"…the story of affect and its encounters"

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essay questions, essay structure.

What is Deleuze’s concept of the affection-image?

Why/how does Deleuze’s affection-image equal slow?

How does my precursor project show that affect equals slow?

Why does this matter/ how does this contribute to interactive online video practice?

+ve -ve

In terms of my research graph what became clear is that I really enjoy researching, reading and taking notes it is the motivation to turn this into writing that I find particularly difficult. 

There are three negatives on my graph, which are sketching out my essay plan, redrafting the essay and reading and thinking about any feedback. 

In terms of the sketching out my essay plan and redrafting the essay, these are things that I could definitely improve on to make my writing reflect the amount of research that I’ve done and I always feel like this is an issue in terms of my writing not articulating or not getting exactly to the point that I want it to.

The anxious essay plan:

I always have this anxiety in writing out an essay plan because I find it hard to find structure in my research, whilst I can see how my research connects and know enough to flesh out the essay I always find it difficult to structure in a way with the most clarity. In light of this I don’t often spend enough time on planning and go straight into writing, which can make my writing unclear and a bit messy, even though the content is there.

The daunting re-drafting:

In terms of re-drafting, I think I’m getting better at this because I am actually treating the first time I write the essay as a draft, which make re-drafting possible. I find the task of re-drafting daunting because you need to be quite critical of what you have written and find it quite difficult to have that objectivity necessary to draft properly because I am so connected to the research and don’t want to cull or re-write. However, I have found this really necessary in terms of fixing up my structure, in my first essay for Adrian I realise that if I had of re-drafted properly my structure and sentence order would be a lot more coherent.

The nervousness of feedback:

Feedback makes me feel nervous, even though it is always useful I have this horrendous fear that I’m going to get attacked, which realistically has never happened. I’m not sure exactly why I find feedback such an awkward experience and I think, which is kind of separate from this research grid that I don’t like showing people unfinished work. This is similar to my relationship with re-drafting, which is having to think critically about my work. I also feel that I need to take the feedback on better and make the feedback tangible to my work and use it to make it better.

To overcome these things:

With the essay plan I think I just need to have more focus to work towards focusing my research into the question, rather than trying to expand the research question to encompass all my research. This is probably a reflection on my research in that I probably go down a lot of dead end, irrelevant research paths. Therefore, I need to focus on what parts of my research will best and with the most clarity answer the question at hand and then what parts it will answer. I also need to spend a lot of time working on what answers the question and break that down in a more succinct way, which is probably the help I really need.

In terms of re-drafting I think this can be overcome through really thinking about what answers the question, what doesn’t and how can my work be better structured towards clarity. I feel that I sometimes overcomplicate things through my writing and therefore properly re-drafting may help to solve this.

Feedback is something I’ve got to just suck up and embrace and also give myself the time to embrace it, not search for feedback in the closing hours of having to hand something in. I feel if I have myself the time and thought through the feedback and applied it I’d be a much better researcher.

affective interactive video

Some notes I’ve taken from Adrian’s drafts on affective stories:

Affective interactive video needs to be listened to, to be read, and read not used. Works like this have voice, and voice is essential to affective interactive videos.

Perception: seeing, watching, noticing
Action: doing, responses to situations
Affect: enlargements of moments and experiences that lie between noticing and doing 

article which discusses the materiality of images in online environments

rambling through a brain block.

Deleuze concept of the affection-image has two things that I am predominantly interested being it’s position as single entity, ie. exists outside of the temporal coordinates of the narrative or sad face in white space and that it is a centre of indetermination between seeing and doing, or perception and action. 

What this offers for interactive video is a framework, which is specifically attuned to the affordances offered by software systems such as Korsakow. This is because within interactive video you as user become a ‘centre-of-indetermination’ you watch a video and then have numerous options, in which to forward your journey through the work. In conjunction because the affection-image does not narrate, it does not refer to anything else specifically, which provides more possible connections, or ‘in’ and ‘out’ points. Therefore, due to the multiplicity of possible connections the user will make patterns and associations, which are complex, their progression through the story doesn’t piece together causes and effects, but perhaps a more poetic relationship between images.

