Entrance Test

Entrance Test from N Nivreen on Vimeo.

Last five weeks!

38 25 April Saturday

1. sketch up head shots for shoot DONE
   
2. Shoot Emily DONE

37 26 April Sunday

1. Opening skeletal wall, add layers and depth, render out DONE
2. Hand scene DONE -needs more work
3. Side entrance closeup of Emily DONE
   

36 27 April Monday

1. Emily peering in, comped to entranceDONE
2. Thesis 20:00DONE

35 28 April 5 WEEKS TO GO
Write up rest of thesis, format, everything DONE

34 29 April Wednesday
PrintDONE

33 30 April Thursday
Bind DONE

32 1 May Friday
Do up CV DONE
Bird woman bedroom in AE NOT DONE
Mirror room in c4d basic modelNOT DONE

31 2 May Saturday

1. Sketch out design of mirror baroque room 18:30 - 19:30 DONE
2. Model up C4D mirror baroque room 20:30 - 21:30 started
3. Set up bird woman room basic in AE 19:30 -20:30 DONE
4. emily entrance peering 21:30 - 23:30 DONE

30 3 May Sunday

Realistically , the mirror / dome scene takes one week non stop with nothing else, anything else is a plus.

1. Start Collage of plan and section of baroque room 7:30- 10:30
   
2. Model up C4D mirror baroque room 10:30-18:00 a. basic volumes 10:30 - 12:00, b. dome 14:00-18:00
   
3. More bird woman room in AE 19:00- 21:00
   
4. View from inside corridor with Emily looking inside 21:00-22:30
   

29 4 May Monday

1. Collage of plan and section of baroque room
2. Model up C4D mirror baroque room
3. More bird woman room in AE
4. Hands breath
   

28 5 May THESIS HAND IN: 4 WEEKS TO GO

1. Model up C4D mirror baroque room
2. Textures for mirror baroque room (Photoshop files)
   
3. More bird woman room in AE
4. Collect from binders and Hand in thesis
5. 3d model of world aerial view
   

27 6 May Wednesday

1. Textures for baroque room
2. Render out bird woman room
   
3. 3d model of world aerial view

26 7 May Thursday

1. Apply textures in mirror baroque room
   
2. Finish bird woman room
   
3. Eye / cosmos scene - particles in C4d
   

25 8 May Friday

1. Apply textures in mirror baroque room
2. Render out baroque room
   
3. Eye / cosmos scene - particles in C4d Render
4. Eye /cosmos - after effects, electricity effect
   

24 9 May Saturday

1. Opening bedroom door
   
2. Comp Emily into rendered scene - render out in AE
   
3. Eye / cosmos scene finish
   

23 10 May Sunday

Finish mirror / dome scene

1. Comp multiple Emilys into mirror scene
   
2. Finish bird woman room
   
3. Render cosmos scene
   

22 11 May Monday

1. Comp multiple Emilys into mirror scene and render
   
2. Build shelf scene, C4d
   
3. Comp cosmos into eye
   

21 12 May 3 WEEKS TO GO

1. Set up second view of Emily in mirror room
   
2. Make collage section

20 13 May Wednesday

1. second view of Emily in mirror room
   
2. collage section

19 14 May Thursday

1. second view of Emily in mirror room
   
2. collage section

18 15 May Friday

1. Scale scene collage section (bigger scale
   
2. Scale scene collage section (biggest scale)
3. second view of Emily in mirror room

17 16 May Saturday

1. second view of Emily in mirror room
   
2. Scale scene collage section (pulling out of corridor)
3. Print sections and plan
4. Mount sections and plan
5. Print images done so far for portfolio and mount
   

16 17 May Sunday

1. Finish scale scene
2. Dome scene
   

15 18 May Monday

1. Dome scene
2. Put everything together
   

14 19 May 2 WEEKS TO GO

1. Edit and sound
2. More printing and mounting
   

13 20 May Wednesday

1. Edit and sound

12 21 May Thursday

1. CRIT

11 22 May Friday

1. Dome scene

10 23 May Saturday

1. Buy portfolio boxes
   
2. Edit and sound
3. Bedroom mirror scene
   

9 24 May Sunday

1. Edit and sound
2. Bedroom mirror scene
   

8 25 May Monday

1. Edit and sound
2. Bedroom mirror scene
   

7 26 May 1 WEEK TO GO

1. Edit and sound
2. Finish Bedroom mirror scene

6 27 May Wednesday

1. Edit and sound
2. Chronogram
3. log book Me
   

5 28 May Thursday

1. Edit and sound
2. Chronogram
3. Print portfolio and mount
4. log book Emily
   

4 29 May Friday

1. Edit and sound
2. Chronogram
3. Richard helping Logbook
   
4. Printing
   

3 30 May

1. Edit and sound
2. Portfolio

2 31 May

1. Edit and sound
2. Portfolio

1 1 June

1. Edit and sound
2. Portfolio and print
   

0 2 June: HAND IN!
3 June
4 June

to be fitted in somewhere:

Mirror room: cinema 4d extras
Dome room final scene:cinema 4d extras
Mirror room
Dome room final scene
animated tendrils
2 Plans
2 Sections
B(Log) Book
Manuscript / Anatomy Drawing layout for portfolio book

mirror room, mirror test (hideous render)

Just testing how imported movie textures react, they seem fine
I'm going to need to build the scene in entirety, comp emily in, then render this out, then use it as the texture for the mirrors.

textures applied are just tests to see how the deformation of hte surfaces reacts.

Next to build photohshop file for walls and ceiling


tendrils and mirror test from N Nivreen on Vimeo.

Mirror Room, Tendril Test

Speed to be gradiated so growth isn't consistent. Texture to match photoshop textures to be applied to walls.


Untitled from N Nivreen on Vimeo.

15. She is in a vast mirrored hall that encircles her like a strange optical effect but she is in it. It envelops her. There is a light at one end of it, a grand domed hall.
Photoshop.After Effects.particular.footage.

• Photoshop image
  
• Cinema 4d model of this for depth shot
  
• Comped in After effects with lights sfx et

17. She is now below a massive dome, immensely detailed with moving growing parts, the walls below flanked with golden books. The camera moves further and further into the dome, the chop of the fan becomes louder
Photoshop.After Effects.particular.footage. C4d

• Footage of Emily looking up
  
• Comped into aftereffects built room
  
• Comped in After effects with lights sfx etc

Chapter Three: Almost Final

Chapter Three: Entering the Chiasm, revealing the Haecceity

“A flickering brain, which relinks or creates loops – this is cinema”

Gilles Deleuze 1986

In Chapter Two, the internal notion of embodiment was discussed in relation to neuroscience’s developments and discoveries, in this chapter, the second aspect of embodied architecture: the manifestation of a sense of space that allows expression and reflection on its nature will be discussed. Once again quoting Juhani Pallasmaa the Finnish architect and academic:

“The task of architecture is 'to make visible how the world touches us', as Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote of the paintings of Paul Cezanne. In accordance with Merleau-Ponty, we live in the `flesh of the world', and architecture structures and articulates this existential flesh, giving it specific meanings. Architecture tames and domesticates the space and time of the flesh of the world for human habitation. Architecture frames human existence in specific ways and defines a basic horizon of understanding. We know and remember who we are and where we belong fundamentally through our cities and buildings.”

Pallasmaa furthers this point by asking what the closest art form is to architecture and hich is the one we can learn most from. He believes it to be film:

“The ground of both artforms is lived space, in which the inner space of the mind and the external space of the world fuse into each other forming a chiasmatic bind. The lived space of cinema offers a great lesson for us architects, who tend to see our craft through a formal bias.”

I wish to push this statement further and to put film forward as another form of architecture, one which is more suited to representational architectural expression of modern thought and space than its static counterpart.

Why film?

While acknowledging that conventional, constructed architecture still plays a representational role in revealing the world back to ourselves as it did in the past, I argue that the massive upheaval in how we now understand space through neuroscience’s developments demands a new expression. Plasticity and mirror cells redefine our spatial landscape, they describe new complex dynamic networks in flux. They describe plastic subjectivity. They pose deep questions about the symbiosis of states. They describe the existence of consciousness on a cellular level, they hint at what our very consciousness may be. They propose the blending of the chiasm. They describe a new möbius like topology of space, one in which experience and perception feed back eternally.

To represent this as a static building (conventional, constructed architecture) or image (painting) or merely to describe it as a graph, an arrowed diagram or a complex equation (the sciences) or as words (philosophy) is to lose the essence of these new truths. The palimpsest of time and memory suggested by brain plasticity as well as the altered intersubjective perspectives suggested by mirror cells, point to movement, dynamism and the effects of time.

The immersive embodied sense of perception which is now so clear is excellently transmitted and explored using the external embodied architecture offered by the medium of film. The parameters and constraints imposed by conventional, built architecture cannot make the imaginative departure from concrete, physical reality in the manner that a film can, which by its nature is fluid and sensory, fuses sound, movement and image through time creating an immersive version of reality, that can be engaged with.

