Quest for Hallucination

Seeing the image, as described by Barthes, is so invested in time. Taking time, watching - and now we want still images to move, to give more, and at the same time we want the moving image to be arrested. Speed and stillness frustrate us equally.

A property of viewing is withdrawing from the image, the silence of the closed eyes, fixing on the lingering trace of the image, letting the most poignant aspect materialize inside of us.

Barthes says the photograph is a totality. It is complete and without future. Is this true? Does it need to have a future?


Friday 20th February.

The landscape is devoid of people. It is not immediately recognizable. Truly a landscape speaks to a person on an individual level. I see, I construct.... a tenable connection is made. It is impersonal, hyper personal, easily inscribed with one's own reality. A reflective agent. i see now in the static image the vision of speed, the threat of blur.

The silent witness:
'Partly because of the muteness of the medium itself, the crowd is presented as a group of silent, static observers. They are witness to the spectacle of light and dark, a territory natural to the photograph. These are moments of temporal suspension that bring the distant events and their dislocated solitary observers together in a metaphorical community of silent witnesses' - Jim Harold. Harold also states 'virtual proximity has become more real than the physically local'.

re: TV. TV is so passive. The viewer's fears/desires are neutralized and there is no opportunity or space for challenge. On-line screens are less passive, perhaps hyper-active, still wanting to be told something, though needing to control the input/output in a passive receptive mode. Have we tricked our brains into thinking? No? We are still as ignorant but with the delusion of autonomy.

'[film is] a confined space, only a rectangle of white light' - Sugimoto. Zummer speaks of 'pre-existing inanimate things' and 'a radical change in form address, access and transmission.' Mulvey states 'presence of time itself can be discovered behind the mask of storytelling' (presumably the fiction-narrative of film).

Benjamin - it is through the instrumentality of the camera that: 'an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored.' (YES!)


March 17th

All sides are radiating from a shift in colour. The perception of reality operates outside, or rather, away from the totality of an image (in our minds). Counting, tracing, mapping, all elude to a certain amount of control (that our minds may have). Drawing forth from a shadow is a shift in existence through movement (a projection?). Yes it was, but then, also.

Colours are screens, further disorientating, taking the image further away from a sign that can be named. You cannot give everything away too fast. Lean over - do not show me your face. Your face is the easiest reflection of my own self, the easiest thing to see, without it I want to touch you instead - pull you into me. Who is that? What is that? An obsession.

We want the slow creep in the photograph, the pause and delay in cinema. We need time to process the image yet we demand the essence of movement. A total stillness indicates a lack of any possibility of engagement. It is the expanse between being told and having discovered.