Cinema 1 Chapter 1 Page 1 Paragraph 1

Bergson does not just put forward one thesis on movement, but three. The first is the most famous, and threatens to obscure the other two. It is, however, only an introduction to the others. According to the first thesis, movement is distinct from the space covered. Space covered is past, movement is present, the act of covering.

What Bergson is saying here is that movement is distinct from space. In order for covering to take place, there must be displacement and displacement is only one type of movement (and not the only type of movement). The words actually say it when we use the spatializing metaphors of language as in “to take place” as in taking up space or “covering space” as if covering a bed with a blanket. In this conception of the universe, space is voluminous background whereas movement happens through it, within it. It is a 2-D metaphor applied to a 3-D phenomenon: as if a point was moving alongside a flat plane. The movement happens within the space but not as a part of it, not constitutive of it. So, what is space? As Bergson would have it in M&M p. 206, “Abstract space is nothing but the mental diagram of infinite divisibility.” The space covered is divisible, indeed infinitely divisible, whilst movement is indivisible, or cannot be divided without changing qualitatively each time it is divided. From a classic perspective, space is divisible and movement is indivisible: space is a referenced three dimensional system where time exists as a fourth dimension independent of the space. Space in itself is an empty yet solid entity which is homogeneous and has no temporal dimension within it. Movement or change cannot be reconstituted from static sections (slices), beca use continuity would be absent from the sequentiality. In classical mechanics, we would say that the momentum and speed have been removed from within the section thereby rendering each section indeterminate in terms of the completion of the movement. The continuity is singular, unitary, and cannot be decomposed into constituent elements or parts. Every constituent part would create a discontinuity at the start of the segment and at the end of the segment, a halting balkiness which the movement’s continuity-as-a-whole does not have. Constituting movement from static images, each having a velocity of “zero”, is impossible because the summation of zeros will always amount to zero. I cannot excise a portion of movement, i.e. a transversal moving image at a particular instant, because each instant of now must integrate the dynamic evanescence of pastness and incipience of futureness inherent in the covering of space. Likewise, we cannot constitute movement out of static slices because we cannot imbue them with a continuity the slices do not have. I can intercalate an infinity of static images between two immobile plates but these will be just as immobile. We cannot add movement to a static image. In the same way that Achilles would never reach his destination, he would have been unable to start, because the distance between him and the first point is infinitely divisible and therefore unreachable.

The So What Factor.

Apart from the gee-whiz aspect of McIntosh’s and Kirschner’s “art” works which in themselves constitute only slightly aesthetisized science-fair projects, the ideas that they bring out are simple ones which have been existent for quite some time and rather well understood. The direction of the work is novel but its creative drive ought to punch through the “so what?” threshold. I like art as much as the next guy, but why should I have to say it’s great when it only fetishizes the common-place and only foregrounds the obvious?

I saw the “plans” for McIntosh’s Undulations in a chapter dealing with interference and resonance patterns in a pan of mercury in Duncan and Starling’s Text Book of Physics, vol. 2 Heat Light and Sound originally printed in 1917. If “artists” wish to illustrate interactivity or adaptation or evolution with scientific ideas, they should do so in a manner that is à la hauteur des temps or beyond, otherwise, it’s an insult to the intelligence and imagination of the spectator. There is a difference between minimalism and simplicity. I have no problem with “scientific” art per se, but the demonstration of a process au premier degré is not sufficient to constitute an artistic experience.

