erin manning-coloring the virtual.pdf

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Coloring the Virtual

Erin Manning

Configurations, Volume 16, Number 3, Fall 2008, pp. 325-346 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/con.0.0063

For additional information about this article

Access provided by The University Of Texas at Austin, General Libraries (23 Sep 2013 08:09 GMT)

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/con/summary/v016/16.3.manning.html
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1. Jim Campbell Electronic Interview with Jim Campbell, with Heather Sealy

Lineberry, inJim Campbell: Transforming Time, Electronic Works 199099, ed. Marilyn

A. Zeitlin (Phoenix: Arizona State University Art Museum Press, 1999), p. 68.

Abstract

Jim Campbells sculptural installations and filmic images have

pioneered new ways of looking: the closer you get to the images, the

more intangible they become. The more you perceive their moving-

stillness, the more they move you. This essay explores how Camp-

bells work creates propositions for vision that alter not only how animage is seen in its framed stability, but how the instability of its

composition occasions kinesthetic experience, activating a lively

dialogue between the analog and the digital in a way that calls forth

the future cinematic.

If you even try to measure something, you affect it

Jim Campell1

Jim CampbellsAmbiguous Iconsincludes a series calledMotion and

Rest(2001)six panels of red on black, black on redthat bring to

perception the movements of disabled bodies. You look for the image,

you see the pixels, and then the image appears. The image is black, its

background red. But as you look again, you see red in black, the black

appearing as the force of red backgrounding itself. And then youve

lost it, and you see the black only as the shadow of red, foreground-

ingpixels and image in a tangible struggle for recognition.

325


Erin Manning

Concordia University

Configurations, 2008, 16:325345 2010 by The Johns Hopkins

University Press and the Society for Literature and Science.


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You move back. Now the red seems like a side note to the appear-

ing black figure. You stand at a different angle. The red reappears and

the image stills. You move again and this time, the figure moves with

you. An accident of perception? Cinema or photograph, what is ap-parent is that this movement is withyou, it is a moving-withthat re-

lationally alters where you stand. You cant stand still.

Jim Campbells series of moving stills Motion and Restis a self-

designated accolade to Eadweard Muybridge. But looking again, I

dont see MuybridgeI see Etienne-Jules Marey, I see the enchant-

ment of perceptions play on the imperceptible, I feel movement in

its incipiency. Whereas Muybridges work was about capturing the

still to attach movement to it, Mareys focus was on making felt the

incipience of movement in its very taking-form. Marey was neverinterested in how poses could be combined to elicit a sense of move-

ment; his main concern was mapping the imperceptible within

movements continuum.2It was never an outspoken concern of Mar-

eys to develop a vocabulary of the relational interval or to make

apparent the affective force of movement in the making; his efforts

were consistently empirical and concerned chiefly with document-

ing the imperceptible at the level of quantifiable knowledge. Yet the

quality of perception taking-form remains artistically palpable in

Mareys work, especially in his experimentation with gases. In theseexperiments, he sought to make apparent that which cannot be seen:

the movement of air. This radically empirical explorationradical

because it makes felt the force of the virtual within the actual

brings to the fore the force of the imperceptible taking-form. With

Marey, as with Campbell, what stands out is not the cinematographic

habit of adding movement to a pose, but a direct encounter with

perception in the making. The poses are always already moving.

CampbellsMotion and Restmakes the morphogenesis of percep-

tion felt by staging a force field for vision: we feel the pull of co-at-traction between the red pixelation and the black-appearing image.

In the perceptual remix, as the screen begins to hold our gaze, we

326 Configurations

2. For a detailed exploration of perception and relation as they come together in

Etienne-Jules Mareys work, see Erin Manning, Grace Taking Form: Mareys Movement

Machines, in Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

2009). My reading of Marey is influenced by Marta BraunsPicturing Time: The Work of

Etienne-Jules Marey (18301904)(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), whomakes a similar argument with respect to the important difference between Eadweard

Muybridge and Marey. See also Franois DagognetsEtienne-Jules Mareya Passion for

the Trace(New York: Zone, 1992), and Georges Didi-Huberman and Laurent Mannonis

Mouvements de lair: Etienne-Jules Marey, photographe des fluides(Paris: Gallimard, 2004).


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find ourselves surprised by an emergent becoming-orange, a yellowing

of the redwhite light in a vibratory tuning in and out of the black

foreground. It is not that we chooseto look at foreground or back-

ground, black image or red pixel or oranging of red, it is that lookingitself becomes a tug of war, an activity of foregrounding and back-

grounding that activates a coloring which pulsates between the pixel

grid and the becoming-image. This vibratory mode of vision alters

how we stand with respect to perception: viewing becomes a fury of

pulsating seeings-with. How can an image stand still when perception

is making felt the jump-cuts of its very process?

The panels of CampbellsMotion and Restare composed of hun-

dreds of tiny light-emitting diodes (LEDs), which compose a red grid

that is covered by transparent Plexiglas lying against it at variabledistances. The further from the LEDs the Plexiglas lies, the more ap-

parent the moving figure is to perception as an outline of a body.

The closer to the display the Plexiglas lies, the more present the red

grid. What we see, however, is never the grid as such, or the image as

such; what we see is the feeling of a body appearing in a vibrational

pixelation of the active passage of the between. Our vision fields the

intervals of light and form such that what we perceive is a bodily

feeling coming into appearance. This feeling colors our vision. We

see-with the in-between of the forms coming into appearance asfigure, our vision taken over by redness oranging.

To perceive is always to see more than the actuality of

appearanceit is to see-with the relational tendencies that gather to

propose a oneness of form or figure. What we perceive when we

see a moving figure in one of Campbells panels is a virtual remix

of what is actually there: red pixels tending toward an image

constellation proposed by the transduction of digital code into light.

