|
| Empty Rooms: Impersonal Seeing in Digital Images - On David's Paradise, Part III of Jun-Jieh Wang's Project David |
|
text by Huang Chien-Hung
The Intensity of “Digital-Politics”
Completed in April 2008, the new film work David's Paradise, the final part of Project David by prominent Taiwan new media artist and curator Jun-Jieh Wang, presents Taiwan's digital art with an unmistakable challenge. The nearly 20-minute film forms an unusual creative cluster, combining high-definition digital technology (techno-economics), digital aesthetics (the philosophy of images), micro-sensibility (a new sensibility linking the body and the visual) and media art subjectivity (the political stance of the “single” in the global democratic age). If high picture quality, the effect of the gaze and the inflection point are the three elements that produce the “intensity” of digital images, then the image cluster provides the “impersonal” (or “depersonalized”) “single-body” behind such intensity by linking up his various concerns during different periods – such as leftist fantasies (opposition and lifting of the martial law), the signs of simulacra (the bubble economy and internationalization) and the fantasy of de-signification (globalization and the M-shape society).
In Project David, Wang gives autonomy to images by making use of “randomness” and “interactivity”. The “impersonal” element develops differently in Untitled 200256 and Microbiology Association: Condition Project II, the first and second work of Project David. In Untitled 200256, footsteps enter the picture, followed by a close-up of the shoes. The camera moves on to a shiny and immaculate metal door handle. A hand stretches out opposite the camera to turn the handle. In a room with strong white light, a drop of liquid drips down from an intravenous drip bottle, which dissolves poetically into two specks of light in an eyeball that gradually move apart. In Microbiology Association: Condition Project II, there are even more variations in the camera movement, resulting in more fragmentary poetic shots: scenes featuring shooting, falling, bleeding, blood dripping, cherry blossoms blooming and drifting in the air, an aircraft cabin, coffee, a small TV and oranges are accompanied by low-frequency sounds. Projected on two or three screens, these shots are randomly combined to form different intertextual films.[1]
Untitled 200256 consists of the simple combination of footsteps, the act of opening a door, an eye and an intravenous drip. As an independent object, the intravenous drip is the only external event that suggests the key to the spatial transition - disease and death. In Condition Project II, there are scenes of shooting and bleeding, with the door acting as an interface to create a continuous sequence with narrative suggestions. In addition, the film features drifting cherry blossom petals, a cabin window, coffee, a screen and oranges. The cherry blossoms, coffee and oranges appear as independent events with the window and the screen as interface. The spatial transitions here are more complex than in Untitled, with shooting, flying and a screen indicating a shift to another space. The oranges penetrated by light function as an open interface like the eye. These scenes combine to form different intertextual works in a multi-screen projection. Footsteps, the central element that runs through the trilogy, obtusely suggest the acts of “entering” and “passing through” in these two film installations, which in turn symbolize life and its crisis. But instead of naming the persona in the film or suggesting the identity of the persona, these footsteps are used to point to the “impersonality” of the characters, the author and the spectator. What is destroyed or effaced in the process is the rigid personal pronoun. This flexible formal intention is given even more radical treatment in David’s Paradise.
In David's Paradise, the eye in the two previous works has disappeared. The montage principle and interactivity are also substituted by intent gazing guided by tracking shots. Thus, the suggestion of consciousness and spiritual depth in the two previous works has been removed, while the narrative elements suggested by melodramatic images and montage are also abolished in favour of: (a) the continuous placement of real partitions; (b) the presentation of objects that become events; (c) the shift between analogue space and virtual space; and (d) a non-linear maze created by the linear movement of the gaze. The footsteps and figures in this film are also no longer as definite as in the previous films. Instead, through the use of flickering signals, they suggest a kind of passage to and from a “garden”,[2] represented by a flowered lawn with saturated colours. In the artist's imagination of “heaven”, the character “David” seems to be returning to a kind of naturalistic Christian setting. The film shows a sequence of spaces with non-narrative “object-events” as their theme: a bunch of roses in a vase floating on top of a round table and another cut rose on the table, a TV with flickering signals floating next to a sofa and a standing lamp, a floating aluminium chair, a window opening and a writing pen, a bathroom with water turned on, water coming out horizontally from the shower in the direction of the tracking shot and a muscular body passed through by the water, an airplane flying away in a landscape photograph on the wall, and a body writhing underneath silk sheets. The visual events that appear in these partitions are no longer objects with narrative suggestions as in the two previous films. Instead, they concentrate on mysterious objects of gaze like the cherry blossom petals, coffee and oranges in Condition Project II. The smoke and maple leaves behind the window and the airplane in the photo are potential (or “virtual”) cuts through an interface (window opening and photo frame), just like the shifts to close-ups (vase, cut rose, TV, chair, writing and bed sheets) in each room. In addition to the linear movement of the tracking shots, there are also filmic linear cuts through the use of close-up. However, due to the trans-reality and virtualization brought about by the digital medium, these analogue methods lead us into a kind of “maze”, a realm of illusion woven together by “topo-images” (i.e. differentiated images). No longer carrying narrative suggestions (substituted by a ritual effect, to be explained below), the mysterious objects of gaze are like the “grin without the cat” as described by Lewis Carroll. As a “singular point” in space, the “grin” signals the presence of the body. Conversely, the body “presents itself” due to the effect of the singular point, and becomes “body-energy” events.