Natural processes and scientific or technological ideas deserve more focus than the simplistic reductionism that these two projects seem to want or be able to apply to them. And here I’m not referring to the implicit beauty that emerges in wave tanks or wind tunnels or watching copper sulphate crystals grow. Although some of 20th century art from Dali, Magritte, Balla, or Duchamp uses a scientific thématique, the concerns tie-in beyond the technique or the work at hand. Technological art of the type presented by McIntosh and Kirschner rose from a different experience than the artistic. You’ve likely seen etchings of some kind or other of a man of science demonstrating to a peer the production of some process of other: the one that immediately comes to mind is Newton’s demonstration of the breakdown of white light through a prism into a spectrum of colours. Is the demonstration in itself art? Later on, these demonstrations go public as travelling expositions or presentations of scientific findings and breakthroughs in public lectures. And now the presentation of this scientific knowledge has made its way from Scientific American to the Discovery Channel. But wait, now you can also own your very own piece of scientific process and exhibit it right in your very own home... Remember Sea Monkeys? Or the mail order ant farms? I think I’m choking on my madeleines.
The scientific experiments of the 19th and early 20th centuries not only demonstrate a level of sophistication in the understanding of these basic physical, chemical, electrical processes but a finesse and elegance in their demonstrations with simple unsophisticated means. And here I mean “demonstrations” such as Cheshire’s disc, or Bunsen’s Grease-Spot Photometer, or apparatuses to produce Lissajous figures, or Chladni’s figures, or devices to determine the velocity of light. Never mind the scientific and technological advances made in the latter half of the last century! The technical processes and their attendant technologies demonstrate an understanding of the ideas involved that far surpass the simplification of their explanation. “Is there anything more beautiful than a nuclear submarine or a Mercedes turbo-charged V-12 engine?” WW Simondon S?

There’s a huge divide between the understanding of the world by scientific and technological disciplines versus those of the artistic and philosophical disciplines. Is it that the scientific and technological advances are so far ahead of the aesthetic and philosophical understanding of the nature and implications of these advances that their simplistic depiction or representation as aesthetic ideas tend to be naive? Isn’t the device itself the best description of the process or processes to be illustrated? In the example of the Merc V-12, don’t we have the interactivity and adaptation to external inputs in a variety of circuits (electronic, thermodynamic, kinetics of gases, etc)? Don’t a lot of people already get it without getting all aesthetic about it and having to show it at the MOMA? I know people that would look at a Bosch turbocharger rapturously, in the same way that some people would look at a Bosch triptych. Or perhaps you have to actually make a turbocharger at home in order to really get its significance and be able to partake in the confrérie of techno art? But for me, what I find most lacking in the tech-art projects is the element of cleverness or surprise that grabs you by the throat and takes your breath away (the unheimlich manoeuvre) or the beyond the common-place as well as a scientific understanding of the principles at hand that would elevate these two projects from the mundane to the sublime. Do these simple presentations reflect McIntosh’s and Kirschner’s lack of appreciation for scientific and technical finesse or is this a reflection of the poverty of current artistic discourse? What if I were to put a multi-meter across the electrodes of Kirschner’s piece and looked at the needle oscillate? Exactly, so what!