How we see is specific to the configuration of the screening as

machinic process. No single element of Campbells complex screen-machine can be separated from the other. The image comes forth in

relation to a series of tendencies: the Plexiglas, for instance, is not a

passive support for the image, but an activating force for its taking-

form.

To perceive a figure in Motion and Rest is to see a subtraction

emergent from the relational field of lines, edges, and contours. To

see is to subtract form from a relational field of potential. The figure

emerges in the active backgrounding of the resonant field created by

the red pixelated grid. To actively background is to move-with. This

incites a seeing that is implicated in its own movement, a movement

here tuned to red. Infused by red, the image of the figure taking-form

tends in its appearance toward a certain coloration, even if we note

Manning / Coloring the Virtual 327


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that the figure is clearly black. In the seeing-through-subtraction, the

black figure becomes tinted with the experience of our having seen

red. We look to the figure through what we do not actually seered.

The black body resonates with the coloring of our experience ofhaving seen through subtraction. The figure vibrates with the more-

thanof its actual representation.

We see in movement. The movement is not whatwe see, it is how

we see. When we perceive the constellation of the red grid giving

into form, we see-feelthe reddening of an image in composition. The

reddening is the virtual aftereffect of having seen red. It is virtual,

not seen as suchthe actual image remains blackfelt in a

movement of seeing that tends to red. What we perceive when the

figure appears in Motion and Rest, I am suggesting, is a more-thanblackness of the figure in a tending toward red that animates the

perceptual movement-withof the figure taking-form. The Plexiglas as

transducer of light to form is one of the activators of this virtual

coloring. The coloring of the virtual makes felt the tendency to

always perceive more-thanin this case, more-than grid, more-than

red pixels, more-than black figure.

In a sustained looking-with, Campbells redblack seriesMotion and

Restbegins to tend toward orange. How to account for this becoming-

orange that suddenly takes over vision? Orange is what happenswhen perception can no longer lock in on the strict differentiation

between figure and background. It takes over when we are no longer

seeing the grid as such, but cant quite get beyond it; when we find

ourselves looking-with the light of the pixel, but still see the image.

In this still-seeing a becoming-orange emerges that colors perception

in the making, infusing the experience of seeing the black figure

with an oranging of the field. We feel the figure moving: figure not

as fixed form, but as apparition of light modulating. This is a paradox

of Campbells movement-images :3 the more the pixels are

backgrounded, the more the image appears; but the more the image

appears, the more the pixels are foregrounded as more than pixels,

as colors shading in and out of the moving image. Coloring the

328 Configurations

3. Throughout, I am indebted to Gilles Deleuzes concept of the movement-image;

see his Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Thomlinson and Barbara Habberjam

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). For Deleuze, the movement-image

refers to an image that is not conceived as stillness with movement added, not an

immobile section + abstract movement (p. 2). Building on Henri Bergsons theories ofmovement, Deleuze emphasizes the idea that movement expresses something more

profound, which is the change in duration or in the whole, which means that each

time there is a displacement of movement, there is also immediately a qualitative

change in the whole (p. 8).


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virtual, the pixels are no longer a discrete grid, but a vibratory

machine for an image taking-forman image that is always more

than black, more than still figure.

The how of seeing activated by Motion and Rest is never arepresentation of movement, nor is it a projection of movement. It

is a moving-with of perception in the making. The abstract

movement of the vibrational pixelation tending toward the coloring

of an image taking-form gives us a feeling for seeing. This feltnessof

seeing is itself colored: perception reddens, oranges, blackens. This

coloring comes through virtuallywe never see it as such. The image

appears in an activation of light and movements in-between, in the

interval of the red tending toward its pixelation and the black

tending toward figuration. This tending makes felt the light itself,giving the appearing of the contour of an orange hue. The virtual

interval contributes to the actual imagean actuality that remains

fragile. The fragility of the actual is due to the continual variation in

the field of vision. Perception moves, unstable as it hobbles to the

rhythm of the disabled bodies activated in Motion and Rest. To

perceive Campbells screen-machines is to move with the fragility of

the figures incipient displacements.Motion and Restmakes felt the

force of movements taking-form, a movement-with that does not

perform itself without struggle.In Motion and Rest, movements preacceleration4its incipient

becoming-actualmakes its apparition through red, red coloring the

activity of perception. Red is the dots, the pixels, the LEDs themselves;

red is what stays the same, what is programmed digitally as the

background to the becoming-image: red is the direct expression of

the algorithm poised to transduce light into form. It is through red

that the image appears, the image taking-form in the reddening

blackness of its appearing disappearing. And it is because of red that

orange appears in tandem with a foregrounding of what appear to beblack shadow-pixels. This suggests that while red is the stable support

theoretically, it is more than that in the event of perception. Red

activates a pulsating variation for perception even as it continues to

be a support for a discrete process of image taking-form; red sets the

conditions for its own de-territorialization. We seered even as we see

through red, a seeing that is not a variation on possibilitiesthe

either/or of grid or imagebut a variation on the potential that

activates a new field for perception.


4. Preaccelerationrefers to the virtual tending toward displacement that precedes

every actualized displacement. I discuss this in depth in a piece titled Incipient Action:

The Dance of the Not-Yet, inRelationscapes(above, n. 2).


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In its transductivepotential,5red is much more than the support

through which edge becomes figure. Red is the fabric for the renewal

of process. Transduction is not translation, it is a shifting between

planes that requires a simultaneous shift in process. When red pixelsbecome reddening perception, what has happened is that the process

has captured red not as a given, but as a tending toward. Red stands

in for the impossibility of stability in the event of perception.

