, and how these two terms,
affect and flatness, then provide ways to think about slowness.
3. In Cinema One Deleuze contrasts the early history of cinema as a particular type of image making
in relation to other sorts of image making such as painting and photography. For Deleuze the
cinematic apparatus offers a ‘scientific’ machine vision where the lens and film substrate is indifferent
to that which it records. You point, shoot, it films. Here ‘I’ as camera person may not be indifferent to
what I film, but the machine in itself doesn’t care, and so is an indifferently automatic procedure.
This is the “any instant whatever” where science’s empirical objectivity, the imperative to observe
neutrally
is repeated within the mechanical
apparatus of the film camera. Twenty four frames a second, no matter what is in front of it. Each
moment, for the recording machine, is the same as the previous, and will be the same as the next.
They are, in relation to each other, produced through a procedure of ‘flatness’ (what Deleuze calls
‘equidistant points’), and so are unlike an album of snapshots or a folio of drawings, and no matter
what a human interlocutor may make of them, the film images form a series where any one is, in
itself, equal to the others.
4. Deleuze recognises that the film camera is in itself indifferent to what is recorded. This indifference is
unlike painting, where the time and effort to make means that what is painted is always in some sense
posed and that what is sought is the expression or representation of something quintessential about
that which has been painted.
Similarly, the earlier history of the photograph inherits these qualities through its use of the pose —
modelled for example on particular forms of portraiture — and of course reinforced by the slowness of
early photography where a subject literally had to be held still to allow for a photograph to be taken.
In these cases the pose is outside of the everyday. The pose is not informal, quotidian happenstance
but carefully staged and framed to express and signify import, to document and demonstrate that the
posed subject expresses some essence, and reaches outside to tie the photograph into an imaginary
grander history of other such poses.
The concept of the ‘pose’ requires that there is an ideal form which expresses the essence of a
moment, event, thing and that this posing appears just so, yet in fact is deeply staged, reflecting a
Platonic ideality that is always fallen in the relation between pose, image, and the world.
5. The pose then presents itself as a privileged moment outside of any actual moment, yet within this
moment of the pose is the idea that this is a moment that matters because it is of and outside of the
time of the everyday. This is not the economy of film and the camera’s disregard of what it records,
means that within the flatness of these any–instant–whatevers arises the possibility of a privileged
instant. This is the accidentally recorded moment that, as a consequence of an indifferent recording, is
not only captured but able to be replayed, reviewed, and rewatched.
(I am thinking for example of one sequence in de Sica’s “The Bicycle Thief” where the father and
son run across a road. The boy takes a tumble, all helter skelter akimbo and though I don’t know the
way he falls is not with that second guessing of the staged fall, but he ran as asked across the road and
the film has caught the accident, and de Sica has kept it.) These accidental moments are privileged not
because they are the pose, but because they are unveiled through the indifference of their recording as
a moment or point that becomes a peak because of the flatness of their surrounds.
6. For Deleuze, following Bergson, the cinema begins or arises within a sensory motor economy of
action and reaction. The world is made up of things that act and react on other things in a multiplicity of
ways. In this sea of action and reaction most relations and events are automatic to the extent that they
follow what we can call the laws of nature (of physics, chemistry and so on). In these cases the relation
of action and reaction is unconsidered, it just happens (think the relation of ice in a glass of water and
the relations between ice, water, glass, air, temperature gradients and so on). However, there is a
special case of action and reaction where an interval exists between action and reaction where this
interval becomes a gap so that the reaction that may happen is no longer automatic, but is now subject
to choice. In this context there become possible reactions in response to action. This interval, what
Bergson describes as a “living image” is used by Deleuze to produce the tripartite basic schema of
cinema’s movement image, which is made up of perception, affect, and action images.
The first are those shots where we see what is to be noticed, the second is where a decision is to be
made, and the third is where we see the consequence of that decision realised as an action. We see
the gun, we see the hero and the villain seeing each other see the gun, we see both race to get it —
notice, decide, do. In this constellation affect becomes not only the need for a decision, but becomes
enlarged as that interval where decision is foregrounded, and more specifically where the action
undertaken in response to perception, that is the action decided upon, is inadequate or insufficient in
relation to what has been noticed.