Cosmogony of the Liver

Like all beginnings that have come undone and all the ends that subsequently have come to be, that which binds every thing in relation could no longer do so, and, yes, the center could not hold: the divine energy of the universe had once again made itself known as the celestial intervention of its own undoing. I embrace you death for it is only through you that life is felt! Life comes into being at death’s door and in death’s den is where life comes to be. For no matter its duration, life is but a slow path to a much too quick demise and death is never swift enough in its begetting of new lifeblood. Order gives way to the disorder of becoming as darkness emerges from pulsating light to eke out passage on the pilgrim’s path. Abandon your steadfastness to the unfaithfulness of order in the same way it abandons you as it yields to its undying constancy to the ever-changing nature of disorder. Embrace the errancy of migration and dispersal; the way of the unknown, on a sea of uncertainty, unguided by stars, helmed by faith. From the very same impurities which cause emergence and becoming, the very same substances that will ultimately decide my existence and role, that which I reject as the not-me yet shall define the very essence that gives meaning to what I am, and from which I derive my nourishment and sense. The tree of knowledge of that which is salutary and that which knows how to dispel evil has spread its branches deep within me and guides my ways. A wave ripples, an arborescence of quicksilver and crimson and gold glimmers as the tree of becoming that branches out within every possible reach within me. And I have not forgotten what you have asked me: that surface that covers my dendritic excrescence, that pertains to me alone, that shelters my untrammelled pulsating viscous cosmos of warmth and muffled gurglings, I would have to answer that it is the product of intension, extension and expanse that allow all things to exist together yet blind to each other. And I cannot tell you more about the lifeblood that courses through my being any more than I can tell you about the lifeblood of that emptiness which contains that which contains the universe: the ethereal vapours that clothe the becoming raindrops that meet the river that flow into the sea to meet the oceans of uncertainty and evaporate as the red mist of morning and become the purple clouds of dusk. For they all exist as intervals of differentiated many and as one: what constitutes the ocean constitutes the drop, and drops do constitute the waves of which the sea is made. One or many, many or one. They are not the same but the many feel as solid as the one and the one is sentient like the many. To look, to see, to touch, to smell, to hear, images all of which I am not, but reflect that which is not there as if it were in ways in which I can comprehend but never really understand. The closer you look, the less you will see. The more you seek, the less you’ll find. No thing is every thing and every thing is no thing. Where the two shall meet is where you will become one with the present. The past is at your back: turn around and it will be in front of you like the imagined future that is yet to be but has been. The future is behind you: turn around and it will face you, uncharted and unknown, yet imaginable and predictable, like the past that it dictates and draws towards itself and is doomed to repeat in infinite variations of itself. You will find difference in the repetition and order to the repetition and similarity to the disparity for chaos fuels the appetite of order’s false satiety to exist as one. And static and unitary as you would like the object of your being to be, from however many vantage points you wish to compose an image of it, it will be the same but never alike. Its every facet is a facet of some thing that is other to your being even though to it linked you are as one. And to that expanse which is infinite and unknowable yet determinate and convergent, I would apply the God-given factor of 1.7 in determining the fractal dimension of extension of its being in order to determine its infinite expanse.

Let there be light

Apparently any kind of electromagnetic radiation can either be particle or wave depending on how one chooses to look at it. Looking at it as a stream of particles makes it easy to visualize and the wave is easy to represent as a squiggly line doing its sinusoidal ondulations as it courses through space. And we say that it travels through space at 186,000 miles per second. But what travels at 186,000 miles per second? The photons as tiny little particles of light traversing the universe like a stream of shooting stars? Or is just a manifestation of the characteristics of the wave function?

The frequency established has a specific wavelength which in turn has a specific velocity but nothing is really going anywhere, just a whole lot of shaking going on! The wave is not a line wiggling in space, it is more of an expanding pulsation of intensification that ripples through space where the frequency remains the same unless disrupted by gravity. This means that it is not only the medium that changes as the radiation pulsates through it but the intensity itself of the lightwave that is changing as well. Now, once the sine wave is established, does anything really move or does it simply stand in place, doing the wave, like spectators at a hockey game?

As I take in light's pulsations, I bask in the everpresent now. I can see the waves rolling towards me, surging beneath me, and receding into the distance. What is it that made Einstein think of waves and trains and what does that have to do with alarm clocks?

The Pulsating Onion of Spacetime

It doesn't get any more basic than this. On page 1 of Cinema 1 Deleuze writes "Space covered is past, movement is present, the act of covering." How exactly does it do so? What is the moving? What is the direction of forward motion and where is the behind that is being left?

The process of movement transforms the space in which it happens: it re-texturizes it as it ripples through. In order for covering to take place, there must be displacement. Isn't that particular and curious all at once? The words actually say it as we use the spatializing metaphors of language as in “to take place”. Yes, exactly. How exactly does movement cover space? It doesn't, it stays put and shakes like hell; the speed, hence time is in the shaking. It's the pulsating onion of spacetime doing its thing! Space is voluminous background whereas movement happens through it, within it, without going anywhere. Or is it time? The movement is within the space but is not a part of it, nor constitutive of it. Why should space be divisible? And why should it only become “visible” when there is a change, when there is an acceleration? When there is light? This would mean that there is a difference between motion as displacement and motion as vibration. Particle or wave? Space can only be when there is change and the only motion that allows this is vibration because it is in vibration that change occurs. A constant state of displacement, i.e. constant velocity does not allow space to form because the relativity is constant and does not allow the observed/observer relation to take hold. What moves relative to what? Who moves relative to whom? Is it the space that is covering the motion or is it the motion that covers the space? The term displacement hides a variety of “things.” What does displacement displace? Space? And where is it displaced to? To think of displacement, one must conceive of a substantial body that occupies all void not occupied by other entities. As the body is moved from one place to another, ethereal space fills in the volume immediately which our object has just vacated. Displacement also hides the heterogeneous nature of movement except in ideated circumstances—displacement happens when one feels acceleration or change in the temporal or spatial representation of the event. Apparently, photon inertia covers these bases.