Paradoxically, it is the strength of the grids dominion that gives red

the opportunity to be infinitely more than an array of objects (LEDs),

shifting the event toward the variability of perception itself. Despite

its so-called fixity in the form of a grid, it is finally because of reds

overdetermination in the interplay between planes of experience

that the image never appears fixed, that the stability of red shadesinto orange-yellow-white.

Motion and Restmakes apparent the activity of relation that is

perception; it makes felt the relational interval that becomes our

experience of having seen. Looking with the woman limping is a

looking through color. Background foreground pulsing, pixelating,

looking through color is an experience of light and movement

resonating. When perception colors, we see not a figure on its own,

we see-with the active interval of its taking-form. InMotion and Rest,

the interval is seen-with as a variation on color. The interval is theactive in-between of the preacceleration of perception coloring the

virtualmovement taking-form as a figure haloed in a coloring that

is more than the pixelated red of the grid, more than the blackness

of its edging into form.

Red dots make black shadows. Black shadows tend toward red dots,

which merge into yellow-orange-white halos. The figure is blackness

emerging from the unstable ground of color, color as variation on

becoming-figure. Neither strictly red nor black, what we see is the

relational activity of intervals coloring perception in the making.


Perception is a question of movement. Color is a question of light

in movement that folds through differential intervals of hue and

vibration.We never see a color as such. We experience a worlding of

color that resonates between different coloring tendencies.Motion and

Restmakes this felt: its becoming-imagepulses between movement and

330 Configurations

5. For more on transduction, see Gilbert Simondons LIndividuation psychique et

collective(Paris: Aubier, 2007).


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light to make appear the vibratory constellation of the actual taking a

virtually colored hue. This taking on of the virtual in its effects feels

like movement: we experience a shift from the still-movement of the

display to a moving-still of the open screen-machine. Perceivingbecomes a moving-with the screen-machines foregrounding of the

moving-into-shadow of the figure subtracting itself, a subtraction that

creates a becoming-orange of perception. This coloring infuses the

blackness of the figure with a virtuality that colors not the figure per

se, but our experience of seeing it move, of moving with it.

InMotion and Rest, the digital meets the analog. Analog images are

digitized, and digitized images are, in turn, activated for perception

through a re-becominganalog: the digital pixel is transduced into the

analog through the becoming-actualof the figure-image in perception.Digital meets analog in a play of perception taking-form, making

viscerally apparent the relational constructedness of how vision is

experiential. This is a play between what the machine can do and

how experience can feel it: machinic perception. Campbells work

situates itself at the very site of machinic perception, emphasizing

how perception involves much more than eyes. Perception as

activated and foregrounded in Campbells digitalanalog machines

is a complex interworlding between animate and inanimate

movement, past seeings and future viewings, preconceptions andanticipations. His machinic interventions are not representations of

this process. They are machines for the coloring of perception that

make felt the experience of moving vision.

Campbells perception machines are neither strictly digital nor

analog: they make use of analog and digital tendencies to make felt

the strange interplay between the actual and the virtual in perception.

Here, it is important to remember that the virtual is not simply the

not-seenof actual experiencethe imperceptible. The virtual affects

experience in the making. In this regard, it is as real as the actual. Thisaspect of the virtual is key to Campbells work. His concern is less with

the mechanism of the digitalhow the digital renders images through

pixelsthan with the activation of our sensing bodies in movement,

themselves vibratory taking-formsof virtual actualizing tendencies.

The digital is a means to an end: code operates within strict

parameters at the level of possibility, not potential.6Where potential


6. For a detailed exploration of the relationship between the digital and the analog

that focuses on the role of the virtual in the experience of perception and the regimesof possibility/potential the digitalanalog mix call forth, see Brian Massumi, On the

Superiority of the Analog, in Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).


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might be thought of as the springboard that holds in abeyance the

infinite variability that is the open whole of experience, possibility is

firmly rooted in the realm of the already-thought. There is no virtual

actualizing tendency in the strictly digital realm, no potential. This iswhere Campbells work makes a difference to the digital: he creates

machinic processes that reach beyond the actual algorithm, beyond the

limits of the digital, toward potential.Motion and Restis more than a

strictly digital phenomenon: it is a recombination of the digital with

experience. It takes a quantifying system and activates it qualitatively.

Motion and Restcalls forth a virtual interval felt in the oscillating

perceptual experience of seeing beyond the image toward its

vibratory potential. Its panels are forces for virtual activation; they

make palpable the potential active at the cut where experience takesover the mechanism. The mechanism becomes a machine for

perception. When mechanism becomes machinic process, there is a

felt shift from the preconditioned parameters of possibility toward

an open individuation of potential. Campbells processual machines

attend to an in-between that is neither strictly cinematographic nor

digital, neither moving image nor still image. Motion and Restis a

proposition for a new kind of imaging process: a moving-stillthat

emphasizes not the pose, but the sense of the alwaysin still.Motion

and Restmoves stillness in a regime of aberrant continuity.This concept of moving-still is Campbells proposition to the

future cinematic, the realm where digital and analog coexist in an

open field of potential. It is a proposition for the force of vision

transduced into an outside of thought7outside not because it is

outside the process, but because it attends to the more-thanof actual

experience. When the force of vision tends to an outside of thought,

the complex interplay between the actual and the virtual is made

palpable. We feel itit colors experience in the making. Campbells

work plays with the interval of force taking-form. He creates acinematic movement of thought where digital meets analog in a

complex and incessant return and remix of measure and open whole,

possibility and potential.

