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On an Invitation for a Disturbing Event: Context Number 1 (Image, Excess and Space)

 

 

This essay constitutes the first part of series of essays that contextualise and discuss the process of making a set of images that constitute the invitation for the first event of the Faculty of Minor Disturbances, the comet.

 

 

In Phalènes. Essays sur l’ápparition, 2 Didi-Huberman presents the moth as the epitome of the movements between the image and the real; of the apparition of the image as real, to argue that an image is not always the same, just as a moths transform, mutate, and undergo metamorphosis. It is transient. At the centre of his study is the importance of seeing an image not as a static, petrified, dead thing, but instead as something constituted by movement, that is alive and thus has a productivity beyond representation. Curiously, the association of image and movement is not far from the a medical condition known as  Mal de Débarquement Syndrome (MdDS). A treatment for MdDS consists of being in a small empty room, with nothing but a small device above and behind the person being treated that projects a grid of multi-direction moving lights at variable light intensities and speeds. It is something similar to a disco mirror ball. The idea is to create and excess of moving information for the brain causing strain that after several days readjust to a normal status. The illusion of movement produces a real affect and effect and has had some therapeutic. It is through the creation of an image of movement, which is also a moving image, that the disease can be treated. This is the starting point for the images attached to this short essay.

 

MdDS (Mal de Débarquement Syndrome), is a neurological disorder, disturbance, that leaves patients feeling like they are always in motion. In very simple terms, the brain does not seem to adjust when there is no longer any movement as for example in train or car travel. The result is that to begin with there is the constant re-enactment of the body movements that were responses to the vehicle. After some time these wobbles can also give way to a new bodily sensation, as if the body itself had become tired of playing the same game and imposes a change. The movement is then transformed, mutates, into stillness and leads to cognitive impairment. Within the whole of a disease, within its unity and continuum, it poses fundamental questions: Where does one sensation finish and another start? When does a symptom emerge and another fade away? What order and spaces do sensations, symptoms and the incapacity for their naming occupy? This raises a further set of questions about representation: When one does not have the words either to name or even to describe what one feels (emotionally or physically) how does one express it? Although one can feel the condition very precisely and clearly, it is almost impossible to describe it precisely and clearly. This is a common problem with diseases in that what seems to be a simple task, to describe what one is feeling at a given moment, becomes impossible. And, within different descriptions of the same disease and its symptoms, it becomes difficult to even recognize or diagnose which disease it is being described? When facing the difficulties of describing what is felt, and present, but invisible, and thus also absent, one can either obstinately insist on an objective description, believing such demand to be possible because  it is archetypical, or to release oneself from such constrains and use one’s imagination, phantasy, working through and exploring, metaphors and analogies in a speculative way. For example the condition can be pictured, made as an image, imagined,  but not represented since there is no precise, objective, referent. It becomes a construction of an image into which one can, and possibly should delve, as in creating the apparition of an image one is also moving between the virtual and the possible as Didi-Huberman suggests in Phalènes. Essays sur l’ápparition, 2. Thus,  The question emerges: can an image re-enact the disturbances of a disease?

 

 

This account of MdDS as well as its treatment set the context for the creation of the invitation for the comet, the first event of the Faculty of Minor Disturbances: anaglyph images I made were set to create a disturbance. An anaglyph image in a very immediate way allowed for the creation of a visual disturbance, producing an invitation to move away from a descriptive representation of the event. It allowed the creation of a phantom or an apparition, which, as Didi-Huberman says, are both of the same order, since both are phantasy, that it the faculty of producing visual apparitions; the kind of imagination that goes behind imitation as it emerges out of what is invisible, instead of the visible. Also, by moving the focus of attention for the prints out of its alleged theme - the comet, it opened up the possibility of having multiple or no themes, thus setting a disturbing, nonsensical, tone to the event itself. It produced an homology with the call by asking, ‘What is this event all about?’ ‘What are the participants supposed to do? How do we name the event? In which category of events should it be placed?