The complex space that we now understand and thus inhabit is one of dynamic relationships between the self and the world . Our active and subjective position within the world as sensory biological organisms is well described by the filmic medium. It transcends the normal constraints of physical architecture by its multi sensory and time based qualities, through these it gains a ‘body’ of its own and emulates the experience of space we sense from the complex world around us, thereby letting us both reflect upon the nature of this space as well as becoming active participants in the medium ourselves, feeding as we do from the world around us in a loop of perception. We are changed by and change the film by experiencing it.

Vivian Sobchack elaborates upon this reciprocal relationship in The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience,

“More than any other medium of human communication, the moving picture makes itself sensuously and sensibly manifest as the expression of experience by experience. A film is an act of seeing that makes itself seen, an act of hearing that makes itself heard, an act of physical and reflective movement that makes itself reflexively felt and understood.”

In essence the filmic medium manages to both represent the embodiment of space while at the same time embodying space.

Defining Filmic Space:

For the purpose of this thesis I will be using the terms defined by Najmeh Khalili in her essay, Walter Benjamin Revisited: The Work of Cinema in the Age of Digital (Re)production. In this essay she defines two types of space which I feel comprise contemporary current filmic space they are:

Hypercinema which defines the ‘formal aspects of a cinema and is equipped by:

1) virtual reality and digital simulation at the level of mise-en-scene (such as virtual actors, digital spaces and hyper-real motifs),

2) artificial intelligence as an apparatus for capturing or constructing the image, in other words replacing the human eye behind the camera with that of a machine.

She describes how, the medium through which filmic space is now expressed is altering its very makeup, in particular the rules that dictate narrative:

“Since the advent of sound, narrative film has dominated the scope of cinematic experience, to such an extent that much of our film theories and cultural studies have been dedicated to using the language of film to convey a meaning or to decipher its text. The new digital and electronic technologies are well on their way to expanding the narrative dimension of hypercinema.”

Cybercinema is defined to further the “narrative connotation of hypercinema”

1) the poetics of the virtual imagery, or the non-narrative and oneiric possibilities provided by digital technology in creation of images which are not entirely divorced from meaning but are more dedicated to intensity and duration of an experience and to “haecceity” (referencing Deleuze)

2) the cult of digital image production and distribution.

Using this contemporary definition of film I hope to analyse the developments in neuroscience with regard to embodiment and show that filmic space can decipher, illuminate and extend phenomenological and existential notions of embodiment through its liminality and its use of a set of non verbal and transcendental techniques.

Deleuze, methodology, key techniques

By using Deleuze’s theories in particular that of the Crystal-Image I will explore ways to invoke experimentation in film that allow us to speculate more deeply about the self in contemporary space. Cinema like the body can be seen as a mediator of experience and change and the space between the screen and viewer becomes the place of excitement and discovery. The space in which the chiasmic duality merges through reflection and interaction with the spectacle.

“In Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, Deleuze showed that the ‘new cinema’ was an institution that took upon itself the task of creating images of the phenomena that would have otherwise been inaccessible to us. This is why its effects become reminiscent of the actual/virtual state of reality. Also known as liminality, this state allows us to capture the ‘transcendentals’ behind these symbols. By moving progressively from the appearing symbols to the basic structures of the human world Deleuze performs an analysis of a semiotic field (cinema) toward identifying its effects on our conception of the phenomenon of time.”

By using a hybrid approach to deciphering embodied space (through the mergence of philosophy, science and film) creative and new avenues of understanding can be forged.

“For Deleuze, the philosopher ‘works alongside’ the cinema, producing a classification of its images and signs but reordering them for new purposes…Cinema and philosophy are brought together in a continuing process of intercutting. This is philosophy as assemblage, a kind of provoked becoming of thought.”

The ability of cinema to go beyond conventional philosophical or scientific techniques lies in its immediacy and as Deleuze's describes 'preverbal’, pre-linguistic content:

“The cinema seems to us to be a composition of images and of signs, that
is, a preverbal intelligible content (pure semiotics)”

Likewise, Merleau-Ponty’s beliefs in the oeuvre as a valid philosophical discourse are pertinent to the medium of film.

The Crystal Image

The Crystal-Image is a notion that is comprised by a number of theories. It describes the dynamic, folded, symbiotic space between self and world and subject and object and the body that is the link for each of these chiasms, that neuroscience has heavily defined and influenced in the last forty years.

To summarise the key difference between Deleuze’s Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (an analysis of pre WW2) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (post WW2):

“The former cinema, which finds its archetype in the Hollywood genre film, is dependent on movement and action. Characters in the movement-image are placed in narrative positions where they routinely perceive things, react, and take action in a direct fashion to the events around them. The movement-image is a form of spatialised cinema: time determined and measured by movement.”

In Cinema 2, Deleuze deals with the time-image which is the context to the crystal image. The time-image is one of fracture and non rational narrative:

“In the time-image, which finds its archetype in the European modernist or art film, characters find themselves in situations where they are unable to act and react in a direct, immediate way, leading to what Deleuze calls a breakdown in the sensor-motor system. The image cut off from sensory-motor links becomes "a pure optical and aural image," and one that "comes into relation with a virtual image, a mental or mirror image"”

It is characterised by the difference in the techniques it uses in comparison to that of the movement-image:

“In the time-image, rational or measurable temporal links between shots, the staple of the movement-image, gives way to "incommensurable," non-rational links. Because of these non-rational links between shots, vacant and disconnected spaces begin to appear ("any-space-whatevers"). As a consequence, the journey becomes a privileged narrative form, with characters in a more passive role, and themes centered on inner mental imagery, flights of fancy, and emotional and psychic breakdown. The result of this pure optical and sound image is, according to Deleuze, a direct image of time (a time-image or crystal-image).”

The topology of the time-image is useful in describing the chiasmic nature of existence described by neurophenomenology:

“The time image which Deleuze releases from modern cinema gives him a new line of approach to a number of important problems of modern thought: the undecidability of truth and falsity, the relation of inside and out, the relation between the brain and the body.”

It's necessary to understand the Mneosign or Recollection image in order to understand the crystal image. It is defined as:“a virtual image which enters into a relationship with the actual image and changes it.” whereas the Crystal or Hyalosign image, previously discussed in Chapter’s one and two is the next step in this process defined as: "the uniting of an actual image and a virtual image t the point where they can no longer be distinguished."

This can be read as a very pertinent method of understanding the notion of the brain’s plasticity. Although we experience reality directly through our bodies, the mediation of our mind in forming the experience is based on previous readings of other situations onto which the new experience is formed and is formed by. Thus the virtual image of a memory (a previous experience) is always part of the equation in perception of space and reality.

Its use as a method to decipher or create film, that in turn deciphers and reflects upon space is vital. Deleuze’s crystal-image chiasmic properties of memory allow for the mergence of time frames or sheets as he describes them and allows an infinite reflective process on meaning and significance. The crystal image defines the process of image making in cinema, from actual image memory to the cinematographic image / virtual image to a mirror image.

“Mirror is a turning crystal, with two sides if we relate it to the invisible adult character…with four sides if we relate it to two visible couples… And the crystal turns over on itself, like a homing device that searches an opaque environment”

Through the medium of film one sees a reflection and can reflect upon that reflection. The ‘crystal-film’ is therefore the kind of film that exposes the relations between what is being reflected and the act of reflecting. It has the ability through visual and sonic techniques to both immerse the viewer sensually so that they can engage in deep reflection.

Techniques of the Crystal-Image

The Time-Image and Crystal-Image as described by Deleuze offer both an explanation of techniques of cinema used as well as potential creative points of departure for new experimental film makers. Their presence acting as a powerful philosophical tools.

Virtual Reality and Digital Simulation:

The use of virtual actors, virtual landscapes and virtual special effects through Computer Generated Images brings the medium closer to the realm of the “pure optical and aural image," and one that "comes into relation with a virtual image, a mental or mirror image"
The removal in some cases of an actual human being as a central character or a naturally recognisable landscape creates a stylisation of the form which allow for greater allegorical interpretation and reflection.

“Cinema does not just present images, it surrounds them with a world”

CGI’s chronokinetic ability (controlling time , creating time distortion), remove gravity and alter the colour scape and form of the events taking place breaks down the natural sensor-motor system allowing for transformed reflection of reality and of modern space as it truly is. The contraints of naturally occurring laws of physics that dominate live footage are easily overcome, allowing the film to enter a new level of communication with the viewer, one which replicates the imaginary spaces of the mind and the invisible complex spaces of contemporary life. One which immerses the viewer with a new haptic sense; the fusion of carefully designed and constructed sound, image and motion.

Although Deleuze wrote Cinema 2 before the invention of CGI as we know it today, the ability of film to leave the inhibitions of the world and to express the world of the mind and the modern age was prescient:

“Antonioni does not criticise the modern world, in whose possibilities he profoundly ‘believes’: he criticises the coexistence in the world of a modern brain and a tired, worn-out, neurotic body. So that his work, in a fundamental sense passes through a dualism which corresponds to the two aspects of the time-image: a cinema of the body which pulls all the weight of the world and modern neurosis; but also the cinema of the brain, which reveals the creativity of the world; its colours aroused by a new space-time, its powers multiplied by artificial brains.”

Artificial Intelligence:

The Replacement of the human eye behind the camera with a machine has massive implications for the representation of the altered relationships between self and world through the body. As was earlier discussed in Chapter One, the use of perspective throughout the ages has always acted as a representation of the eras sense of itself and its place collectively within the world. From the God's eye view: a disembodied, single, omniscient, perfect perspective applicable it to all events, that was used in pre-Renaissance art, to the strict scientific rigour of a one point perspective, placing the subject at the centre of the world and yet immobile and static with one great unblinking eye, to the fractured multiple perspectives of cubism in art and deconstructivsm in architecture in the 20th century (and today).

But the artificial eye both within CGI and network controlled systems of cameras on a set, once again, like the God’s eye view removes the eyes of the individual and gains its own omnipresence. However, the distinction being that where God’s eye view proposed a divine, single point of all knowing perspective, the artificial eye allows an infinite mergence of perspectives. The subject to world relationship mirroring the complexities of modern thought in this medium, being everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. The added dimension of time allowing for motion perspective, one which extends the possibilities of multi point perspective techniques of cubism and modern art.

The artificial eye combined with the other techniques of CGI such as the compositing of discrete elements into a single shot allows for the montage of experience, the linking of disparate time lines and narratives and the cut and splice of assemblage first described by Eisenstein and now more fully capable of fulfilling itself through the new techniques.

“For what is interesting in philosophy is that it proposes a cutting [decoupage] of things, a new cutting: it groups under a single concept things that one would have thought were very different, and it separates from it others which one would have thought very close. Now, the cinema by itself is also a cutting of visual and sound images. There are modes of cutting which can converge.”

Deleuze describes the components required for the creation of transcendental film which allows the greatest reflection of the sense of self both individually and collectively, the one which emphasises the intersubjectivity suggested by neurophenomenology earlier discussed.

“In short the, the three cerebral components are the point-cut, relinkage and the black and white screen. If the cut no longer forms part of either of the two series of images which it determines, there are only relinkages on either side. And if it grows larger and absorbs all the images, then it becomes the screen, as contact independent of distance, co-presence or application or black and white, of negative and positive, of place and obverse, of full and empty, of past and future, of brain and cosmos, of the inside and the outside. It is these three aspects, topological, of probabilistic and irrational which constitute the new image of thought. Each is easily inferred from the others, and forms with the others a cirulation: the noosphere.”

Modern cinema both arthouse and blockbuster Hollywood incorporates these elements to mesmeric, oneiric effects, ones which reveal, transform and change our perception of ourselves and the world around us.

The following case study seeks to dissect two films which depict subjective realities through the structure of memory. Both would be classified under the time-image defined by Deleuze, one was made in the 1968, pre CGI and artificial intelligence, the other more recently in 2004 with the plethora of additional elements that now comprises filmic space.

The 2004 film I argue surpasses the first in creating a dynamic reflective process on existence due to these elements.

Analysis of two time-image films:

1968: Je t’aime, je t’aime
Director: Alain Resnais
Writer: Jacques Sternberg

2004: Eternal Sunshine of the spotless mind
Director: : Michel Gondry
Writers:Charlie Kaufmam, Michel Gondry, Pierre Bismuth

The two films I have chosen I feel describe and explore embodiment to an extent that conventional architecture cannot.

They deal with very similar plot and storylines but have been made nearly forty years apart, in which time the technology of film has advanced to include the techniques described in the previous section Hypercinema and Cybercinema. In fact it is highly probable that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is influenced to a very large extent by Resnais’ earlier incarnation.

The earlier film’s plot centres on a time travel experiment carried out on a man who has just left hospital after attempting suicide. The scientists try to send him back exactly one year in time to relive a single minute. The experiment works to a certain extent – he goes back in time but is trapped adrift in his memories, past and present leaking back and forth maddeningly. The focus of his memories centre on his failed relationship with woman whose death he feels guilty about.

Much in the same way as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, he traverses his past in a non sequential manner being driven by his core memory of Catrine. It is unclear at points as to whether his memories are pure memories or whether he is creating them. Indeed as the film continues it becomes unclear as to whether the start of the film is in fact the start of the time fracturing process, his suicide attempt, could be interpreted as a way of ending the nightmarish flicker of his experiences between past and present.

The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind focuses on the lives of a young couple Joel and Clementine whose tempestuous relationship results in them both opting for a (science)fictional brain operation which removes all of their memories of the relationship.

After a two year relationship, one night the couple have a particularly bad fight after which Clementine visits Lacuna, Inc, a clinic where painful relationships can be eradicated from memory. On discovering this, Joel himself decides to do the same.

The real interest begins when the procedure starts to take effect upon Joel and he realises he wants to reject it, thus causing glitches in the program. As he lies unconscious in his bed with electrodes attached to his head and wired up to a computer which starts to delete his memories, we the viewer experience the process from his point of view. Trapped inside his body, he moves through scene after scene of his life with Clementine, in each they disintegrate and seamlessly he finds himself transported between them in the blink of an eye, the turn of a back, the shutting of a door. Unable to stop the experiment (to wake up) he and Clementine (or rather the version of her that lives in his mind) hatch a plan to hide in areas of his memory that she was never a part of so that the deletor technician won’t find them and thus she will remain alive in his memory.

The ensuing scenes are breathtaking in their skill and craft. They run through his childhood, changing scales and ages, from bathing in a sink as a baby to lying in his teenage bedroom as they try to evade the inevitable deletion.

It displays a depth of understanding of the neurological basis of memory with incredible subtlety, using CGI as an invisible weapon in producing the seamless transitions that create the dizzying journey through Joel’s labyrinth of memory. Deleuze’s cerebral components are all present in abundance in the editing of the film: the, point-cut of the shots, their relinkage and the transitions. The decoupage of the various elements of his past , present and potential futures merge through the delicate use of CGI and the editors hand.

The detailed and painstaking nature of some of the shots which create the rich oneiric tapestry is unseen in the film but for a two second shot the level of post-production is frightening. Like the ballerina on a stage, gracefully pirouetting on her bleeding toes unknown to the audience watching her, likewise to achieve the gritty, real to life, emblematic, Gondry style of the film, months of sleepless nights must have gone into the special effects and post production of this film.

The company who provided the post-production have a behind the scenes video which documents the iterations that took place in producing some of the films. I’ve included one below:

The shop road scene 38:11
The house collapsing:

While both films extend the notion of the embodied self in space and allow a level of reflection impossible by any other discipline, the techniques available to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind allow it to depart from conventional reality to the place of the pure optical and sound image that Deleuze discusses in the Time-Image. In it we sense to a much greater extent than je t’aime je t’aime the unity of cystal-image, the mergence of the virtual and actual, in neurophenomenological terms the sense of constant feedback between the outside world and the self through the memories experienced.

The role of CGI within E.S.O.T.S.M.
The shop road scene 38:11


Pattern Completion: Cross-disciplinary project between two artists and a neuroscientist (

Chapter Two: In Practice

Key ideas:
Borges: Labyrinths as a representational method of describing perception and consciousness: internal cognitive map
Plasticity

Mirror neurons

Work produced: Initial chronogram: description in relation to plasticity and mirror neurons, and distortion

storyboards with description of relevance to each one

transformative studies to represent dynamic brain networks: flowering, growing, curling animations

Chapter Two: Almost Final: 1,600

Chapter 2: Neurophenomenology and Embodiment:
Exploring the Chiasm

“If technology changes or augments the body, then - as the body is architecture’s conduit – architecture must change and vice versa. Therefore developments in medicine are as important to the progression of architecture as advances in building material, probably more so.”

In the field of emerging complex relationships between the subjective self in space, none I feel are more pertinent than that of the discoveries made by neuroscience in the past forty years.

As stated already, I have defined two aspects of embodiment, the first being our relationship as subjective biological beings, to the world we live in. This sense of an embodied self within a subjectively created and experienced world has been long been speculated upon by philosophers has recently been extended by the scientific community through their explorations of the brain and the subsequent discoveries of complex systems of representation at play in forming our consciousness.

To understand the inner landscape of our anatomy and to understand its consequences on our perception, is to alter many of our commonly held beliefs about the self. In the following two examples, each of which are startling discoveries made in the past forty years, I will analyse the effect of them on our understanding of our ability to consume and create space. The enhancements of these discoveries with relation to phenomenology could be defined as neurophenomenology.