David Rodowicks The Virtual Life of Filmaddresses the issue ofhow the digital alters modalities of seeing in the cinematic realm. He

writes: where analog media records traces of events . . . digital media

produce tokens of numbers.8The celluloid or 35mm film catches

332 Configurations

7. The thought of the outside is a concept that Deleuze uses with respect to theconcept of the diagrammatic in Michel Foucaults work; see Gilles Deleuze, Foucault,

trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

8. David Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 2007), p. 9.


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life in the passing, recording it in a one-to-one relation whereby the

input and output are conceivably the same. The digitalization of the

same input undoes this one-to-oneness, transducing the event into

numbers that can, in turn, be transduced into image. Rodowicksuggests that in the era of the digital, the image that once seemed

so cinematically stable has become divested of its real-timepastness,

its potential to express duration as the force of the virtual. The digital

images structure is not based on an input to output model. It is

modular, with values that are highly variable: the powers of the

digital image derive from its mutability and susceptibility to

transformation and recombination.9The key difference, perhaps,

for Rodowick, is the question of the image itself: Can the digital be

said to work with images? Or does the digital forsake the image assuch, operating instead strictly with coded possibilities, only one of

which may be to reconstitute a semblance of an image-based

constellation?10

Deleuzes cinema books provide a vocabulary for the ontological

difference between an image that portends a certain organicitya

composition that attends to continuity of movementand a regime

that concerns itself less with an image per se as with the opening

toward potential the direct experience that time provokes. He locates

this second kind of image, which he calls a direct image of time,in the crystalline regime. In the crystalline regime, what is at stake is

less the image itself than a relational constellation that re-gathers

light and movement toward an internal aberrance of time and space.

When time is directly experienced as aberrant movement, truth of

continuity at the level of movement or narration is no longer at

stake. Here, what Deleuze calls the powers of the false, are

foregrounded.

The powers of the false of the crystalline regime imply a will to

deviation that leads us away from the question of truth or realism,which too often animates the discussion of the turn from analog

cinema to digital cinemaa discussion that tends to focus on loss.

What is lost in the passage from the analog to the digital is not the


9. Ibid., p. 103.

10. While the question of the relation between digital cinema and celluloid-based

cinema may not be relevant to all in this post-cinematic age, it remains a key issue

in many film departments, where the move toward digital is often referred to as the

loss of something. This something is rarely defined, but my sense is that it has to do

with the perceived loss of a quality of perception, a certain completeness of visionafforded by the material of celluloid itself in its machinic relation to the projector. To

experience this attitude, one has only to enter a film class and observe the reaction of

students and professors alike to the showing of a film on disk instead of in its true

celluloid format.


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real, but a certain vision of light meeting movement in a mirage we

call realism. This realism is a mutating quality, as Rodowick

suggests, and may therefore be a false starting point for a discussion

of the ontology of digital cinema.11

How the light moves through aprojector to animate a moving image has little or nothing to do with

realism. It has to do with a particular mechanistic process for making

the perceptible appear. In the move toward the digital, there is no

question that the quality of light changes, and in that way, what

seems real will also change. But this is not about the truth of the

real. It remains a question of ontological difference at the level of

perception itself.12

What is lost in the passage from analog to digital projection is the

specificity of the machinic support and its singular uses of light.While there is no denying that the machine has an effect on the

image, this loss is another machinic processs gain. At its best, what

the digital can do is make propositions for perception that go beyond

the mimicry of an analog process. Campbells digitalanalog remix is

such a proposition. Experimenting with the role of light for

perception, Campbell extends the problematic of the future

cinematic beyond medium-specificity. He machinically intervenes at

the level of the perceptual experience, focusing on the effect the

digital pixel has on the coloration of visual experience, thus

334 Configurations

11. Every realism relies on formal effects, and no doubt, perceptually, these effects

are cognitively conditioned. But cultural criteria are also needed to comprehend a shift

in the nature of how effects of realism are produced; see Rodowick, Virtual Life of Film

(above, n. 8).

12. Digital projectors no longer shine light through a semi-transparent material such

as celluloid, but they do use light as a mechanism for projection. They project an array

of pixels that produce an image at a relatively small size ranging from six to twelve

inches (1530 cm), [which is] then magnified with a lens onto a large screen. The

LCDs used in digital projectors are approximately the size of a small color slide, and in

fact the projectors operate very much like a traditional slide projector. The main differ-

ence is that the slide is constantly changing. . . . Both CRT and LCD digital projectors

are known as transmitive projectors, meaning that light shines through the image to

project it. There is another class of digital projectors, however, known as reflective

projectors, which provide a much higher quality of image. These digital projectors

have an array of tiny mirrors, one for each pixel. As these mirrors reposition themselves

to either place light on the screen or not, they produce shading which creates the illusion

of a complete image (from http://www.wisegeek.com/what-are-digital-projectors.htm).

John Belton adds that [t]hrough output to electronic displays, the digital images

fundamental form is . . . tokens of numbers that neither occupy space nor change

through time. . . . Part of the image that remains constant over several frames is there-fore given to us in frame one, then replaced in successive frames by a numerical code

that refers us back to frame one. For that particular part of the image, we are seeing one

brief moment of time and space again and again (in Rodowick, Virtual Life of Film

[above, n. 8], p. 137).


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experimenting with the experiential openings the digitalanalog

remix provokes.

In the mainstream digital-cinematic realm, the constraints of the

medium are not often explored in as much complexity as they mightbe: digital cinema is created to look and act like analog cinema.

Therefore we tend to locate the digital in the realm of the cinematic

phylum. When, however, the machinic constellation proposes new

experiential potentialas it has already done in a long tradition of

video art13what occurs is the creation of a new phylum. Thus

opportunities are created for the foregrounding of new processes for

perception. The creation of a new phylum stands out in Campbells

work.Motion and Restis a proposition for an opening toward a future

cinematic that is not the future of cinema so much as the future ofperception activated through machinic means. Campbell does not

work within an existing vocabulary for the seen in movement or the

movement seen. His proposition to the future cinematic moves

toward an ontogenetics of perception before it lays claim to a

medium.