7. Here affect is a remainder, that which action in acting fails to dispel. For example, I see a snake and
leap, yet still feel fear and anxiety even when now obviously safe, as the perception of danger is not
resolved by the merely physical action of my leap. This excess becomes and is affect, and is why
emotion becomes attached to these events as emotion becomes defined as a perception that cannot
be realised through a motor action.
Or perhaps not so much indecision but, where a film is dominated by the affect image it concentrates
on the inadequacy or insufficiency of decision in the light of the action required, or the action of what
will happen.
This is the regime of the movement image, where Bergsonian duration is realised via these three
varieties of the movement image. Within this schema affect, that which lies between perception and
action, is an interruption to movement and action and has the capacity to suspect movement into the
slowness of duration.
8. In Alien Phenomenology Ian Bogost appropriates the term ‘ontography’ as a particular method to
name, describe and inscribe the density of the world. His is a method that participates in the recent turn
towards what is I think ironically and with complete deadpan humour described as Object Orientated
Ontology. This is a theory that, in a crude nutshell, argues that much of philosophy and critical theory
has offered a Ptolemaic view of the world (what Meillassoux describes as ‘correlationism’). OOO, in its
turn, offers itself as a Copernican revolution, where the human as an orientating, intending, or
originating site is shifted aside to grant object hood in its own right to everything else. Here all things
have relations between themselves, and these relations are of the same qualitative scale as relations
between the human and the world, or between human and human.
In this reconception of objects and their relations Bogost proposes ontography as a way to approach
this thickness of things by creating what are catalogues of such things and their connecting and
disconnecting into different objects or units. Here objects rule, but an object is never a single discrete
thing but a constellation, and as one constellation may connect or engage with another it too becomes
a new object or unit in itself. (For me this appears to be not very distant from my understanding of
Deleuze’s Bergson and the ways in which all things have facets or orientations which may or may not
become addressed to the facets of other things.)
9. This is easy to understand using cinema as an example. We have a unit, called a shot. The shot is a
thing in its own right, perfectly whole. However, we can and do join one shot to another and this now
forms a new object called a sequence, and is for all intents and purposes a new thing (this is what
Christian Metz outlines, using different terms and methodologies, in Section Three of Film Language).
This sequence can in turn be joined to other sequences to make a film, which in turn is also its own
object. Similarly, there can be parts of a film that can be reprised in different ways to make new objects.
For example, the “I could have been a contender” speech made by Brando in Kazan’s 1954 On the
Waterfront is quoted in Scorsese’s Raging Bull and Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights. As Bogost
describes, ontography “is a practice of exploding the innards of things — be they words, intersections,
shopping malls or creatures. This “explosion” can be as figurative or literal as you like, but it must
above all reveal the hidden density of a unit.” (Loc 1297.)
Here the world is resolutely flat as there is no hierarchy or privilege within or between these objects.
There is the Brando plus De Niro plus Wahlberg object. This flatness, like the web and hypertext, lets
things be equidistant from each other, and in this flatness we make peaks and valleys with what we will.
10. These films are not narrative. They are too directly observational and fragmentary to offer a story. This
is a strength indicating a self confidence that they matter for themselves without needing the flimsy or
filigree of a tale, and that the world offers things worth noticing of themselves if we wait, watch, or better
yet, just see.
(This latter point is almost straight from Bazin, where his celebration of a particular notion of ‘realism’,
coupled with his Catholicism, offered a vision of film making that became less about the imposition of a will
upon the world (of the screen, the camera, the story) than the revealing of what is immanently there, an
ethics of looking to find what is there, already.)
I can, of course, create narratives about these films. Wondering who they are, why they are there, what
they may be thinking, doing, and even what happens next. However, these are outside of the films,
applied retrospectively to perhaps solidify what is fluid, and unnecessary to each of the works in
themselves. They are, narratologically, offering description, not narrative, those moments in a story where
causation and drive is suspended to simply describe, where story time pauses so that, for instance, a
sequence of shots might characterise and contextualise a location (the opening of Allen’s Manhatten, what
Metz in his canonical taxonomy calls a ‘descriptive syntagma’).