In David's Paradise, Wang combines “body-energy” with the digital medium and high picture quality, using the above-mentioned “singular point” to contribute to the “immanence” of the images and facilitate subjectivation (construction of the individual subject). Through cold and precise digital images, the “depth” and “immanence” achieved in film in the past as a result of lighting, depth of field, dialectic editing and projection are homogenized into a shiny surface composed of “pixels”. How to infuse “immanence” (i.e. subjectivation) into the superficial gaze in digital images has become the greatest challenge to artists today. The example that Wang provides is to ensure the efficient diffusion of the energy of the “singular point”, so that the “frozen” picture quality is transformed by a sort of topological “isothermal diagram”, which in turn makes subjectivation possible. When memory becomes a sort of signal, or when the DPI and the stability of transmission is used as a kind of ‘style’ to evoke memory or feeling, this style, which is neither formalized or stylized but enables subjectivation, can be called “Digital-Politics”.
The Politics of the Ritual: the Poetics of “Real-kitsch”
"The more real things are, the more fairy tale-like they are.",
"The Anarchy of The Imagination"
── R. W. Fassbinder, 1986
From Untitled and Condition Project II to David's Paradise, the artist is obsessed with images of a high picture quality. But this is not a simple case of “technological obsession”. Technological obsession is a worldly phenomenon and expresses the ideology of a technology-oriented age. By manipulating high picture quality, Wang confronts the world of phenomena directly. This kind of manipulation involves the profound question of “realism”: high picture quality is a kind of realism. Undoubtedly, “realism” is not the description, interpretation or representation of the objective world, but a creative relationship between the “subject” and the world. This kind of realistic intention coincides with Pasolini's idea of poetry.
On the one hand, high picture quality is necessary because of a paradoxical poetic desire. This poetic desire points at a certain kind of realism that is not founded on the simulation of appearances. Instead, it confronts reality with the images themselves, that is, by manipulating high picture quality, images can effectively evoke the “reality of reality itself”. Outstanding creators of contemporary video art are aware that “high picture quality” is not an independent objective fact. Instead, it implies that images are given texture and specific spatial-temporal characteristics by the artist in order to confront reality and show such confrontation, like a kind of “ritual” with saturated colours and accompanying sound.
With this in mind, we can now try to understand why the “faceless” David appears in an immaculate suit and shiny black shoes, how the blue colour of the room and the red of the roses and desk lamp strongly influence the viewing of the “rooms”, and how come all dramatic suggestions have been replaced by the pure gaze of scenes in David’s Paradise, as if we are near the end of a ritual. For a long time, the “ritual” has been taken possession by the state machinery, social system and capitalist power in Taiwan. It is manipulated by those in power to give us a name. In other words, creating a “private” and “subjective” ritual through images is in itself political, since the characters always engage in self-naming through their appearance and use the extraordinary ritual to represent the exceptional experience of an inner reality. Along with auteurs such as Pasolini, Fassbinder, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Kenneth Anger, Peter Greenaway, Terayama Shuji, Bill Viola, Tsukamoto Shinya, Chen Chieh-jen and Tsai Ming-liang, Wang is no doubt committing a kind of political and economic “transgression” with his film. The ultimate experience of ritual highlights objective and real social situations that are often marginalized. In a ritual, the problem of “realism” becomes the problem of “real-kitsch”. “Kitsch” is not a relative category, but represents the reality of someone who has lost his social identity, that is, the rupture between social representation (power-capital-culture) and the reality of the individual.
Impersonal Seeing of the “Single-Room”
"So personal movies exist as the after-products in society,
as a testament to its living conditions"
──Apichatpong
In his film Chant d'amour (1950), Jean Genet uses physical space and the texture of materials to create a surrealist tale. Through the actions of the characters and the textures of objects, this silent film concentrates on describing the act of “passing through the walls between cells”, suggesting that it is the only way to represent a free “body”, that is, “liberation”. In David's Paradise, we also peep (gaze) into a series of rooms. But the tracking shots obviate the need for cross editing between close shots and close-ups as in Genet's film, and also divert the gaze away from the surface. The film uses mysterious transitions because of an even more fragmented external reality and a virtual fragmentary perceptual experience.
In her essay A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf establishes a virtual link, a relation between the monad and the world, by referring to the writings of several female authors. With Jun-Jieh Wang's rooms, the virtual link is with a kind of “digital writing”, an impersonal writing which is associated with David's “absence”, “departure” and “elsewhere-ness”, thus achieving the singularity of the universe of a monade.