The digital is characterized by Campbell as a medium for

quantification. He expects no more of the digital. Its strength, he

says, is that it can count. Where he sees the creative process at work

is in the exploration of the open entanglements of the digital withthe unquantifiable. For Campbell, the artistic process is an investment

at the level of a qualitative intervention that asks what engineering

can do at the limit where it turns experiential. Engineering, he

says, is about solving problems, and art is about creating them, but

in both cases the important thing is to ask the right question.14

Asking the right question means experimenting with the works

modulations via the works own ecology of process, such that the work

begins to ask its own questions: I almost always put what I would call

aesthetic/electronic adjustments into the works, so that when I havefinished I can tweak the work both visually and rhythmically . . . to

change a work as my understanding of it grows.15

To develop an understanding of a work as it grows is to become

attuned to the ways in which a process creates relational intervals

constellations of potential that open it up toprearticulatedthoughts,16


13. See, for instance, the work of Steina and Woody Vasulka (http://www.vasulka

.org) and Bill Viola (http://www.billviola.com/)

14. Campbell Electronic Interview (above, n. 1), p. 64.15. Ibid., pp. 6465.

16. Prearticulated is used here in alignment with preacceleration, suggesting a

virtual force for articulation that envelops acctual articulation. It should not be mis-

taken with the pre-thought. Prearticulation is the immanent force of thought/articula-


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concepts, perceptions, movements. It is to make palpable the poten-

tial that animates actual experience in the making. Analog processes

have access to this potential in its wholeness: they field the event

with all of its noise. The potential of the whole is retained in analogprocesses, gathered into the time-pressure of the works becoming-form.

To perceive is to catch the images becoming remarkable in the

vista of wholeness that makes felt the virtuals effects within the ac-

tual. To perceive is to feel the rhythm of an ecology of processes

taking-form. In a digital process there is, strictly speaking, no such

open ecology. Nor is there direct access: we cannot experience code

unless transduced into an analog display. The ontological difference

with a digital image is that the image we see is actuallyone possibil-

ity among many, its recomposition not a copy of what was, but arendering of a determinate set of parameters into an infinite of possible

formats. The digital has no object. It plays with the futurity of percep-

tion by proposing different real-time outcomes from the parameters of

its algorithm. It is not image-specific. But it is event-specific.

The projection of an image, analog or digital, requires light to

make apparent the contours and edges that become image, their

shadows receding into a three-dimensionalizing background. Light

is constitutive of the coming into expression of the image. What we

see when we see an image is the subtraction from what Deleuze callsthe whole or the plane of immanence: The plane of immanence

is entirely made up of Light. . . . The image is movement, just as mat-

ter is light.17That matter is light means that in perception, there is

no actual object as such, only movement: active backgroundings

and foregroundings that create relational intervals that activate

edges for perception. Edges and contours can be thought of as attrac-

tors for the becoming-form of movement transducing into matter

within an ecology of relational intervals. We see through them when

we catch an image in the passing. A singular image comes to lightthrough a subtraction from the wholeness of potential perceivability.

As an image takes form, the relational intervals of its edging into

figure become inflected with imaging/objecting potential. Edge be-

comes line becomes forma form always in contrast with that which

does not actualize as form, remaining light. This coming-through-

edge of image taking-form occurs through movementnot because

336 Configurations

tion that intensifies and complexifies lived experience. For Deleuze and Whitehead,

the prearticulated first expresses itself affectively. This concept is explored further inPropositions for Thought in Motion in Erin Manning,Relationscapes: Movement, Art,

Technology(Cambridge, MA., 2009).

17. Gilles Deleuze, The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Min-

neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 6061.


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the interval moves, but because movement activates the relational

opening through which perception takes place. The image we see is

the activation of an incipient movement transducing an interval

into forma transduction of movement into mattering-form. Move-ment becomes matter in the taking hold of the nowthat is the event

of perception. This is a taking hold not of the image as such, but of its

relational coming into appearance: we see-with the virtual interval in

an actual taking-form of light becoming shadow.

Light forces form into appearance by backgrounding itself as light.

We see matter taking-form as figure always in a play of appearance

disappearance, where what is foregrounded is not the image per se,

but remarkable points. These remarkable points are in counterpoint

to the plane of immanence: they are lights shadowings. Lights shad-owing in Motion and Restcolors the virtual. Light and movement,

movement and color are co-constitutive of perceptionmovement,

not as quantitative displacement but as qualitative activity, bringing

into relation perception as worlding. We see-withas much as we see

through: In the movement-image there are not yet bodies or rigid lines,

but only lines or figures of light.18The quality of seeing is always in

step with what we see, which is in step with how we see. We see the

feeling of perception taking-form. As Vertov says, the eye is in things.19

Experientially, there is therefore little difference between thecinematic and the digital phylum, even though their machinic

processes are markedly different. Campbells work articulates an

experiential vocabulary for their coming together that foregrounds

the transduction of the machinic into the perceptual. Motion and

Restis the creation of a machine for light that situates us at the cusp

of two kinds of light events: that of the pixel, and that of the analog

image. Our approach to the artwork is not one that chooses between

these two modes of experimentation with vision. The perceptual fields

us before we control it. What we feel in the seeing is not one or theother mechanism, but the unresolved tension of their being brought

togethera bringing together activated by movement, in movement.

Campbells work makes us move. We are moved to perceive.