"Korsakow can also be seen as part of the digital humanities: the pursuit of ‘traditional’ questions about the human condition that have been re-energized by a broad-based embrace of digital media."

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"Whereas the other images act and react on all their facets and in all their parts, here we have images which only receive actions on one facet or in certain parts and only execute reactions by and in other parts."

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softvideography & affect

Yesterday in class we talked about the “horizon of understanding” and what your hypothesis is. Basically, you what this means is that you have two premises and the connection between those premises is your hypothesis. For instance, in my research I have affect and interactive video and the connections between those is my hypothesis ie. affective interactive video, and what that means. The “horizon of understanding” is the intersections between these bodies of knowledge and how it is not about using Deleuze’s affection-image to provide a grid over which to think about interactive video, but to look at how interactive video and affect push towards each other and the affordances of each and how they work together.

This is something that I feel that I am more able to do now after reading some of Adrian’s articles on softvideography, because they look at how softvideography is different from hardvideography, or in other words how interactive video is different from cinema. Therefore I can use this to think about affect, and the overlapping points between how Deleuze conceptualises affect and how softvideography is conceptualised.

‘The recognition that each track within the work is in fact capable of being an independent entity is a major paradigmatic shift in terms of traditional cinematic practice’ 

(Miles, “Softvideography”)

This differs greatly from cinematic practice, where ‘decisions are singular, as one shot is selected in lieu of another and then inserted into a fixed sequence’ (Miles, “Softvideography”). In other words in the softvideographic possibility that each individual video can be connected with numerous other videos each video loses it’s reliability on other shots to create sequential meaning. This defines a clear connective point with Deleuze’s affection-image due to it’s position as an entity, ie. 

‘the close-up does not tear away its object from a set of which it would form part, of which it would be part, but on the contrary it abstracts it from all spatio-temporal co-ordinates, that is to say it raises it to the state of Entity’ (98, Deleuze)

and

‘The affect is entity, that is Power or Quality. It is something expressed: the affect does not exist independently of something which expresses it, although it is completely distinct from it.’ (99, Deleuze) 

and

‘The affect is independent of all determinate space-time; but it is none the less created in a history which produces it as the expressed and the expression of a space or a time, of an epoch or milieu (this is why the affect is ‘new’ and new affects are ceaselessly created, notably by the work of art).’ (101, Deleuze)

The affect image exists, to some extent, independently of the spatial and temporal coordinates of canonical and sequential narration. For instance, in The Passion of Joan of Arc, her quality of sadness exists as an independent entity of expression, in Dreyer’s framing of her face in a close-up, which presents her face against a white non-determined background. This shot presents her sadness in and for itself it presents sadness as separate from what caused that sadness. 

Therefore due to the position of Deleuze’s affection-image as single entity, which does not refer explicitly to what determined it or what it will determine it holds a clear connective point to interactive video, which presents videos as single entities, the videos have to exist in and for themselves. In other words the hypothesis of my research because of this connection is that Deleuze’s affection-image provides an image which is the most appropriate for interactive video because it expresses a power or quality in and for itself, and therefore due to one of the fundamentals of what constitutes softvideography as differential from cinema is that the video elements of the work remain as independent entities (Miles, “Softvideography”)

Cited works:

the virtual and the actual in hard and soft video

I read Adrian’s Programmatic Statements for a Facetted Videography, which bring into light some nice connections between cinema editing, interactive video and affect, which helps to clarify some of the things that I have been thinking about.

The difference between hard and soft video:

The easiest way as Adrian notes is to think about editing, in making a film ‘the video work is malleable and fluid in quite extraordinary ways while being edited, but once committed to publication these features are removed-it becomes resolutely and immutably flat.’ To quickly elaborate the shot is the only whole in a film and these smallest units can be realistically ordered in a plethora of different ways, which is done in the editing, when shown to an audience this order of shots is fixed and is no longer malleable. 

In contrast softvideo is a ‘video architecture and practice that is able to retain this granularity after publication, where videos can be created that consist of shots that no longer have a canonical sequence.’ Ie. The viewer is now in the position of the editor with the means in which to create their own relationships between shots and korsakow as a software system is a means to do this.