So we get description, small grained, partial, fragmentary yet clearly of the world, and in many of these
a privileged instant reveals itself. At this moment the small film folds out of itself into ever larger sets of
possible relations. Neither are they lyrical, their happenstance and accidental everydayness and
ordinariness suggests they avoid the subjective declaration that lyric relies upon. These are films that
spend their energy not in telling us how Croma feels, but render visible things through an assemblage of
place, stuff, lens, camera, Croma, software, and the web. [Qoute about assemblage here]
They are, in Bogost’s terms, ontographic.
11. Croma’s films are ontographic. I’m not sure if this helps us think about the films, or ontography, or
both?). In the density of their brief moments expanded through observation, recording, slow motion,
and post produced effects, they reveal in their slowness the thickness and density of the world. The
films seem to participate as an object that is not quite indifferent to the world — they do not form a
surveillance project — but neither are they directed or uttered in the way of fiction and much art. Each
film is its own object, and while there is some seriality by virtue of being in a video blog each is its own
refrain without needing another.
The iteration present is not an outside procedural apparatus prompting each film, their method is not
calculable in any sort of way, yet each is the expression of a particular and specific method of making.
Each is exquisitely personal yet in a manner that looks out, not in, so there is little that I can say about
Robert Croma from watching the films, though there is perhaps a great deal that I can imagine I can
say about the world.
The films explode what they view, through this mechanics of slowness, demonstrating the flatness of
the relations between the parts viewed within. In a work such as Connection at Passy it is Croma plus
camera plus lens plus one stranger plus one stranger plus the metro plus a platform plus a train plus a
digital file plus post produced mattes plus time, and the film brings these into relation where all are what
they are. It is flat, and this flatness slow.
12. In digital making it can be hard to avoid the cool. The pleasures and seductions of not only what the
digital now allows us as makers, but also the celebrations of technology itself. In Croma’s films there is
instead a digital flatness, a post–analogue field where there is no discrimination between the ideality of
the moment of recording and the later application of effects in post production via software systems and
algorithms that work upon what has been recorded. This flatness sees the image file as an object that
extends equally from the camera as digital source through to post produced effects, compression and
online delivery, where while it is a linear flow of steps each carries the same force in the final film. None
seems to matter more than another, one isn’t merely the precondition or prelude for the other, yet
neither are they their sum. This is an affirmation of the small, the slow, and of a particular affective
ethics of making. Each matters, in its own right for itself — hence the care of the observation as well as
the craft of the effects, and the design of the blog — and also in relation and concert with each other.
Yet not. For the effects applied in post production are orientated towards a heightened mode of
digital mise–en–scene to reframe attention upon what is seen and now found. These effects become a
secondary framing that creates spatial relations, even dividing a single frame into parts through the use
of blur and mattes that serve to make and produce what the film is about. The films now become
painterly, which contributes to their lyricism, where the ordinary everyday becomes grounds for the
figuring of a digital carefully crafted ‘painting’. This is not the application of industrial digital practice to
clean up or repair. Here there is the presence of voice, of small steps and the careful application of
effects to bits and pieces, bibs and bobs. The scale, always, is small, minor, sketch like, that is realised
under the auspices of the hand made, the slow, a digital craft practice.
13. These are small films, realised literally in their scale as web specific video, and aesthetically in terms
of what and how is filmed. Here smallness expresses a quality of speed as a slowness arising from
framing the observed and observable. It is a practice that arises from the local — from the technically
immediate to hand and what is nearby. This extends from not only filming what is phenomenally near,
but includes the use of simple technologies such as a digital camera, available light, a small suite of
post production tools and the Web. These are films that don’t feel obliged to say, merely show. They
don’t shout, they do. You need to wait for each one to unfurl itself, sometimes arriving at that distinct
moment, its privileged instant, sometimes not, and in their own way approaching a still life or even the
miniature more than the boldness of the large, finished and self confidently closed work.
Hence the individual films, and the collection as an ongoing and expanding whole, become a
manifold of the slow. There is the patience of their collecting, the digital craft of their composing after
the fact of their capture, their reliance upon the local, the call they make to the viewer to wait, and to
observe while waiting
, patiently and slowly, their physical scale, and finally in the
quiet claim they make indirectly, of the world and of us. This is a post personal cinema.