Newtonian time conceives of itself as homogeneous and continuous and Newtonian space as a homogeneous and continuous entity that is somehow anchored at its origin and allows an ideal displacement to happen homogeneously relative to a static background, just like time. But if both “entities” have the same properties, does that not make them not necessarily the same, but alike? We tend to think of time as linear, and space as voluminous. What’s that about? Is time the textural difference between one location in space and another? Is time the how-happens as opposed to the when-happens of the where-happens? Is time simply the qualitative change of being?

Stand up and do the Wave!

In the green book, Arie Altena writes on “art” projects by Thomas McIntosh and Roman Kirschner. McIntosh’s project Ondulation in which the invisible is once again rendered visible “consists of a basin filled with 2,000 litres of water, which is gently made to move by sound coming from speakers installed underneath. A pattern of waves arises on the surface of the water. Beams of light trained on it reflect this pattern onto a projection screen on the wall.” I must say that I had to laugh when Altena expresses his exasperation at “visitors who cannot resist tapping on the glass of the basin to create new waves. The piece was not designed for such interaction.” Who are these pretentious mortals who deign interfere with the unfolding of the divine plan?

The thing I find most captivating about McIntosh’s demonstration is that it made me think about vibration not only as an interactive process but as a potentially adaptative and evolutive one: as one adds waves, the interaction changes, i.e. becomes complexified and takes on new patterns that stabilise with time until disrupted either by new audio waves (or pesky humans). These new patterns may be more or less beautiful, more or less complex in appearance, but they demonstrate that with each and every new wave that is foisted onto the system, the overall pattern of the reflection changes into something else. Cool!

But isn’t this also the way affect works? Doesn’t every interaction beget a new affective outcome? Could this be called the montage effect of affect? (WW Eisenstein S?) Except that in the case of real-world, open-system affect, the montage effect happens not as a result of two already existing affects, but is infolded into a pluri-multitude of already-there affects that have undergone an infinite process of recursive interaction with each other. Ow!

The second thing I found interesting about McIntosh’s demonstration is that in thinking about vibration as an interactive “evolutive” process it made me think of vibrations of another sort, at another durational level. If we break matter down, we inevitably come to find that the more it is broken down, the less particular material there is to constitute it. There comes a point where the particles are so broken down that we end up with wave functions which amount to no certainty of there being anything anywhere to form what we usually constitute and conceive as matter. One is left with a conceptual ideation of the possibility of something (whatever) coming into being that somehow ends up becoming being―within this vibratory interactivity of waves and wave functions, the interaction yields a standing wave that constitutes the resonance of being. I know that this is a shaky argument, but I think that this thinking of vibratory interaction can also be applied to thinking about affect metaphorically as a wave pattern constituted in turn by other waves.

The third thing I found interesting about McIntosh’s demonstration is that in the creation of the projecterd wave patterns we could see areas of intensifications of darkness and lightness with areas of gradation in between. What jumps out at me is that in considering rhythms we tend to think of them as discrete individuated binary constructions: black and white dualities (toc, interval, toc, interval, toc, interval, etc) when in fact there is attack and decay to the incipiencies of both decay and attack themselves and to the intensifications as well. The philosophy of process cannot think in terms of entities without always keeping two things in mind: that no thing is static and that nothing is static. If you is, you is in “changement”. Being of any kind is never static, even in the standing wave that is the duration of whatever entity. And in its predestined and unavoidable interaction with any and all other entities, the individual entity is part of one quaking, shaking, vibrating entity of being.