The difference between the virtual and the actual

Adrian draws on Levy’s concept of the virtual and the actual and is reminiscent of Deleuze’s affection and action. 

The virtual is a ‘set of possible expanding futures.’ They present ‘possibilities’ which have not been actualised yet, and therefore exists virtually, whereas the actual is ‘those aspects or trajectories within the virtual that actually come to be-that are actualised.’ This in other words is Deleuze’s affection and action-image within the sensory-motor-schema where affection is pure possibility, it is the possibility of action before the action has occured, and if this possibility is actualised it is no longer affection and becomes action.

What this means for my practice

Therefore, as Adrian suggests editing is the ‘activity of actualising the virtual that each shot expresses.’ However, what happens when the shots provide no actualisation of affection? This in some respects is my research proposal, what if only the virtual exists? In this respect can we create an affective interactive video?

The connections are not about the viewer connecting virtual elements to their actualisation but a new form of association, possibly more poetic associations, which remove affection from it’s actualisation in the state of things. 

Even though I haven’t quite got there yet, although I feel close, it is possible to contend that affection is an appropriate means in which to frame interactive video due to it’s multi-linearity. Deleuze’s sensory-motor-schema in some respects is redundant because the very nature of the system is not linear- the videos won’t move from perception to affection to action within the images. This schema is displaced to that of the now spectator/editor where they perceive are affected and act, but not towards the actualisation of the affect-image they saw towards something else…

As Adrian notes as interactive video practitioners ‘our role here moves from being content creator towards the architecture of poetic and possibly autopoetic systems’

References:

Matter and Memory

I have begun to read Matter and Memory by Henri Bergson. I have so far read the first 20 pages and more than anything it helps solidify what I have read in Cinema 1 where everything makes that little more sense and I know exactly the context in which Deleuze is referring to. I also think it clarifies perception, and how in allowing a greater degree of perception allows for the possibility of a greater affection.

‘…a strict law connects the amount of conscious perception with the intensity of action at the disposal of the living being. If our hypothesis is well founded, this perception appears at the precise moment when a stimulation received by matter is not prolonged into a necessary action.’

(17)

From this Bergson brings forth two different modes of perception being pure perception and conscious perception. Conscious perception is perception which is informed by past perception, whereas pure perception does not. I was thinking about this in terms of interactive video and the repetition of videos. What is happening is that the first time you see certain videos they are pure perceptions and therefore each time you see them again they become ‘complicated by memory’ (23). Ie. they change meaning as you begin to make your own meanings of the images through your previous perceptions. In conjunction Bergson also notes that:

‘perception is diminished by one of its elements each time one of the threads termed sensory is cut, because some part of the external object then becomes unable to appeal to activity; and it is thus diminished whenever a stable habit has been formed, because this time the ready-made response renders the question unnecessay.’

(23)

This brings forth a major difference between cinema and interactive video where when watching a film and re-watching a film renders a similar experience, whilst some details may be perceived that you hadn’t previously seen the ‘perception is diminished’ because you know the sequence of events and what will happen and this in some respects does not render activity. In comparison interactive video allows for different perceptions each time, where even though some previously watched videos may be quickly flicked through the spectator perceives the work differently because the relationship between each image has changed.

Furthermore, Bergson notes that:

‘To obtain this conversion from the virtual to the actual it would be necessary, not to throw more light on the object, but on the contrary to obscure some aspects, to diminish it by the greater part of itself, so that the remainder, instead of being encased in its surroundings as a thing, should detach itself from them as a picture.

(19)

This is what as I have previously noted see as happening within my precursor project, where the fragmentation of the linearity of the film has ‘obscured some aspects,’ such as the actual state of things and the roles of the people. Therefore, what has happened is that each has found its place as an individual ‘picture’ rather than a ‘thing’ that exists within a particular time and place. Or in other words the images from the film are not encased within the actuality of the trial, which happens within the actual film.

As Bergson notes this is how we perceive things in the natural world where we take certain aspects of reality, remove them from their spatial coordinates and act according to them because we find them interesting in some respects. Therefore the more or less hypothesis of my research is that by placing affective-images within interactive video and their position as pictures as opposed to things has already removed what we want to perceive from the world and therefore will create a more deliberative action in response to the images.

Reference: