Sunday 24 January 2010

Diversion Through Jurassic Park

I woke up this morning full of thoughts about what I might write on this blog today. My enthusiasm for research and learning is at a very high level at the moment, especially after I spoke to my professor about my dissertation ideas and was told that they weren't awful! That was all I really wanted when I imagined how our chat would go, I was simply hoping that I wouldn't be told to forget all the research and thinking I had done so far. In some ways I feel as though I'm setting out to solve a problem, or at least resolve the issues that have been concerning me for the past however many years.
Thinking is all I seem to do at the moment, and this week it may have been to the detriment of my reading. I had plenty of plans for reading but they seemed to get sidelined somehow as I thought through the main themes of my research.

I've only just begun to read the texts suggested by my professor but their mere presence in my 'office' is like a calming force, re-affirming my interests and expressing far more articulately some of things I think about cinema and screens. For example, here is an extract from Anne Friedberg's The Virtual Window,
'As the beholders of multiscreen "windows," we now receive images - still and moving, large and small, artistic and commercial - in spatially and temporally fractured frames. This new space of mediated vision is post-Cartesian, postperspectival, postcinematic, and posttellevisual, and yet remains within the delimited bounds of a frame and seen on a screen.' (7)

For some bizarre reason I was thinking about this whilst watching Jurassic Park last night. Laugh all you like, but the technology to be seen in that blockbuster from way back in 1993, like many films, demonstrates the development of user interfaces that are designed to extend human vision. The scene in which Lex, a 'hacker' taps into the parks control system to turn the phones and door locks back on, first of all induces a giggle when she utters the line, 'this is a UNIX system- I know this!' but also displays a nice graphic that shows the viewer how Lex is able to 'see' the whole of the park all at once and simply click each icon to get progressivly closer to the location of the right control. For all that the graphic may be an unrealistic depiction of what a real system such as that might look like, the scene closely resembles an earlier one in which Hammond attempts to guide Sadler via a 'walkie-talkie' (I love that name) through the corridors of a bunker, using a blueprint map. Hammond acts as her eyes, and talks her through what he can see, in theory what she should be encountering in the bunker. After another dead-end is reached, good old Malcolm tells her to simply follow the pipes. Hammonds' vision, transferred to speech and mediated throught the radio transceiver is not adequate to guide Sadler and instead she relies on her own vision, likewise Lex's vision of the park is extended through a representational graphic that is mediated through the screen of the computer, being able to 'see more' she can control the environment in which she exists. That's the theory anyway.

In terms of what Freidberg is talking about, and continuing my thoughts from last week, we can think of mobile phones and the ever present iphone and soon to be released Googlephone, as devices that we are constantly in touch with that which enables us to, 'see more'. Not only do we have graphics to guide us through text mesages, music stores and a connection to the internet allowing us to get information or images wherever we are, the aspect I find so facinating is the digital camera either by itself or on the moblie phone.
You will have done this at some point and if you haven't you might have seen someone doing it, but I'm always interested in the people who record videos of their experiences as they are happening, holding up a frame through which to view that which they can see and feel in that moment. I see this a lot at gigs and concerts, people holding up their cameras/phones to get a shot of the band. I wonder if that person would have the same experience if they had surrendered their recording device and merely relied on their unmediated senses of vision, hearing, touch etc, to experience the event.
The video they record may be for the use of an absent friend, and it will be sent as information to that person, and seen through one of the many 'windows' Freidberg lists. There just seems to be a fear that if we don't capture our experiences (and this is a reference to Sontag), they won't have really happened. We want to be able to look again, after the event and examine what our experience was, to be somewhat outside ourselves, looking in.

The photograph, or rather image of a photograph above, I took when I was on the Southbank in London for the LFF. I was by myself and taking snaps of passers by in the bright morning sunlight, my attempt to capture an image of what it was like to 'be there'! I've posted it here because it captures an image of my presence though the shadow that I cast on the sand below the walkway. Thinking about the way we record our presence, and by that I mean how the individual records their presence not how the individual's presence is captured by others, I feel this photograph nicely demonstrates how I extended my vision first of all, by being able to see myself (my shadow), and then by photographing it and seeing my image cast on the sand and then framed by the window of my cameras' digital screen.

These thoughts lead me to the requirement of more reading, so I will do just that.

As an aside, other films/T.V series I watched this week:
Nowhere Boy. Sam Taylor Wood.
Arrested Development. Mitchel Hurwitch
Climates. Nuri Bilge Ceylan.
The Gleaners and I. Agnes Varda
Shoah (first two hours). Claude Lanzmann.
You, the Living. Roy Anderson
Cloverfield. Matt Reeves.
35 Shots of Rum. Claire Denis.

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