Plasticity

In the early 1970's William Greenough and a team of neuroscientists first documented the strange phenomenon of the growth of new dendrites and synaptic connections between existing neurons in the brains of rats when they took on new activities. This was the start of a massive upheaval of many of neuroscience’s most basic canons of opinion. Before this point the brain was seen as a fixed entity and therefore the relationship of a person to their environment was viewed as relatively simple. However, what plasticity made clear was that the process of perception created by the brain was highly subjective, that the experiences lived by a person formed the architecture of their brain, changing it every time and thus altering how they perceived space.

In human beings, it is now well documented through brain imaging technology that the human brain goes through a series of stages of development which prune and grow the neural connections according to it use in life. The term ‘use it or lose it’ is often applied to the description of the child’s brain. In the prenatal stage, the brain produces trillions more neurons and “synapses” (connections between the brain cells) than needed, by birth our brain has been pared down to approximately 100 billion neurons, roughly as many nerve cells as there are stars in the Milky Way. During the first years of life, the brain undergoes a series of extraordinary changes. “The frontal lobes become active between 6 months and a year old, triggering the development of emotions, attachments, planning, working memory and attention. A sense of self develops as the parietal and frontal lobe circuits become more integrated, at around 18 months, and a sense of other people having their own minds at 3-4.” “Windows of opportunity” are critical periods in children’s lives when specific types of learning take place. If a child isn’t given the sensory stimulus before the end of each critical stage there are whole neural areas that die, never to be replaced. So experience determines the organisational structure of the brain, thus all future experiences will be experienced via the medium of this moulded brain based on previous experience. The parallels with Merleau-Ponty’s embodied subject are clear.

In adolescence, a large portion of rewiring occurs and by the early twenties the brain is formed, the number of neurons relatively fixed. However, all through ones life, the brain has been shown to have a remarkable ability to rewire itself in response to new experiences and environments. For example if one learns to play a musical instrument, no matter how late in life, the brain grows new dendrites and neural synaptic connections, forming new pathways in which this information is processed.

Philosophically this has massive implications on the relationship of the self in space – to internal embodied architecture. Instead of our sense of self being defined by information that is transmitted directly to our consciousness, we are sponges of information that act in a looping feed; sensory information is communicated to our mind via our body and brain. It forms an internal mental map of what reality is, every time we absorb more information from the outside world our mind checks it for probability against our current mental map. Thus our experience of the outside world is in part created by our previous experiences of it. “(Visual) perception is not an optical image at all: what we call vision is actually a memory of the past, derived in the first place by touch and movement.”

This process continues indefinitely. Information enters, is processed and checked and redesigns the map and so on. Therefore the experience of the self in space is wholly subjective, we truly do create the world we experience. This scientifically proved information correlates with Merleau-Ponty’s assumptions about subjective space and Deleuze’s notion of the crystal image.

“…the indivisible unity of an actual image and ‘its’ virtual image…the image has to be present and past, still present and past, still present and already past, at once and at the same time”

The once merely philosophical is now compounded by biological fact. What was once only accepted by and pondered upon by academics is now mainstream knowledge. This itself alters how we as a culture view ourselves in space and thus how we go on to consume space after this knowledge. Like Newtonian science that viewed the world objectively influenced the mind space of an era before.

“Perception is an internally generated hallucination that we check against ‘data’”

“If our perceptions are models, which we use to make informed guesses about the outside world…The process of perception involves selecting an internal model and then checking it against the data. The best model is the one that fits the data. As Richard Gregory says, perceptions are hypotheses. Sometimes two equally likely hypotheses fit the data, like the ambiguous figures of the duck rabbit and Necker Cube in figure X and the brain entertains them in turn.”

“Hallucinations tell us that the brain can generate perceptions with minimal support from the retinal image. There is probably very little difference between a drug induced hallucination and the perception of faces in the clouds…”

Similar occurrences can happen in real space (as opposed to 2d) Often so thought apparitions are ambiguous shapes that take on anthropomorphic forms to the anthropomorphically biased human eye. Or in more extreme situations where the a person has had large parts of their memory lost (i.e. chunks of their internal cognitive map are lost against which reality should be checked) can ‘remember’ events that never happened as the brain compensated as it does when it is normal and healthy by filling in the gaps. In these case though unlike it merely producing a seamless narration of life, it becomes fictitious.

Our seamless version of what we perceive is in fact our brain making estimations of probability and feeding them back into our consciousness. Noise (random error information) accompanies all of the sensory information fed into our brains from the outside world. Our internal cognitive map screens this information based on its probability, filtering the appropriate and likely from the nonsensical. However, at breakdown points in the brain process, be it through a mental illness like schizophrenia, an accident to the brain or the ingestion of psychoactive drugs, these filtration systems are lost allowing strange connections to be made and strange sensations experienced. These glitches offer glimmers of understanding into the mechanisations behind our normally seamless experience of the world.

“Patients with severe memory loss sometimes produce quite detailed ‘false memories’ to fill in the large gaps. They may well experience these memories as real, even though they are invented to cover up the lack of evidence.

All of the above examples further the notion of a fluid, subjective space, in constant flux; the subject and the world in permanent symbiosis.

Another key discovery in neuroscience which has large implications for the understanding of the self in relations to the outside world is that of mirror neurons discussed in the next section.Mirror Neurons:

“Mimesis may well turn out to be a prerequisite or stepping stone to self-knowledge. We observe, reproduce, impose patterns, and thereby understand.”
“Mirror neurons are neurons that fire when the monkey performs object-directed actions such as grasping, tearing, manipulating, holding, but also when the animal observes somebody else, performing the same class of actions”

The esteemed neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran believes these neurons to radically change the landscape of perception beyond recognition.

“The discovery of mirror neurons in the frontal lobes of monkeys, and their potential relevance to human brain evolution … is the single most important "unreported" (or at least, unpublicized) story of the decade. I predict that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments.”

This ability to understand ourselves relative to an Other defines our ability to be changed by the world but more specifically by another recognisable subject has strong links with phenomenology’s theory of intersubjectivity. Lacanian analysis of the ‘mirror stage’ previously discussed seems now to be scientifically provable. The stages of the brain defined by neural growth and pruning reflects to a large extent psychoanalysis’ stages of development of a person.
This newly understood complex, dynamic, fluid system of embodiment, requires a medium capable of representing and manifesting it. Standard conventional methods are simply inadequate to relate, debate and reflect on and to this new type of space we understand ourselves to live in. In the next chapter I assess and challenge what this medium may be.

Chapter One: In Practice

Key ideas at initial stage:

1. Perspective: its use and its control (subjectivity)
   
2. The body as the mediator of experience (the brain)
3. Baroque as a form of dynamic representation based on the body
4. The interior experience of sense: the unity of the two
   

blur examples and descriptions of
videos of 'memory' images: birds flying, beach etc
storyboard image of emily at the mirror with projections of various times on her

In Practice

My starting point for the project was in the exploration of the subjectivity of space. A strong amateur interest in neuroscience has meant that I always approach projects from a perceptual view point: by asking what defines the space that we put architecture into rather than using the built object of architecture as the starting point.

My years work comprises of two projects which are different levels of investigation into the same subject. Although the aesthetic of the two differ to a large extent, the same intent drives both.
Both seek to explore the nature of subjective experience. In the first I explore subjective experience as a product of memory as well as becoming a creative and sometimes illusory experience.

The structure which an academic essay requires doesn't entirely match that of the practical design experience. The former requires a very logical progression of thought whereas the latter often requires illogical creative jumps to be made based on random findings, chance happenings while producing a drawing, animation or model or simply a new idea.

For the purpose of this thesis then, the practice element will not be entirely in sync with the theories of each chapter. Some come before, and went on to influence the later chapters, some come after the theoretical research, others have worked hand in hand as the ideas have progressed. I have chosen to represent my practical research chronologically. Like the premise of the essay, the progression of each idea has been based on the reflection of it after its completion thus leading to its next stage.

Through the use of the blog, I have been able to document my ideas chronologically as well as more importantly allowing me to reflect upon them after completion and share with others and receive feedback.

For each chapter I will sum up the progress of ideas in a diagram, showing the inputs , process and outputs. Quite a lot falls by the wayside but most ideas live on in some form.

Chapter One: Almost Final:2500

Space through the body: The body in space:
The Chiasmic Structure of Embodiment

In this chapter, the term embodied architecture is defined as having two aspects: the internal: the self’s spatial experience and the external: how this personal spatial experience manifests itself in physical architecture. These two entities form a chiastic structure, möbius like topology which while appearing to exist on two separate sides are in fact one. The binding element of the two is the human body which mediates all experiences. Ultimately to understand embodied architecture the uniqueness or haecceity of the unity of these two aspects needs to be appreciated. I will explore this notion of absolute embodiment principally through the writings of Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze.