Electric Perception

Rodowick writes: On electronic screens, we are uncertain that

what appears before us is animage, and in its powers of mutabilityand velocity of transmission, we are equally uncertain that this

perception has a singular or stable existence either in the present or in


18. Ibid., p. 61.

19. Paraphrased in Deleuze, Time-Image(above, n. 16), p. 40.


15/22

relation to the past.20Electronic screens have no objects, yet neither

are they passive displays. Active interfaces for the constellation of

dynamics, electronic screens activate electric perception: they coincide

with perceptions relational activity. Whether we situate this relationalactivity as the experiential in perception or whether we understand

that the digital screen itself mimics this process of perception is

moot, because how we see is what we see.

Perhaps the issue is that of the object itself. If perception is

characterized as the replaying of an object-based renderingas though

perception came fully formed in object-contoured constellations

then there must be an ontological difference between analog

perception, where screen equals image/real world, and digitized

perception, where screen equals mutability/falsity. But if we agreethat perception does not in fact come fully formed, that it is not the

adequation of objects preformed into vision received, then what we

experience in the interplay between the analog and digital is less an

ontological difference than a new machinic process through which

perceptions inadequation with so-called realism takes place again

under different conditions. To each event its own process.

The experiences of watching Alfred Hitchcock on celluloid and

experiencing Campbells Illuminated Average #1Hitchcocks

Psycho (2000) might be a case in point. Both the celluloid versionof Psychoprojected onto a silver screen and Campbells piece are

events for the watching that activate imagistic tendencieslight and

shadowwithin a Hitchcockian vocabulary for cinematic perception.

But their conditions for emergence are significantly different. The

silver-screen event of watchingPsychois experienced from a seated

perspective in a darkened room. It is a narratively enhanced event

for the perception of singular stylistic parameters associated with

Hitchcock. That the projector is moving the film is secondary to the

experience: what we see from the perspective of the theater seat is animage taking-form for perception in a context of a terrifying interplay

of light and darkness that brings to the fore objects and figures in the

making. There is no single scene inPsychothat exists for perception

fully formed.

Campbells digital recasting of HitchcocksPsycho, which involved

the scanning of every frame of the film to create one composite still-

moving image, is equally an event, albeit one that foregrounds a

different posture. Now we are no longer sitting in the cinema, but

standing in the gallery. The loss of imposed stillness guaranteed to

some degree by the seats in the theater opens Campbells

338 Configurations

20. Rodowick, Virtual Life of Film(above, n. 8), p. 94.


16/22

Illuminated Average #1Hitchcocks Psycho to a different kind of

viewing, one that is activated in a moving back and forth that

alternates the perspectives for the taking-form of images. The gallery

experience of moving in and through space is one of the factors thatalters the conditions for the taking-form of the event: Campbells

piece proposes movement in space, catching us in an incessant

receding and return, a moving-with that animates the shadows,

light, edges, and contours of Campbells thickly textured screen-

machine.

Campbells still-moving is not a simulacra of HitchcocksPsycho.

It is what William Forsythe would call a choreographic object: a

proposition for movement in the making.21 Campbells screen-

machine creates an active interplay not of, but withHitchcocks film,moving the film beyond the cinema even while building on the very

experience of watching Psycho on the silver screen. Machine for

perception activating thepresent-passingof a memory of having seen.

Do we see the same film? Of course not. But do we have an experience

of perception that activates the movement of images through light

within a Hitchcockian regime of perception? I would say yes. In

Campbells piece, we experience the singularity of light and shadow

that animates Hitchcocks film under new conditions. In this instance,

there is no need of narrative. The activity of our moving-with isanimated by our having-seen, which is intimately tied to our having-

heard. We see in the context of previous conditions: Campbell

proposes Psycho reframed. This is a framing in action, a direct

investment in the rhythm of the films perceptual multiplicity. What

we see through Campbells work is cinematic futurity at play.

The open frame makes the machinic phylum of perception felt.

We see through the interval of seeings. We see with Hitchcocks

vision of light and shadow. We see with our experience of having

seen. Campbell asks not that the digital and the analog stand aloneas mechanisms for image creation. He demands that they cooperate

to create a new machinic phylum. He asks that their active doing be

their coming-together. The issue thus becomes less one of digital or

analog, than one concerned with the specificity of the conditions for

viewing different mediums propose.

A similar concern faces Michael Snow with respect to the archiving


21. For a more detailed engagement with William Forsythes notion of the

choreographic object, see Choreographic Objects on his Synchronous Objectswebsite,http://synchronousobjects.osu.edu/media/inside.php?p=essay. An in-depth exploration

of the concept can also be found in Erin Manning, Propositions for the Verge: William

Forsythes Choreographic Objects,Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation Issue 2

(2008).


17/22

of his early work. In an age concerned with extending the lives of

works created by machines that are becoming obsolete, Snow must

contend with the problem of the disappearing slide projector, a key

component of many of his early pieces. The work in question is titledSink (1969), which is a photography-based installation work

composed of eighty slides of the filthy, paint-flecked sink of Snows

New York studio during the 1960s. The installation-based work is

made up of one wall-mounted photograph of the sink, and one

continually changing image of the same sink projected next to the

photograph by a slide projector. These images share the same

dimensions and are, in essence, the same sink, their difference being

a question of light.

Light is the key concept for this installation work. Each of theslides was created through a process of lighting the very same sink.

The result is a constellation of colored images, which tend toward

greens, reds, and yellows. For each photograph, different-colored

gels/transparencies/filters were held in front of two standing lights

set up on each side of the sink. All changes in the perception of color

in Sinkare created by a double process of light: once at the level of

the photographic process, and a second time through the projection.