 

I made silkscreen prints using an anaglyph image process since it is a stereoscopic image that recreates a three-dimensional effect by means of producing an image for each eye, which is then decoded as a three dimension image. The image is only one, but is repeated twice along an horizontal axis, each time in a complementary colour (contemporaneously red and cyan are the most used colours, being its predecessor the red-green pair that is used for the invitation). Using glasses with coloured lenses, each one matching one of the colours used in the image will trigger the visual cortex to fuse the two images into a single three dimensional one. The degree of separation between the two coloured images determines the depth of the three-dimensional image, and the sequence order of the colours (the red image being to the left or to the right of the cyan image) determines whether the three-dimensional image recedes or advances. The three-dimensional image is not immediately apparent, it requires that an adjustment to what is being demanded, thus creating a push and pull movement between seeing and not seeing. A pulsing between appearing and disappearing; presence and absence; of one thing being present at a given moment and at the next moment something else becoming present. More profoundly it is a movement between being in the presence of an image and being in the image. A two dimensional image, through which, with the glasses, one can go inside, or to this other dimension, which reveals a three dimensional image. An anaglyph image is thus a search for something that is neither a symbol for a missing thing, nor a representation of a thing.

 

The anaglyph image becomes an image with movement animated. However, this movement is not a movement between the gap of a two dimensional and a three-dimensional image. It is a movement between layers, between dimensions, between realities. What is aprehended is not a three-dimensional object in a space, but multiple flat layers in space, each having their own flat object - drawings- that have been made to interact with each other. The comet as name for the event, its description, can now also become part of the movements of the image, and be freed from representation. Breaking the comet into pieces, like a tail and a core, and asking what is core is and what is tail, asks what can a tail be? Or what else can the core be? The thing becomes separated from its image, and a play of visual analogies that opens the comet to new possibilities, or to the possibility of becoming something else. Is it a comet or the texture of paint on a wall, the texture of a dirty floor, of tree bark; limestone and bacteria on a clay pot that hosts an exotic plant; deep underwater creatures; ancient depictions of miracles; the infinite drawings made by geometrical tools? Pulsating between being a comet and something else, or multiple other things, in this process of coming and going between dimensions, between spaces, the multiple drawings of the elements that inform the comet become the conduit of the anaglyph experience. And, in being so, they open up the image to the pleasure of the movement between the two and the three-dimensional image, the pleasure of experiencing the distance between seeing and touching.

 

The anaglyph image creates what is seemingly a simple pleasure, the pleasure of a magic trick. The allure of wearing strange paper glasses with coloured lenses to watch a film on TV. A trick is played through the body, but is it an illusion? How is the body being deceived? As with a magic trick knowing what it is, how is done, terminates the pleasure. The parallel lines in two colours give it away. The image sis familiar and one knows what it is, and thus one may not want to experience the trick again. And, what is usually seen as an easy entertainment, an easy source of pleasure is deemed vulgar, not suitable for a sophisticated minds, as everything that is deemed of easy access is often regarded as negative. A paradigm that insists on diminishing everything that is related with physical, bodily, pleasure. And yet, as with, for example the circus  or the carnival which also reveals its mechanisms to produce an entertainment with an easy laugh, it remains a magical place. A place where fantasy and reality are undifferentiated, a place of excess. This sensation, this pleasure, this simple game, is counterbalanced by the elabourately constructed image that produces this same pleasure. The process of producing the invitation images as silk screen prints created an excess which came from opening up of possibilities, of unfolding paths. In this the excess arose from experimentation, with the possibilities that are opened through changing and moving, playing with small variables in each print that were introduced within the process of experimentation. The final images may look almost exactly the same, to the point that is not always possible to distinguish the difference. This led to making the invitation as an absence of a final image, there are at least 676 used in the film of them, however, the exact number is in itself meaningless, it only indicates the extent of the excess of production, the excess of possibilities. The excess opened up movement, different kinds of movement, the last being the moving image (http://trans-techresearch.net/disturbance.html). This excess, this process, the anaglyph image has ultimately disclosed the possibility of experiencing the physical pleasure of abstract space.

 

Rita Cachao

 

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Reference:

Didi-Huberman, G. (2013) Falenas. Trans. Preto, A. & All. Lisboa: KKYM, 2015.

 

 

 

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