Phenomenology

Phenomenology

It was the philosopher, Merleau-Ponty who most successfully challenged 'Cartesian perspectivsim’.  He argued it is that perception can only exist through the whole body, that perception is not only intellectual but must include the visceral, the senses and the emotions.

"The body is our general medium for having a world.[i]" 
—  (Merleau-Ponty)

Here he goes on to dismantle the dualism in Cartesian principle by stating;

‘In perception we do not think the object and we do not think ourselves thinking it, we are given over to the object and we merge into this body which is better informed than we are about the world.’[ii](Merleau-Ponty, p. 238)

This is radically opposes the prevailing hegemony.

 ‘I think, therefore I am’ and almost overriding it by what could be termed as ‘I perceive, therefore I am’.’(Ajana)

In doing so Merleau-Ponty firmly places the body back into the frame and the mind back into the body and therefore the ‘body’ back into the world. Whilst doing so he also puts places the body as part of the world. In other words the world contains the body and the body contains the world.

As I stated the alarm with which many regard new technologies as having the potential to undermine the human being is evidenced in the popularity of the cyborgs, Avatar and in sites such as ‘Second life’.

To some extent it is the Cartesian rejection of the body that has fuelled the belief that we are in danger of living, as Hayes points out, a ‘posthuman existence’.

Hayes descriptions of ‘the posthuman’ are the apotheosis Cartesian thought.

It [The posthuman view] privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life…..

The posthuman view regards the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born[iii]. (Hayes, p.3)

My interest is on phenomenology’s influence on Interactive art installations.

I will be looking at work that has been created by Interactive artists using motion tracking in conjunction with phenomenological intent when creating work. I will be placing emphasis on work that uses natural body movements in its interactivity, as part of an attempt to both make explicit embodiment and to explore some of the outcomes of doing so aesthetically and conceptually.

I believe that the reason there is now interest in phenomenology with new media artists is because some of the principles of phenomonolgy are embedded in the technology itself so that , for example,  Lev Manovich suggests

Physical space now contains many more dimensions than before, and while from the phenomenological perspective of the human subject, the “old” geometric dimensions may still have the priority, from the perspective of technology and its social, political, and economic uses, they are no longer more important than any other dimension. (Manovich)

Although most interactive modes of communication are still screen based, Manovich goes on to point out that the ‘line of sight’ has expanded to include mobile devices, surveillance cameras, gps, radar amongst others. This means  that our spatial understanding is experiencing a paradigm shift which is being determined by the technology itself; in other words it is the technology that is making us challenge the Cartesian view because it no longer ‘fits’.

Marshall McLuhan’s statement that ‘We impose the form of the old on the content of the new’.[iv]  seems apt to remember.

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[i] Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Phenomenology of Perception)

[ii] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London:

Routledge, 20021962), p. 235.

[iii] How we became post human Hayles, Katherine N, 1999, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,Literature, and Informatics, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 

[iv] McLuhan and Fiore, 1967, The medium is the Massage p. 86 New York: Random House

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more inspiration from Rohtko

I have dropped the using bitmapData because although the effect it gives is good, it ends up obliterating itself in a a short amount of time and turns the whole screen black including the cursor. Since what I am aiming for is a gentle and slow transformation of the image triggered by movement, I am now using the blur and glow filters together and changing the color using a timer. This has meant learning about arrays, filters and timers in AS3. It is going well and working! Since I have now reached the point of getting a functioning application, the time has come to concentrate and think more about the conceptual experience. For this I went back to the source; Mark Rothko and have been reading about what he wanted to achieve in his work and the intended  relationship between the painting and the viewer I propose to take some of his ideas and apply them to this installation.
see below for some of the ideas I am most interested in.

'And I think one of the things that makes this extraordinary quality of Rothko’s canvases is that they are almost like blank cinema screens. You almost have the sense you, as the viewer, now begin to project onto the canvas.  So there is a space for response.  It’s also very much about duration.  It is how long can you look? ' 

http://www.tate.org.uk/tateshots/episode.jsp?item=16698

transcript of curator’s video commentary on Rothko exhibiton

'In the dimness the paintings appear at first fuzzy, and move inside themselves in eerie stealth: dark pillars shimmer, apertures seem to slide open, shadowed doorways gape, giving on to depthless interiors. Gradually, as the eye adjusts to the space's greyish lighting - itself a kind of masterwork - the colours seep up through the canvas like new blood through a bandage in which old blood has already dried. The violence of these images is hardly tolerable - as Rilke has it: "Beauty's nothing / but beginning of Terror we're still just able to bear." Here we are in the presence not of religion, but of something at once primordial and all too contemporary.'

On a notecard from the 1950s, Rothko had written, in his usual clotted style that yet makes his meaning entirely clear:

"When I say that my paintings are Western, what I mean is that they seek the concretization of no state that is without the limits of western reason, no esoteric, extra-sensory or divine attributes to be achieved by prayer and terror. Those who can claim that these [limits] are exceeded are exhibiting self-imposed limitations as to the tensile limits of the imagination within those limits. In other words, that there is no yearning in these paintings for Paradise, or divination.On the contrary they are deeply involved in the possibility of ordinary humanity."

John Banville writes a personal appreciation of Rothko after a visit to Tate Modern's Rothko Room.

http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue7/rothko.htm

It is also true that the process of building the application has turned up some ideas of its own. Each iteration determines the next step to be taken, it is very much a case of trial and error. I see this process as being at the core of the creative process. I am most successful when I allow ideas to live as 'trials'. ie if I do this will it achieve what I want or not? only by acting out this kind of approach are questions answered. It is a inquiry. In some repsects all the iterations that will lead to final outcome are as much a part of the installation. In other words I do not have success with making a plan/design and then building it.