What we see when we encounter the installation is less a series of

different images than an experience of the continuous modulationof light through color variation. As Snow says, the matirewas, and

is, light.22

To conserve such a work means conserving not only the

photographic content, but the play of light on color. The concept of

the piece would be lost in a digital transfer. A PowerPoint presentation

could be made to reflect the same images, but this process would

forego the specter of light and movement as it couples to create the

color effects in the piece. Snow has therefore decided to retain the

play of light in the analog composition of Sinkby photographing theinstallation in each of its illuminations. The resulting eighty

photographs of the installation will become its future composition.

These will act not as mimics or simulacra of the content of the work,

but as a riff on the concept of light in the changing dynamics of

machinic process.23

340 Configurations

22. See http://www.whiteboxny.org/prog_list/prog_list10.html.

23. It is also worthy of noting that Snows engagement here is not with realism orwith nostalgia, but rather his concern is with a singular concept and its recasting under

new conditions. To play with the light through a completely different mode of

exhibition (eighty doubled photographs, rather than one installation of rotating slides

in tandem with one hanging photograph) is a pragmatic and creative way of inventing


18/22

Still-Moving

Movement-images are not framed shots disconnected from one

another by the presence of the cut. They are serial. They make vision

appear not by cutting off the image from its nextness, but byenergizing the relational whole of perception in the making. The

frame is a limit-concept that activates the interval. Framing islimitation not in the sense of holding apart, but in the sense of

foregrounding remarkable points that come to expression through

the relational interval activated in and by perception. Framing

delimits a vision of the now from the whole, transducing lived

duration into present perception. This now of perception is mobilea

force for activation that makes felt the virtual passage into the next

now of the lights realization as image. Movement-images areexperienced as arrays of activating contours for the felt relation of

perception in the making. In Campbell, movement-images are

ensconced in a crystalline regime. They activate the felt continuity

of durations virtual field in the same gesture as they foreground

movements aberrance. Motion and Rest foregrounds movement-

images at the relational ede of direct perceptionaberrant

continuity.

The disabled, still-moving body in Motion and Rest is more

relational contour than hard edge. It is equally a stilling of movement

in the making and a movement of stilling in the making: still-

movement. It expresses duration in its halting, making felt the activity

of holdingsaturation or rarefaction, depending on the status of the

limitthat characterizes movement in-forming. Campbells figures

are movement-images on the cusp of the virtual; they frame a setting

into place of the image, tending toward color. They make felt the

dividual aspect of perceptionperceptions taking in of the changing

field of relations, such that nothing can change without the wholeset of relations themselves changing. In Campbells words, if you

even try to measure something, you affect it.24

The Experiential Digital

Deleuzes direct image of time, or time-image, is an ode to the

experiential digital, which is cinematic in the sense that it brings into

complex configuration the relation between time and movement.

With the collapse of sensory-motor schemata, the movement-image is

backgrounded to make way for a time-imagethe crystalline regime.


productive means at the intersection of analog and digital technology (Erin Manning,

conversation with Michael Snow, September 2008).

24. Campbell Electronic Interview (above, n. 1), p. 68.


19/22

Not opposed by any means to movement, the crystalline regime is the

tending-toward aberrance that makes felt not the continuous flow of

movement so central to continuity editing, but the indiscernabilityof

the virtual and actual within a given experience of time. This co-composition of virtual actuality within the becoming-image makes

time feel out of joint. The force of time is directly felt.

When the force of time is felt, we feel a productive tension in the

now of the event of experience. Time doesnt simply pass: it is active

on several planes at once. Motion and Restis a time machine that

makes felt this activity of becoming in a resonant rhythm that moves

on several planes within the same event of experience. What claims

our attention is less the image as such than the rhythm of its

continuous appearancedisappearance. We see with the coloringarray of pixilation, which has now become less a grid that a coloring

of perception in the making. To look is to look-with this taking-time

of the image taking-form.

To perceive is to catch the virtual in the making, but so briefly

that it gives time not to the seeing, but to the unseeing: we see the

image appearingdisappearing into the coloring of its background.

Attractionsubtraction: from black and red to orange-yellow-white,

we see less the figure than its coloring into the virtuality of

perception-forming. Actualization becomes an effort, and with itcomes a certain vertigo. Time machines give us not the linear time

of pastpresentfuture: they activate the futurepast in the present.

The foregrounding of the figure inMotion and Restfully merges with

a present that is always more than one.

The experiential time of the digital as experienced in Campbells

work is of the crystalline regime where the actual and the virtual

coincide in the same image event. It makes felt the time-pressure of

the actual at its limit. This time-pressure is rhythmic, oscillating in

the betweenness of direct-time and aberrant movement. Campbellspeaks of tweaking the work both visually and rhythmically.25

Tweaking the work rhythmically suggests giving texture to the inten-

sive passage of the between that is the relational interval between

the analog and digital. Campbells is a technogenetic technique for

transducing the ontogenetic force of the virtual into a coloring of

perception: perception colors rhythmically in the active interval be-

tween grid and moving image.

Technogenesisexpresses itself in Campbells work as the process

whereby the work begins to take form in understanding, which

doesnt mean understanding the works content, but rather becom-

342 Configurations

25. Ibid., p. 65.


20/22

ing one with the works process as it develops, moving into the

thought of the work as it expresses itself.26Campbell explains: This

gestation period is common in my working process. Often Ill have a

purely structural or technical idea for a new work and I let it floataround in my head for a couple of years before I actually do the

work, waiting for the content to complete the whole.27The content

completes the whole when the support shifts from being a mecha-

nism to becoming machinic, when it activates its own complex

rhythm in the modulation of time and movement. What is sought

at this level is not the adequate workings of the system as it stands

alone, but the qualitative openings created in the active relation of

the constellationartwork-world.