Merleau-Ponty’s writings embrace the importance of the body, stressing the importance of the phenomenonal, placing it at the centre of human subjective experience, while Deleuze describes the structures involved in the embodied experience of space.

Internal embodied architecture can be described as our internal cognitive map which creates our sense of self in relation to the world outside. The external on the other side is the manifestation of this sense of self: physical architecture, the work of art, through which the fully embodied experience comprised of the two can be reflected upon, altered and furthered. The simultaneous experience of these two aspects defines our embodiment within the world as corporal, fleshy, subjective creatures in constant symbiosis with our environment.

The Architecture of Embodied Cognition/Internal Embodied Architecture/Internal Embodiment

How we consume space via our bodies to create our sense of reality defines cognitive embodiment. It is this key relationship between the self (subject) and the world (the objects that comprise it) that Merleau-Ponty redefined. He rejected the objectivist viewpoint which sought to
“to gain access to an object free of all human traces, just as God would see it”
and which split the mind and the body, viewing the mind as acting and perceiving inside the transient shell of the body.

In Merleau-Ponty’s Primacy Of Perception he established a significant turn in the development of phenomenology from Husserl by arguing that experience is always mediated through a person and is thus always subjective. Husserl while emphasising the importance of phenomenon in experience still divided the subject and object into distinct entities the mind being conscious of a separate object. Merleau-Ponty argued that the scientific experiment still relies on the cognitive faculties of the scientist, thus the act of perceiving cannot be passive. By the self-subject perceiving the world, it is affected by the world, thus changing the subject’s future perception of the world. Merleau-Ponty argues that this dynamic symbiotic relationship cannot be fully defined and expressed by laws of physics as it is indescribable by equations or formulas.

However, although opposed to a purely scientific analysis of the world, Merleau-Ponty still strongly advocated the use of science in furthering the knowledge of the cognitive process through the biology of the body. Drawing delight from scientific discoveries that uncovered new methods of thought, in particular that of quantum mechanics which unlike Newtonian science included the observer as an essential part of any experiment.

Within Phenomenological discourse of the subject-object, self-world relationships, exists the term ‘intersubjectivity’ which analyses the existence of multiple, subjective individuals sharing the same subjective experience. Thus the subject while observing the objects in the world, grows to understand that some of the objects are perceiving, active agents of their own. A key element of intersubjectivity is empathy and the ability to see oneself as the Other from another perspective, one that is not your own. Intersubjectivity allows a communal subjective experience and language is one of its key elements.

At this point the Lacanian concept known as the mirror stage is pertinent. This stage which is categorised within psychoanalysis happens when a child is between six to eighteen months. The key element within this concept is that before this stage, the subject does not reflect upon themselves or the world, their “subjectivity is formless, shapeless and otherwise fragmented” but after it “the infant thinks of herself as a separate being in a world of objects. She also identifies with another main image that she sees: that of her Mother.” “The mirror stage also charts the movement from the realm of the Imaginary, to that of the Symbolic: for Lacan, the Imaginary is pre-linguistic and image-based whereas. the Symbolic is linguistic and cultural.”

This key stage defines the process by which cognition takes place, by the objects surrounding the baby taking significance and meaning beyond their physical attributes, she is able to start creating her own cognitive map of experience, through which she will define the world.

The Subjective Sensory unity of Perception

Although Merleau-Ponty agreed with the empirical notion of John Locke, that the sensory organs worked in conjunction with one another to create the experience of each of our senses, he argued the passivity of this exchange, stating that the individual subject whose organs provide the information, determine the way in which the outside world’s data is processed and thus experienced.

“’Nature is on the inside’, says Cezanne. Quality, Light, colour, depth, which are cover there before us, are only because they awaken an echo in our bodies and because the body welcomes them.”

The topology of the Chiasm: Flesh, Reversibility

“Language is everything, since it is the voice of no one, since it is the very voice of the things, the waves, and the forests. And what we have to understand is that there is no dialectical reversal from one of these views to the other; we do not have to reassemble them into a synthesis: they are two aspects of the reversibility which is the ultimate truth.”

Husserl’s comment on the nature of philosophy and how it reveals the world, points to the use of language as the method by which to know things, however, in Cezanne’s doubt, Merleau-Ponty extends this notion, so that in place of simply language the oeuvre, the work of art plays an even more significant role in revealing truth. As all experience is subjective, ‘the ultimate truth’ can only be found in the structure of the subject itself, rather than an objective reality, which can never be proved.

This structure can be described by Chiasmic topology. In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty discusses “his new conception of the body, as a ‘chiasm’ or crossing over, which combines subjective experience and objective experience. His term for this new conception of the body is ‘flesh’ and he insists it is an ‘ultimate notion’, a concrete emblem of a ‘general manner of being’ which provides access both subjective experience and objective experience.” It describes an eternal loop of feedback between environment and subject in time, through and with the body. One that can be physically visualised by the Möbius Strip. One that at once, touches and is touched. "I can identify the hand touched in the same one which will in a moment be touching... In this bundle of bones and muscles which my right hand presents to my left, I can anticipate for an instant the incarnation of that other right hand, alive and mobile, which I thrust towards things in order to explore them. The body tries... to touch itself while being touched and initiates a kind of reversible reflection " Thus this chiasm is the embodied subject.

“The body interposed is not itself a thing, an interstitial matter, a connective tissue, but sensible for itself.”

To further understand the notion of the embodied subject, one must address the temporality inherent in experience and thus memory. How is one influenced by the world? If one did not exist within time, subjectivity would cease to have meaning (in so far as we currently define it). It is the constantly updated palimpsest of experience that we store and use to create our internal perception of the world that gives us our sense of reality. It is through our ability to exist within both the past and the present in this sense that we gain comprehension of the world.

Deleuze’s recollection-image or mnemosign: defined as “a virtual image which enters into a relationship with the actual image and extends it” further describes this chiasmatic topology. When an image is experienced in the present, the memory of the past experience sets up a relating virtual image, these merge to form a constant experience.

Deleuze furthers this concept with his definition of a Crystal-image or Hyalosign as “the uniting of an actual image and a virtual image to the point where they can no longer be distinguished.”
“…the indivisible unity of an actual image and ‘its’ virtual image…the image has to be present and past, still present and past, still present and already past, at once and at the same time… The present is the actual image, and in its contemporaneous past is the virtual image, the image in a mirror... Every moment of our life presents the two aspects, it is actual and virtual, perception on the one side and recollection on the other…Whoever becomes conscious of the continual duplicating of his present into perception and recollection…will compare himself to an actor playing his part automatically, listening to himself and beholding himself playing.””

The External aspect of Embodied Architecture:

The external aspect of embodied architecture is one of the most valuable tools available to man to understand reality and ‘to make visible how the world touches us’.
Embodied architecture can be understood as the manifestation of an internal sense of reality. The production of buildings and spaces that represent, illuminate and allow reflection upon what the changing types of cultural and cognitive space of an era inhabits.
These spatial creations are then inhabited and consumed by individuals and cultures thereby going on to influence and affect the people who exist within them, further changing their notions of space and thus exhibiting a cyclical loop of progression of embodied space.
As Juhani Pallasmaa the Finnish architect and academic wrote: “The task of architecture is 'to make visible how the world touches us', as Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote of the paintings of Paul Cezanne. In accordance with Merleau-Ponty, we live in the `flesh of the world', and architecture structures and articulates this existential flesh, giving it specific meanings. Architecture tames and domesticates the space and time of the flesh of the world for human habitation. Architecture frames human existence in specific ways and defines a basic horizon of understanding. We know and remember who we are and where we belong fundamentally through our cities and buildings.”

Merleau-Ponty deals with the production of the oeuvre, the work of art as a method of philosophical discourse that both is created by the era and the philosophy it exists within but then also alters it, personalises it and creates further reflection.
He writes of the stages of pespectival representation, from the ‘spherical, visual field of the ancients, their angular perspective which relates the apparent size not to distance but to the angle from which we see the object’ to its successor perspectiva artificialis and its various incarnations in Italian Renaissance art to the Northern European painters. In each case he argues that “The language of painting is never instituted by nature; it is to be remade over and over again” that each new mode of representation is “only a particular case, a date, a moment in a poetic information of the world which continues after it.”

Martin Jay approaches the notion of a combined vision made up of various scopic regimes. In his essay, there are parallels to Merleau-Ponty’s perceptual view of the world as one, which is created by the subject. In Jay’s essay, he discusses some of the ‘regimes’ such as Cartesian perspective and the baroque, but at each instance the interest lies in the regime as a product of the subjective experience of the era it is grounded in and its subsequent life beyond it.

Jay like Merleau-Ponty finds fault with Cartesian perspectivalism, arguing that it disembodies both viewer and painter, "the bodies of the painter and the viewer were forgotten in the name of an allegedly disincarnated, absolute eye." It is unnatural, not accounting for normal binocular vision or the dynamic, saccadic motion of the human eye. This form of representation while still holding merit today was at its zenith in the 1600’s and 1700’s. It was particularly absorbed at Descartes’ time as it fitted so well with an objectivist mode of thought.