In his article, Altena also mentions the “art” work of Roman Kirschner. The object consists of an electrolytic ferric chloride solution in which iron wires subjected to low electrical currents are suspended. Over time, crystals begin to form and grow from the suspended “electrodes” and as the voltage running through the wire-crystal-electrolytic solution changes as a result of the altered conductivity due to changes in concentration in the electrolyte as the crystals grow, the differences are fed into a computer, applied onto a 4/4 pulse and converted into sound. Wah! Wah!

Apart from the making process audible and visible, what drew my attention was the question of the form coming into being―the pretence of the hylemorphic. Other than flicking on the current, what induces the crystal to form out of the solution? If I have a jar of potential happening, what is it that I need to make being come to be? I’d put the jumper cables on that question and gun the engine no problem!

It's Nuthin', Honey!

Let’s say you start with nothing as in “I got plenty of nothing!”

There is so much nothing, it doesn’t know what to do with itself. It just sits there, moping, doing nothing.

There is no past, no future, because nothing is all one huge homogeneous nothing that doesn’t exist. It is eternal present, tenseless, where everything exists simultaneously but doesn’t. It rides the cusp between past and future unable to become and unable to realise itself as nothing emerges from the undifferentiated homogeneous chaos of nothing. There is no time for anything because there is only continuous nothing. There is no motion and displacement is meaningless because there is none of either. Transcendentally, there is absolutely nothing and because it is homogeneous there is nothing to relate to itself other than the nothingness of itself. There is no distinction between time and eternity because they are irrelevant in the way that present and eternity become one at the asymptotic meeting point of past and future at a present in infinity that is nothing. It is pure instantaneity. There is nothing by which to compare nothing to; there is no contrast; no differentiation; nothing to order; nothing to distance. Nothing is coexistent with itself and simultaneous in its becoming nothing throughout its nothingness. There is no cause and effect, because nothing is unchanging and so there is no cause and there is no effect to the change that is non-happening. In nothing there is no succession, because succession is meaningless in nothing, there was nothing before and nothing will come of it. There was never an a priori and there will never be an a posteriori. There is no origin to nothing and no eschatology to nothing. Nothing will never be anything, it will just be an impossible everything of nothing. There is no experience of duration because there is no becoming or unbecoming; the only emergence is nothing from which nothing emerges. There can be no memory to nothing because there is nothing to constitute an image of the past that can be transposed from the past or projected in to the future because past and future are non-existent and there are no images to be created from the chaotic homogeneity of nothingness. In nothing there can be no estimate of time elapsed because in nothingness there are no predicates, no background for differentiation, no future to differentiate it from whatever present is stasis. Nothing is 100% certainty. Nothing has no expanse, space or extension. Nothing cannot be contained in a receptacle and cannot contain nothingness as it has no boundaries or limits and because it is nothing in its infiniteness of nothing. Nothing is not space; it is neither empty nor full as it is not. It is not what is outside the universe or the universes or the multiverses. It is dimensionless and infinite in its nonbeing. Nothing is indivisible because nothing cannot be divided. There is nothing to divide. There are no objects or subjects in nothing, no subjectivity or point of view. Nothing is not relative to anything else or to itself. In nothing there is no place, position, or order. Potentiality is infinite in nothing, but there is nothing to catalyze incipiency. Mathematics, geometry or abstract thought of any kind cannot exist within it because there is nowhere for them to take form or take place in nothingness. Nothing is so homogeneous in its nothingness that being here or being there means nothing because they are both the same, identical in every respect nowhere. It is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Nothing is concretely unitary in its nothingness.

Faith is everything in nothing, because it engenders desire and thus action which in turn begets affect and gets the whole ball of wax going. And then you jump off the cliff and hope that Nietzsche was a liar.