While the self is always present in Virginia Woolf's room, together with many third persons in the self's consciousness, there is no first person in Wang's rooms. The absence of “I” is because of the absence of the other, which decides whether the first person can be projected. “Empty rooms” have become an important device for a lot of contemporary video artists. In these works, the self and the other are placed into a kind of flux that cannot be presented in a single physical time and space, into a sort of invisible digital differentiation. “Single” is the starting point with which the contemporary individual develops his links and connections – an impersonal subjective camera. The device of “empty rooms” first appeared in India Song, Marguerite Duras' major film. It is also found in Apichatpong’s new work Morakot, in Saskia Olde Wolbers' Placebo and Wang Ya-Hui's Visitor. But in terms of the structure of the “empty room”, David's Paradise shows striking similarities with David Lynch's films, such as Inland Empire: the “absentee” is projected by “the presence of space itself”, which inevitably makes that space represent the presence of “a certain being in another space”.
The rooms in Lynch's films are not empty because there is no one there, but because the spatial arrangement and the placement of mirrors force viewers to stare at an “empty” spot. The intensity of the images (i.e. ritual) gives the “empty spot” a “ghostly” presence. Partial illumination creates large areas of shadows, and an indescribable tension in the boundaries between light and shadow. The only pieces of furniture always stand alone along the walls under the light, as a reminder of the place of the “absentee”, leaving an empty space for the gaze to focus on. This kind of seeing and images undoubtedly suggests a ritual-like spatial disposition derived from phenomenological experience. Even though Wang’s preoccupation in David's Paradise seems to be quite different from Lynch, both of them approach a “floating or drifting kind of seeing” by virtue of the alternation between close-ups and medium shots. In David’s Paradise, spotlighting is used to give each room a certain atmosphere, and the light source is an extremely bright colour. Together with the blue of the shadows and the shade of the walls with light reflected on them, the colours reach a saturation that brings to mind a ritual, while the objects in the empty space suggest a place vacated by someone.
The Imperceptibility of Digital Images
The footsteps that repeatedly enter the picture in the trilogy are like a recurring dream. In David's Paradise, each room shows footsteps entering as if in a dream. This is followed by various “floating” events. “Floating” implies “obsession” without the possibility of “fixation”. In this film, Wang creates a unique form of digital seeing: we can merely fix our gaze on “floating”, but not on any definite space, object or meaning. This is a state of “imperceptibility”, which suggests a depth without depth and a manifestation that hides the self. In his discussion of “repetition”, Lacan links it with the idea of Trieb, the other and the presence of hidden meanings. The repetitions in dreams and fantasies represent changing associations and endless revelations, expressing “meanings” that are neither objective nor fixed. In dreams, they carry the meaning (or more precisely “signifier”) of escape. In a fantasy, they place the self in a fictitious situation, in which the signifier is suspended, or becomes an event. In David’s Paradise, through the use of tracking shots and dollying-in shifts to achieve spatial transition and create a “long-take gaze”, Wang accomplishes a kind of “imperceptible” movement. It is not that there is no movement that we can perceive in the film, but the movement is a dream-like movement or a dynamic in fantasy for which we cannot determine whose consciousness it is. In other words, the “impersonal seeing” in David's Paradise, which is not fully developed in the two previous works, is accomplished by the “imperceptible” movement of viewpoints (which both focuses the seeing and disintegrates the viewpoint) and the indistinguishability of the author from the characters.
Such “impersonal seeing” invokes Deleuze's notion of “percipiendum” (“that which cannot but be perceived”), which is central to the power of the images in David's Paradise. The “percipiendum” is also the “imperceptible” (“that which can only be perceived”). David's departure causes a rupture in the perception of reality. The film is the artist's creation in the face of this rupture or frustration. The power of its digital images is inseparable from the fact that the artist succeeds in letting the “percipiendum” be perceived through the gaze of the images. We could even say that Wang has created a “fantasy” by integrating digital images and life, or found a way of acquiring power from “Outside”, what Deleuze calls “the secret is mystification itself”. The secret is expressed as a kind of “repetition” in terms of the camera movement and ritual space, resulting in internal differences that are “imperceptible”. As for the objects present that can seemingly be perceived, they form a kind of shift at specific moments. They are “impersonal”, from which human life has completely departed. Through careful manipulation of these shots, spaces and objects, the artist manages to express something more profound with the digital medium, so that the creation of digital art is tightly bound up with death and its accompanying impersonal shift (becoming a world). (Abridged translation)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] See my article “A Displaced Critical Ontology of Image: the Differentiation between Film and Image-art” in the catalogue of the exhibition “Altered States” curated by Amy Cheng, 2006, Taipei, pp.
[2] In 1990, Derek Jarman shot the film The Garden near a nuclear power station. Using complex images and views of history (pertaining to politics, the consumer society, religious belief, Bible interpretations and environmental consciousness), it discusses the situation of homosexuals in history, society and their country, and the possibility of returning to Eden (i.e. the Garden) by means of new interpretations. This association is the writer's own interpretation and not the artist's original intention. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