However, the evolution of the perspectiva artificialis Northern European painting which adds to our modern sense of vision /perception, extends the notion of the technique, exemplified by the Dutch 17th century painters like Vermeer, in which the eye of the observer ceases, the frame is removed and the work is based around the objects existing independently of a viewer.

"The projection is, one might say, viewed from nowhere. Nor is it to be looked through. It assumes a flat working surface." The emphasis is on the fragmentary nature of reality, "attention to many small things versus a few large ones; light reflected off objects versus objects modelled by light and shadow; the surface of objects; their colours and textures, dealt with rather than their placement in a legible space..."

The third regime of vision Jay alludes to is the Baroque, which he describes as the "more radical alternative". Although introduces 'the baroque' by its conventionally understood context in the 17th century and its links to the Catholic counter Reformation, he goes on to state that "it may also be possible to see it as a permanent, if often repressed, visual possibility throughout the entire modern era."

He himself compares it to other philosophical systems: "Leibniz's pluralism of monadic viewpoints, Pascal's meditations on paradox, and the Counter Reformation mystic's submission to vertiginous experiences of rapture might all be seen as related to baroque vision."
"The baroque self-consciously revels in the contradictions between surface and depth, disparaging as a result any attempt to reduce the multiplicity of visual spaces into any one coherent essence."

This notion of baroque sense of space first represented in the 17th century, has far reaching links to the contemporary, post-modern space we now inhabit as described by the shifting, dynamic relationships of Deleuze’s crystal image and Merleau-Ponty’s symbiotic notions of flesh and reversibility which see the world as embodied, fluid and in flux.

If architecture as oeuvre is to represent and cause reflection on the reality of existence, what is its most appropriate form today? In Chapter Three, I address the notion of an evolving technique of representation to ‘to make visible how the world touches us’. One that references the Baroque sensibility Jay writes of in a contemporary context, using the tools, discoveries and knowledge available to us today. The following chapter explores a new modern context in understanding embodiment, one which I feel extends and progresses the notions of the self, embodiment and reality put forward by both Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze.

Chapter Three A

Chapter Three: Filmic Space as a phenomenological method

“A flickering brain, which relinks or creates loops – this is cinema”

Gilles Deleuze 1985

Introduction

In Chapter Two, the internal notion of embodiment was discussed in relation to neuroscience’s developments and discoveries, in this chapter, the second aspect of embodied architecture: the manifestation of a sense of space that allows expression and reflection on its nature will be discussed. Taking the viewpoint of Juhani Pallasmaa the Finnish architect and academic:

“The task of architecture is 'to make visible how the world touches us', as Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote of the paintings of Paul Cezanne. In accordance with Merleau-Ponty, we live in the `flesh of the world', and architecture structures and articulates this existential flesh, giving it specific meanings. Architecture tames and domesticates the space and time of the flesh of the world for human habitation. Architecture frames human existence in specific ways and defines a basic horizon of understanding. We know and remember who we are and where we belong fundamentally through our cities and buildings.”

Why film?

While acknowledging that conventional, constructed architecture still plays a representational role in revealing the world and ourselves back to ourselves as it did so in the past, I argue that the massive upheaval in how we now understand space through neuroscience’s developments demands a new expression. Plasticity and mirror cells redefine all of our relationships, they describe new complex dynamic networks in flux. They describe plastic subjectivity. They pose deep questions about the symbiosis of states. They describe the existence of consciousness on a cellular level, they hint at what our very consciousness may be. They propose a blending of the chiasmus. They describe a new mobius like topology of space, one in which experience and perception feed back eternally.

To represent this as a static building (conventional, constructed architecture) or image (painting) or merely to describe it as a graph, an arrowed diagram or a complex equation (the sciences) or as words (philosophy) is to lose the essence of these new truths. The palimpsest of time and memory suggested by brain plasticity as well as the altered perspectives suggested by mirror cells, point to movement, dynamism and the effects of time.

The immersive embodied sense of perception which is now so clear is excellently transmitted and explored using the external embodied architecture offered by the medium of film.
The parameters and constraints imposed by conventional, built architecture cannot make the imaginative departure from concrete, physical reality in the manner that a film can, which by its nature is fluid and sensory, fuses sound, movement and image through time creating an immersive version of reality, that can be engaged with.

The complex space that we now understand and thus inhabit is one of dynamic relationships between the self and the world . Our active and subjective position within the world as sensory biological organisms is well described by the filmic medium. It transcends the normal constraints of physical architecture by its multi sensory and time based qualities, through these it gains a ‘body’ of its own and emulates the experience of space we sense from the complex world around us, thereby letting us both reflect upon the nature of this space as well as becoming active participants in the medium ourselves, feeding as we do from the world around us in a loop of perception. We are changed by and change the film by experiencing it.

Vivian Sobchack elaborates upon this reciprocal relationship in The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience,

“More than any other medium of human communication, the moving picture makes itself sensuously and sensibly manifest as the expression of experience by experience. A film is an act of seeing that makes itself seen, an act of hearing that makes itself heard, an act of physical and reflective movement that makes itself reflexively felt and understood.”

In essence the filmic medium manages to both represent the embodiment of space while at the same time embodying space.

What is film? Defining Filmic Space:

For the purpose of this thesis I will be using the terms defined by Najmeh Khalili in her essay, Walter Benjamin Revisited: The Work of Cinema in the Age of Digital (Re)production. In this essay she defines two types of space which I feel make up contemporary current filmic space, hypercinema and cybercinema.

Hypercinema defines the ‘formal aspects of a cinema which is equipped by
1) virtual reality and digital simulation at the level of mise-en-scene (such as virtual actors, digital spaces and hyper-real motifs),
2) artificial intelligence as an apparatus for capturing or constructing the image, in other words replacing the human eye behind the camera with that of a machine”
She describes how, the medium through which filmic space is now expressed is altering its very makeup, in particular the rules that dictate narrative:

“Since the advent of sound, narrative film has dominated the scope of cinematic experience, to such extent that much of our film theories and cultural studies have been dedicated to using the language of film to convey a meaning or to decipher its text. The new digital and electronic technologies are well on their way to expanding the narrative dimension of hypercinema.”
The term cybercinema is defined to further the “narrative connotation of hypercinema”

“ 1) the poetics of the virtual imagery, or the non-narrative and oneiric possibilities provided by digital technology in creation of images which are not entirely divorced from meaning but are more dedicated to intensity and duration of an experience and to “haecceity” (referencing Deleuze)
2) the cult of digital image production and distribution.”

Using this contemporary definition of film I hope to analyse the developments in neuroscience with regard to embodiment and show that filmic space can decipher, illuminate and extend phenomenological and existential notions of embodiment through its liminality andits use of a set of non verbal and transcendental techniques.

Methods: Deleuze’s theories on the usefulness of cinema

By using Deleuze’s theories in particular that of the Crystal-Image to explore ways to invoke experimentation in film which therefore allow us to speculate more deeply about the self in contemporary space, thus fulfilling Merleau-Ponty’s desire for ‘revealing the world’. Cinema like the body can be seen as a mediator of experience and change and the space between the screen and viewer becomes the place of excitement and discovery.

“In Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, Deleuze showed that the ‘new cinema’ was an institution that took upon itself the task of creating images of the phenomena that would have otherwise been inaccessible to us. This is why its effects become reminiscent of the actual/virtual state of reality. Also known as liminality, this state allows us to capture the ‘transcendentals’ behind these symbols. By moving progressively from the appearing symbols to the basic structures of the human world Deleuze performs an analysis of a semiotic field (cinema) toward identifying its effects on our conception of the phenomenon of time.”

By using a hybrid approach to deciphering embodied space (through the mergence of philosophy, science and film) creative and new avenues of understanding can be forged.

“For Deleuze, the philosopher ‘works alongside’ the cinema, producing a classification of its images and signs but reordering them for new purposes…Cinema and philosophy are brought together in a continuing process of intercutting. This is philosophy as assemblage, a kind of provoked becoming of thought.”

The ability of cinema to go beyond conventional philosophical or scientific techniques lies in its immediacy and as Deleuze's describes 'preverbal, pre-linguistic content':

‘The cinema seems to us to be a composition of images and of signs, that
is, a preverbal intelligible content (pure semiotics)’

and

“It seems to us that cinema, precisely through its automatic and psycho-mechanical qualities, is the system of pre-linguistic images and signs”

The immediacy and ability to present time is also at the heart of the filmic experience:

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The Crystal Image

The Crystal-Image is a notion that is comprised by a number of theories. It describes very adequately the dynamic, folded, symbiotic space between self and world and subject and object and the body that is the link for each of these chiasms, that neuroscience has heavily defined and influenced in the last forty years.

