THEORETICAL BRACKGROUND
GILLES DELLUZE
DIVIDUALS
«During that time, the world of screens and the world of men were not, as today, separated; one could go in and out through the screens and both kingdoms lived in peace. One day the people of the screen invaded earth. Their strength was great, but through bloody battles and magical powers, emperor Yellow prevailed. He rejected the invaders, jailed them in the screens and imposed on them the task of representing, as if in a kind of dream, the life of men. He rid them of their strength and form and reduced them to simple and servile representations.
One day, however, they will get rid of that magical lethargy…
The forms will begin to rebel. They will begin to differ from us, to represent us less and less. This time they will break their crystal and metal barriers and it will be the world of men that will be reduced to a mere representation of the world of screens[1].»
[1] This a free version I have done of the tale “The mirror´s animal” from Jorge Luis Borges. Replacing mirrors for screens mostly.
DIVIDUALS AND DELEUZE
Goodbye individuals, hello dividuals. This is the new language of control, according to Deleuze. Instead of seeing people as value, it’s actually the data produced by individuals that becomes valuable in today’s capitalist society. Capitalism today is for a higher-order production – it no longer follows the typical factory model. Instead, the new model of capitalism is wrapped up in marketing. Marketing has become the driving force of consumption today and the actual products have taken the backseat. And what makes marketing even more effective? The fact that an extensive amount of individuals’ information is collected through data and available for analysis.
The article «Spinoza and Us» explains that the body is defined by relations of motion and rest and development… It’s a little confusing, but essentially, this description reminds me that networked individuals are most valuable today – not static individuals. Facebook doesn’t care about Erica Olmstead. Facebook cares about what items Erica Olmstead likes, who she’s friends with, what links she posts on her wall, which public figures she follows, and so on. The value is continuously changing, Erica’s network is expanding, and data miners are loving it.
The ideas presented in Haggerty and Ericson’s article, «The Surveillant Assemblage» were easier to follow. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, the authors explore the abstraction of human bodies into data flows, or «data doubles». In this way, everything that we do (that can be traced through data) is reassembled into some meaningful way – clearly, for the purpose of making a profit. This idea is similar to what I mentioned above from Deleuze’s articles, but the argument is more clear to me. In the surveillant assemblage, people are commodified; their data flows are closely monitored and used by companies for the purpose of making profit. Similar to how Arvidsson discussed branding of life and programmed individuals, the surveillant assemblage allows for the manufacturing of desires. The surveillant assemblage makes it easier to market specifically to individuals as so much of their information is available.
SPATIAL MONTAGE WITHIN MY RESEARCH
Lev Manovich defined the term “spatial montage” for a type of montage that modifies the traditional form of perceiving time in narration and that opposes the idea of succession and sequence. It’s a montage whereby there is no continuity among associated images. It’s therefore no longer one image after the other, but one image plus another. The spatial organization does not seek to prioritize or to offer a fixed path. It’s not so much the images that are of interest, but the relations that can be found between the links and connections of the images.
This “between” implies being aware of what is not in the image, that which remains outside. A “between” that Gilles Delluze singled out as the starting point from which modern cinema developed new relations with thought:
“[…] the deleting of an everything or a total of images in the benefit of an “outside” that can insert itself between them”.
Spatial montage thus seeks to become more an image of thought that a reflection of reality. The intention is not to retell a story but to present an image in which we can get lost, that we can construct, de-construct, and find different senses or non-senses.
Although there is a broad range of artists and works that have tried to reflect the concepts and forms hereby described, my intention is to develop this narrative concept through an interactive montage that uses programming and new technologies. This structure, with hypertext features, gives us access to different connections among the three stories.
The development of the spatial montage will imply working together with a programmer and will be one of the fundamental pillars of the research project for the Master.