Campbell creates choreographies for perception, not perceptibleobjects. Objects make me nervous he says. He designs processes for

perception in the making, choreographic interventions into the

space-time of the gallery. Choreography here is not of the order of

the already-thought or the already having moved; it provokes

movements in the making that enhance the artworks individuation

in an open field of experience. Campbells moving-stills are still-

movings. They are propositions that initiate the fielding of a virtual

circuit that reroutes perception toward movements as yet unthought.

The Future Cinematic

Perception in the making reveals time as sheets of the futurepast.

Nonlinear time foregrounds aberrant movement, making apparent

that the feeling of continuity was just thata feeling. Linear,

quantitative, continuous movement is a mirage of experiences

infinite complexity. The event will always take its own time and

make its own seeingit will create its own time machine. And its

time will be false, invested as it is with the powers of the false. This

falsity will express itself from within the event as the events will topower.28The will to power expresses not a subjective will, but a

force for thought that activates the virtual wholeness of potential.

This virtual wholeness is not the event. The event is the singular

plurality of the nowness of experience in its opening to infinite

recombination and invention.


26. For a more detailed exploration of technogenesis, see Dancing with the

Technogenetic Body in Erin Manning, Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Technology(Cambridge, MA., 2009).

27. Ibid.

28. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York:

Vintage, 1968).


21/22

The event takes place in the direct-timeof the specious present:29

direct because the event is here and now, specious because the present

lives as the impossibility of a now that already was. The direct-time of

the event is the living-out of the powers of the false. Its coordinatesare devious, determined to confound. It is perception active in the

contouring of the impossibility of seeing all there is, because what

there is is inter, in the between of relational intervals from feeling to

thought, vision to movement, black to red. We see across, through,

with, in direct relation with the disjunctive impossibility of total

connection, total conjunction, total continuity.

What remains? According to Deleuze, [t]here remain bodies,

which are forces, nothing but forces.30There remains the force of

thoughtnot objects, not mediums, not discrete mechanisms, buteffects and affects propelled by enabling constraints. How we see is

what we see, and what we see is how we think. Lived relations not

analog or digital, but experiential. With the force of thought comes

not medium specificity, but combinatorial alchemy. Technology

becomes technogenesis, a shock to thought.31

A shock to thought is another way of saying that thought moves

beyond articulation to the direct expression of time that makes felt

the powers of the false. Thought here is no longer denotative: it

functions at the level of incipient action. Thought is of the order offeeling movements aberration taking-form in the time of the event,

willing perception to liberate itself from a subject. There is no

preexisting subject here that thinks time into being or comments on

a pre-existing function of time. Thought emerges as the force of

prearticulation, activating the play of time out of which the subject

subsequently emerges. Thought individuates, populates the

intricacies of the taking-form, fields the directc time of the event in

its unfolding. Thought is in the realm of the technogenetic, activating

potential within an ecology of lived practices. This ecology includesan individuating subject, but is never limited to it.

Motion and Restis a technogenetic event that activates perceptionin a digitalanalog remix. It proposes not subjects or objects for

viewing, but a machinic intervention for thoughts prearticulation.

This is a thought of the outsidenot outside the event, but withthe

events outside, thought as the force of the whole the event makes

felt, thought as the more-than of an events actualization.

344 Configurations

29. For more on the specious present, see William James, The Principles of Psychology(New York: H. Holt, 1893).

30. Deleuze, Time-Image(above, n. 16), p. 139.

31. For more on the idea of a shock to thought, see Brian Massumi, Like a Thought,

inA Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari,ed. Brian Massumi (New

York: Routledge, 2002).


22/22

Technogenesis works with the outside of thought not to resolve

the content of the problem of the work, but to turn the problem into

an ontogenetic opening. When asked about his process, Campbell

says, maybe I create physical problems by applying science to art.32

Motion and Rests eventnesspropels a thought of the more-than of its

present iteration. It technogenetically alters the ontology of thought,

making felt the unthought in thought. It forces thought beyond the

already-imagined toward the relational interval of emergent events

for thought in the thinking.

Deleuze writes: the cinematographic image must have a shock

effect on thought, and force thought to think itself as much as

thinking the whole.33Thought becomes a force for the powers of

the false when it enters into relation with the undeterminable, theunreferable, into the realm Antonin Artaud called the cinema of

cruelty.34The cinema of cruelty, unrealized as yet as far as Artaud is

concerned, is where cinema [expresses] . . . the dissociative force

which would introduce a figure of nothingness, a hole in

appearances.35The cinema of cruelty is the future cinematic, to

cinema that seeks not to make apparent what we are already

thinking, but to force thought toward the creation of new techniques

for thinking-feeling.36

It is no longer a question of analog ordigital. It is a question tothought itself. The future cinematic creates expression in the making

by foregrounding not the mechanism of cinematic perception, but

the machinic potential of thought in motion. Blanchot writes, as

quoted by Deleuze: what forces us to think is the impouvoir of

thought.37To not yet know how to think: aberrant movement spurs

aberrant thought.

Thought of the outside is directly felt in the relational interval of

perceptions taking-form. It is a seeing-with, a thinking-feeling. This

thinking-feeling extracts the seeing from the subject: subjectivity nolonger has a ground to stand on. Thought is the activating force for

an event ecology that itself alters how we see. In an event ecology,

we see not pixels or figure, but the disjunctive flow through which

image becomes movement of thought. We participate in the disquiet

of false continuity even as it reinvents where we stand.


32. Campbell Electronic Interview (above, n. 1), p. 68.

33. Deleuze, Time-Image(above, n. 16), p. 158.34. Ibid., p. 167.

35. Ibid.

36. For more on the idea of thinking-feeling, see Brian Massumi, The Thinking-

Feeling of What Happens,Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation1:1 (2008).

35. Deleuze, Time-Image(above, n. 16), p. 168.

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