To summarise the key difference between Deleuze’s Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (an analysis of pre WW2) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (post WW2):

“The former cinema, which finds its archetype in the Hollywood genre film, is dependent on movement and action. Characters in the movement-image are placed in narrative positions where they routinely perceive things, react, and take action in a direct fashion to the events around them. The movement-image is a form of spatialised cinema: time determined and measured by movement.”

In Cinema 2, Deleuze deals with the time-image which is the context to the crystal image: The time-image is one of fracture and non rational narrative:

“In the time-image, which finds its archetype in the European modernist or art film, characters find themselves in situations where they are unable to act and react in a direct, immediate way, leading to what Deleuze calls a breakdown in the sensor-motor system. The image cut off from sensory-motor links becomes "a pure optical and aural image," and one that "comes into relation with a virtual image, a mental or mirror image"”

It is characterised by the difference in the techniques it uses in comparison to that of the movement-image:

“In the time-image, rational or measurable temporal links between shots, the staple of the movement-image, gives way to "incommensurable," non-rational links. Because of these non-rational links between shots, vacant and disconnected spaces begin to appear ("any-space-whatevers"). As a consequence, the journey becomes a privileged narrative form, with characters in a more passive role, and themes centered on inner mental imagery, flights of fancy, and emotional and psychic breakdown. The result of this pure optical and sound image is, according to Deleuze, a direct image of time (a time-image or crystal-image).”

The topology of the time-image is useful in describing the chiasmic nature of existence described by neurophenomenology:

“The time image which Deleuze releases from modern cinema gives him a new line of approach to a number of important problems of modern thought: the undecidability of truth and falsity, the relation of inside and out, the relation between the brain and the body.”

It's necessary to understand the Mneosign or Recollection image in order to understand the crystal image. It is defined as:

“a virtual image which enters into a relationship with the actual image and changes it.”

whereas the Crystal or Hyalosign image is the next step in this process defined as:

" the uniting of an actual image and a virtual image t the point where they can no longer be distinguished."

This can be read as a very pertinent method of understanding the notion of the brain’s plasticity. Although we experience reality directly through our bodies, the mediation of our mind in forming the experience is based on previous readings of other situations onto which the new experience is formed and is formed by. Thus the virtual image of a memory (a previous experience) is always part of the equation in perception of space and reality.

Its use as a method to decipher or create film, that in turn deciphers and reflects upon space is vital.

Deleuze describes the crystal-image chiasmic properties of memory:

“…the indivisible unity of an actual image and ‘its’ virtual image…the image has to be present and past, still present and past, still present and already past, at once and at the same time. If it was not already past at the same time as the present, the present would never pass on. The past does not follow the present that is no longer, it coexists with the present it was. The present is the actual image, and in its contemporaneous past is the virtual image, the image in a mirror. ...Every moment of our life presents the two aspects, it is actual and virtual, perception on the one side and recollection on the other…Whoever becomes conscious of the continual duplicating of his present into perception and recollection…will compare himself to an actor playing his part automatically, listening to himself and beholding himself playing.”

The crystal image defines the process of image making in cinema, from actual image memory to the cinematographic image / virtual image to a mirror image. In this instance Deleuze is discussing it in relation to Tarkovsky’s films

“Mirror is a turning crystal, with two sides if we relate it to the invisible adult character…with four sides if we relate it to two visible couples… And the crystal turns over on itself, like a homing device that searches an opaque environment”

Through the medium of film we can look at ourselves as we do in a mirror, but whereas in a mirror one only sees a reflection (a replication of yourself), within film one sees a reflection and can reflect upon that reflection. The film has the ability through visual and sonic techniques to show the dynamic indiscernability of the actual and virtual. (add ref)


The crystal film is described by Alexander Kozin in his essay The appearing memory: Gilles Deleuze and Andrey Tarkovsky on `crystal-image'

"The ‘crystal-film’ is therefore the kind of film that exposes the relations between what is being reflected and the act of reflecting, or, to put it in phenomenological terms, the ‘given’ and ‘givenness’."



Relevance of the Crystal image to Hypercinema and Cybercinema:Techniques

The Time-Image and Crystal-Image as described by Deleuze offer both an explanation of techniques of cinema used as well as potential creative points of departure for new experimental film makers. Their presence acting as a powerful philosophical tools.

Virtual Reality and Digital Simulation:

The use of virtual actors, virtual landscapes and virtual special effects through Computer Generated Images brings the medium closer to the realm of the

“pure optical and aural image," and one that "comes into relation with a virtual image, a mental or mirror image"

The removal in some cases of an actual human being as a central character or a naturally recognisable landscape creates a stylisation of the form which allow for greater allegorical interpretation and reflection.

“Cinema does not just present images, it surrounds them with a world”

The ability of CGI to slow down / speed up time, remove gravity and alter the colour scape and form of the events taking place breaks down the natural sensor-motor system allowing for transformed reflection of reality and of modern space as it truly is. The contraints of naturally occurring laws of physics that dominate live footage are easily overcome, allowing the film to enter a new level of communication with the viewer, one which replicates the imaginary spaces of the mind and the invisible complex spaces of contemporary life. One which immerses the viewer with a new haptic sense; the fusion of carefully designed and constructed sound, image and motion.

Although Deleuze wrote Cinema 2 before the invention of CGI as we know it today, the ability of film to leave the inhibitions of the world and to express the world of the mind and the modern age was prescient:

“Antonioni does not criticise the modern world, in whose possibilities he profoundly ‘believes’: he criticises the coexistence in the world of a modern brain and a tired, worn-out, neurotic body. So that his work, in a fundamental sense passes through a dualism which corresponds to the two aspects of the time-image: a cinema of the body which pulls all the weight of the world and modern neurosis; but also the cinema of the brain, which reveals the creativity of the world; its colours aroused by a new space-time, its powers multiplied by artificial brains.”

Artificial Intelligence:

The Replacement of the human eye behind the camera with a machine has massive implications for the representation of the altered relationships between self and world through the body. As was earlier discussed in Chapter One, the use of perspective throughout the ages has always acted as a representation of the eras sense of itself and its place collectively within the world. From the God's eye view: a disembodied, single, omniscient, perfect perspective applicable it to all events, that was used in pre-Renaissance art, to the strict scientific rigour of a one point perspective, placing the subject at the centre of the world and yet immobile and static with one great unblinking eye, to the fractured multiple perspectives of cubism in art and deconstructivsm in architecture in the 20th century (and today).

But the artifical eye both within CGI and network controlled systems of cameras on a set, once again, like the God’s eye view removes the eyes of the individual and gains its own omnipresence. However, the distinction being that where God’s eye view proposed a divine, single point of all knowing perspective, the artificial eye allows an infinite mergence of perspectives. The subject to world relationship mirroring the complexities of modern thought in this medium, being everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. The added dimension of time allowing for motion perspective, one which extends the possibilities of multi point perspective techniques of cubism and modern art.


The artificial eye combined with the other techniques of CGI such as the compositing of discrete elements into a single shot allows for the montage of experience, the linking of disparate time lines and narratives and the cut and splice of assemblage first described by Eisenstein and now more fully capable of fulfilling itself through the new techniques.

“For what is interesting in philosophy is that it proposes a cutting [decoupage] of things, a new cutting: it groups under a single concept things that one would have thought were very different, and it separates from it others which one would have thought very close. Now, the cinema by itself is also a cutting of visual and sound images. There are modes of cutting which can converge.”

Deleuze describes the components required for the creation of transcendental film which allows the greatest reflection of the sense of self both individually and collectively, the one which emphasises the intersubjectivity suggested by neurophenomenology earlier discussed.

“In short the, the three cerebral components are the point-cut, relinkage and the black and white screen. If the cut no longer forms part of either of the two series of images which it determines, there are only relinkages on either side. And if it grows larger and absorbs all the images, then it becomes the screen, as contact independent of distance, co-presence or application or black and white, of negative and positive, of place and obverse, of full and empty, of past and future, of brain and cosmos, of the inside and the outside. It is these three aspects, topological, of probabilistic and irrational which constitute the new image of thought. Each is easily inferred from the others, and forms with the others a cirulation: the noosphere.”

Chapter Two: Unfinished (1,900)

Chapter 2: Neuroscience and Embodiment:Discoveries of the Body

“Perception is no more than successful hallucination.”

“If technology changes or augments the body, then - as the body is architecture’s conduit – architecture must change and vice versa. Therefore developments in medicine are as important to the progression of architecture as advances in building material, probably more so.”

In the field of emerging complex relationships between the subjective self in space, none I feel are more pertinent than that of the discoveries made by neuroscience in the past forty years.
As stated already, I have defined two sides of embodied architecture, the first being our relationship as subjective biological beings, to the world we live in. This sense of an embodied self within a subjectively created and experienced world has been long been speculated upon by philosophers has recently been extended by the scientific community through their explorations of the brain and the subsequent discoveries of complex systems of representation at play in forming our consciousness.
[The application of a phenomenological approach to neuroscience is one which may elucidate both the fields of philosophy and neuroscience.]
H does our ability to understand our biology relate to our ability to understand ourselves existentially? To understand the inner landscape of our anatomy and to witness its consequences on our sense of self and existence, is to give ourselves an altered sense of what may traditionally be believed through common sense. In the following three examples, each of which are startling discoveries made in the past twenty years, I will analyse the effect of them on our understanding of our ability to consume and create space.

1. Plasticity
In the early 1970’s William Greenough and a team of neuroscientists first documented the strange phenomenon of the growth of new dendrites and synaptic connections between existing neurons in the brains of rats when they took on new activities. This was the start of a massive upheaval of many of neuroscience’s most basic canons of opinion. Before this point the brain was seen as a fixed entity and therefore the relationship of a person to their environment was viewed as relatively simple. However, what plasticity made clear was that the process of perception created by the brain was highly subjective, that the experiences lived by a person formed the architecture of their brain, changing it every time and thus altering how they perceived space.
In human beings, it is now well documented through brain imaging technology that the human brain goes through a series of stages of development which prune and grow the neural connections according to it use in life. The term ‘use it or lose it’ is often applied to the description of the child’s brain. In the prenatal stage, the brain produces trillions more neurons and “synapses” (connections between the brain cells) than needed, by birth our brain has been pared down to 100 billion neurons, roughly as many nerve cells as there are stars in the Milky Way. During the first years of life, the brain undergoes a series of extraordinary changes. “The frontal lobes become active between 6 months and a year old, triggering the development of emotions, attachments, planning, working memory and attention. A sense of self develops as the parietal and frontal lobe circuits become more integrated, at around 18 months, and a sense of other people having their own minds at 3-4.” “Windows of opportunity” are critical periods in children’s lives when specific types of learning take place. If a child isn’t given the sensory stimulus before the end of each critical stage there are whole neural areas that die, never to be replaced. So experience determines the organisational structure of the brain, thus all future experiences will be experienced via the medium of this moulded brain based on previous experience.
In adolescence, a large portion of rewiring occurs and by the early twenties the brain is formed, the number of neurons relatively fixed. However, all through ones life, the brain has been shown to have a remarkable ability to rewire itself in response to new experiences and environments. For example if one learns to play a musical instrument, no matter how late in life, the brain grows new dendrites and neural synaptic connections, forming new pathways in which this information is processed.
Philosophically this has massive implications to the relationship of the self in space – to internal embodied architecture. Instead of our sense of self being defined by information that is transmitted directly to our consciousness, we are sponges of information that act in a looping feed; sensory information is communicated to our mind via our body and brain. It forms an internal mental map of what reality is, every time we absorb more information from the outside world our mind checks it for probability against the current mental map. Thus our experience of the outside world is in part created by our previous experiences of it.
The word Perception can easily be substituted on this statement on visio:
“Visual perception is not an optical image at all: what we call vision is actually a memory of the past, derived in the first place by touch and movement.”
This process continues indefinitely. Information comes in, is processed and checked and redesigns the map and so on. Therefore the experience of the self in space is wholly subjective, we truly do create the world we experience. This scientifically proved information correlates with Merleau-Ponty’s assumptions about subjective space and Deleuze’s notion of the crystal image. The once merely philosophical is now compounded by biological fact. (and extended??)What was once only accepted by and pondered upon by academics is now mainstream knowledge. This itself alters how we as a culture view ourselves in space and thus how we go on to consume space after this knowledge.
“…perception is an internally generated hallucination that we check against ‘data’”
An intrinsic part of this process, is the fact that our brain as the mediator of experience, is constantly making decisions about what we perceive based on previous experience and thus forming probability levels of reality. Therefore, our seamless sensical version of what we perceive is in fact our brain making estimations of probability and feeding them back into our consciousness.
Noise (random error information) accompanies all of the sensory information fed into our brains from the outside world. The internal mental map screens this information based on its probability, filtering the sensical from the non sensical. However, at breakdown points in the brain process, be it through a mental illness like schizophrenia, an accident to the brain or the ingestion of psychoactive drugs, these filtration systems are lost allowing strange connections to be made and strange sensations experienced. This offer glimmers of understanding into the mechanisations behind our normally seamless experience of the world.
“Hallucinations tell us that the brain can generate perceptions with minimal support from the retinal image. There is probably very little difference between a drug induced hallucination and the perception of faces in the clouds…”
“If the Bayesian philosophy of perception is correct, our perceptions are models, which we use to make informed guesses about the outside world…The process of perception involves selecting an internal model and then checking it against the data. The best model is the one that fits the data. As Richard Gregory says, perceptions are hypotheses. Sometimes two equally likely hypotheses fit the data, like the ambiguous figures of the duck rabbit and Necker Cube in figure X and the brain entertains them in turn.”
Similar occurrences can happen in real space (as opposed to 2d) Often so thought apparitions are ambiguous shapes that take on anthropomorphic forms to the anthropomorphically biased human eye. Or in more extreme situations where the a person has had large parts of their memory lost (i.e. chunks of their internal cognitive map are lost against which reality should be checked) can ‘remember’ events that never happened as the brain compensated as it does when it is normal and healthy by filling in the gaps. In these case though unlike it merely producing a seamless narration of life, it becomes fictitious.

“Patients with severe memory loss sometimes produce quite detailed ‘false memories’ to fill in the large gaps. They may well experience these memories as real, even though they are invented to cover up the lack of evidence.

All of the above examples further the notion of a fluid, subjective space, in constant flux; the subject and the world in permanent symbiosis.
Another key discovery in neuroscience which has large implications for the understanding of the self in relations to the outside world is that of mirror neurons:

TO BE WRITTEN UP BASED ON INFO BELOW:

mirror neurons:
“In the last decades, special mirror neurons have been found in the premotor area and in the posterior parietal cortex. They directly link perception to action: the perception of actions activates the relevant parts of the observer's motor system. Emotional expressions evoke resonance states inside the observer in a similar way. Besides underscoring the prereflective and implicit nature of intersubjectivity, this can provide an access to the neuronal basis of empathy and intuition.”
“Mirror neurons are premotor neurons that fire when the monkey performs object-directed actions such as grasping, tearing, manipulating, holding, but also when the animal observes somebody else, either a conspecific or a human experimenter, performing the same class of actions”
“Researchers at UCLA found that cells in the human anterior cingulate, which normally fire when you poke the patient with a needle ("pain neurons"), will also fire when the patient watches another patient being poked. The mirror neurons, it would seem, dissolve the barrier between self and others. [1] I call them "empathy neurons" or "Dalai Llama neurons". (I wonder how the mirror neurons of a masochist or sadist would respond to another person being poked.) Dissolving the "self vs. other" barrier is the basis of many ethical systems, especially eastern philosophical and mystical traditions. This research implies that mirror neurons can be used to provide rational rather than religious grounds for ethics.”
The connections that can be made between Merleau-Ponty’s symbiotic world of intersubjectivity, one where the subject
“The discovery of mirror neurons in the frontal lobes of monkeys, and their potential relevance to human brain evolution … is the single most important "unreported" (or at least, unpublicized) story of the decade. I predict that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments.”
(wikipedia)A mirror neuron is a neuron which fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another animal (especially by another animal of the same species).[1] Thus, the neuron "mirrors" the behavior of another animal, as though the observer were itself acting. These neurons have been directly observed in primates, and are believed to exist in humans and other species
Many scientists also believe that neuronal mirroring can reflect in two directions, illuminating both the external world (of others) and the internal world (of self). By constantly observing and imitating others, we not only learn about them but about ourselves: How we see and think of ourselves; the meanings we ultimately give to our most intimate and “unsharable” experiences like pain; indeed the ongoing project of human creation in general as it works to fill the world with things that possess the capacity to reflect our humanity (5).
Thinkers like Sartre, Foucault and Lacan may have been exquisitely prescient. Mimesis may well turn out to be a prerequisite or stepping stone to self-knowledge. We observe, reproduce, impose patterns, and thereby understand. We can do this with objects that happen to cross our field of vision like the patient encountered by Friges Karinthy or the seal by Mark Doty. But we could also do this on a more sophisticated level. If a potential doppelganger doesn’t exist we can invent one. As Alphonse Daudet does in his dream of the boat with the damaged keel (mirroring his diseased keel-spine). And as many artists do in their poems and paintings. After finishing his masterwork, Flaubert is famously reported to have said of his creation: Emma Bovary, ces’t moi. The re-production leads to recognition. The same thing that painters do perhaps more self-consciously in their self-portraits and in the case of Frida Kahlo, her double self-portraits. Here the dictum of philosopher Nelson Goodman is most transparently realized: Comprehension and creation go on together (6).
.to be finished
(all references are included in the word document, the blog doesn't recognise them)