MESH
Digital Rhizome: by Brad Miller

A multimedia interactive art work cannot be reviewed the way a film, television piece or video art work can be1 . A theorist such as Richard Dienst,2 if we take his arguments regarding television to their logical conclusion, would claim it cannot even be viewed, let alone re-viewed, as other moving - image based works are and in fact the kind of viewer party to such a work is different, to the point that one cannot even be called a viewer .

Before elaborating on this further, I want to explain why I would look at Brad Miller's Digital Rhizome via Richard Dienst given that Dienst is discussing television. What Dienst and Brad Miller have in common is Gilles Deleuze. What Dienst explains is Deleuze's concept of the time -image as a direct presentation of time and an image that is able to "think", what the implications of that are for television and hints at what it might mean for newer technologies. (This is not however to claim that one imaging format is simply the logical extension of the laws of another). What we have to ask of Miller's work is not only if his work operates successfully at the level of content in dealing descriptively with Deleuze's concept of the rhizome and an essayist's approach to Deleuze's Mille Plateaux, but whether the digital image might possibly be one that is able to "think" in additional ways. Certainly the apparatus is added to (and in fact incorporates) an existing array of formats but is the 'image-thought' additional to those already available to us and if so has Miller activated it in his work?

Dienst describes Deleuze's work on the image as a "Natural History of Images" but this does not imply, I would argue a supercessional model of development. For Dienst, television and video and one might hazard the multimedia interactive come both before and after Deleuze's cinema. "They are the unthinking and the not-yet-thought image regime that oversee his project from the outside."3

Deleuze's theories of the image in relation to cinema are by now well known: his theoretical and historical distinctions between the movement - image and the time - image; his arguments against Lacanian informed Metzian film semiotics as much as against the phenomenological notions of perception; his critique of conceptions of representation in the image and autonomous perception in the viewer. Rather he posits via Bergson, a viewer who must always be considered an image on the same plane as the filmic one.

How he is able to do that is via a theory that understands that within the cinema of the movement - image, the camera apparatus is supposed to duplicate human visuality but cannot in fact replicate a continuous movement given that it breaks into frozen singular images.

For Deleuze what exemplifies the movement - image, (which he locates in the cinema of the pre-war period), is the way in which sequences of images are supposed to extend into the responses of spectators but which he will prefer to call "living images"4 . This extension he calls the "sensory motor link" but rather than claiming that "a given construction of images will produce a given response, - since perception itself is only activated as an image,- the "sensory motor link" crosses back and forth through a set of references as its immanent principle of unity , its plane of consistency. It motivates the structure without emanating from a single source"5 .

Deleuze can now totalise the field of images without having to refer all images to a single point of reference (the ideal viewer) rather he proposes two parrallel systems of reference : things as movement and perspective's as duration.

In the post war period however, the sensory motor link is uncoupled and the time-image emerges with a new state of disorganised exchange networks.

The time-image, is that which operates within a temporal economy not organised around a subjective reference and bears witness to what Deleuze will call cinema's "will to art".

Now cinematic description becomes possible. For Deleuze this means there is no longer even a place from which to ask about the distinction between the real and the imaginary6. Further, sound is liberated from a demand for realistic synchronisation with the image, as are camera movements, to show how the apparatus itself emits thoughts. As Dienst summarises it, the work of cinema becomes less montage (assembly) and more montrage (a showing) of images in their singular opticality and sonority rather than as raw materials that show a movement . The falseness of the time-image exposes the truth about cinema's rules of construction. "By indescernability between real and imaginary Deleuze wants this zone to be considered as aspect of the object character of the images, not as the putative confusion of some viewer"7. This indescernability pivots on a structure he calls crystalline time. A crystal -image always implies two sides. Actual and virtual.8

The point of recounting all this is to identify just what methodology we are using when approaching different forms of moving - image registration and for it not to be confused with methodologies dependent upon a "spectator dialectic, a duality of projection and introjection, an axilogy of experience or an emphasis on desire, where desire is expressed in terms of the audience " 9 .

Having said this, in the electronic image, the indistinction between object and image dissolves into what Dienst claims is a continuous movement, allowing time to pass in a newly automated consistency. Unlike the cinema of the time-image, the most salient question of which we could ask is regarding the possiblity of thinking a "cut in - itself", with the electronic image, the possibility of the most radical cuts are implied because the integrity of the frame is violated and images can surge up from any part of the screen. The image never fully appears because it is cut laterally 10 .
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On Dienst account, TV produces a time - image the moment it is turned on regardless of whether it is turned on for anyone in particular. Televisual time is already in the air-time as the "infinitesimal fissuring of an interminable present".

Building on Deleuze's conception of the time image, Dienst claims television offers the simultaneous peaks of the present and virtual loops of returning past in its everyday segments and proposes two features of the televisual in relation to its temporal economy that of still time and that of automatic time .

In television the cut has been overtaken by the switch or the mix, which makes every change of image a potential displacement. Every image begins with a mix or switch. Although we can only talk about seeing what happens as a mixture of still and automatic time, the mix or the switch structures seeing.

Still time in television is not a moment of capturing a picture and making an object of it as in photography. Televisual stills are created by switching away from a picture.

Automatic time, Dienst claims appears when an image is switched and left running, so that it is no longer an image of something, it is "the time of the camera's relentless stare", persisting beyond the movement of objects and scenery that pass before it.

If still time slices off images and designates them as past, the automatic time opens up to an anticipated future. The fray of instants in still-time is most readily evident in music video and commercials, on Dienst's account. "Rapid meanderings with erratic framings offer a fleeting glimpse of things that neither compose nor contain one another. The rapid flight of images are however marshalled by a single commodity (or in music video, an autonomous automatic sound-image) that serves to reference the entire set... The instant image is the minimum unit in televisual aesthetics, the smallest interval for the activation of sensory-motor-reactions and the most intense fusion of subjectifying and objectifying image making processes.11 "

Automatic time is specifically televisual epistemology, evident especially in "live" televisual situations, i.e. the pure event, the direct, the scene that "speaks for itself12 .

Neither still nor automatic time can reach an end point of fulfillment where each would finally become the other (although video art offers greater possibilities). Sitcoms and series tend toward features of still time -interchangability and repeatability -whereas serials exhibit a more automatic form, linear and incomplete. "It is not "things" or "situations" that are reproduced, represented or even simulated but the archaic speeds of their programming " according to Dienst.

Still and automatic times are not forms of experience but TV tools of analysis so that images do not need to be interpreted so much as located in their diverse sets and series.Television Dienst claims offers disjunction as part of its apparatus :the more complex the televisual system, the greater its powers of dispersive flux.

The VCR and newer systems such as the multi-media interactive amount to systems that moves away from solely representational unities toward multi-directional technological solutions, according to Dienst.

If for Deleuze the temporal economies of the cinema, nominated as the movement - image and the time-image and figured around the sensory motor link and the workings of the cut, and for Dienst the still and automatic times of television are grounded in the mix and the switch, then the temporalities of the multimedia interactive perhaps pivots around information flow and the click and drag. What these might be are yet to be fully figured .

But certainly we could not begin to try and understand them by confusing the interactive with a medium the way media are traditionally understood nor with something thay even produces an image as such. The calculated image unlike those produced in other media is not obtain by recording but through modelling and the computer is not itself a medium. According to Timothy Binkley13 , with media such a painting, film or video the image information is inseperable from the physical material storing it. But the computer provides us with a phenomenon not found in other media. It contains a frame buffer which stores the image. The computer by managing image memory can compute the contents of the frame buffer and transfer it to any appropriate output device such as the video display terminal, disk, printer and so on (Strictly speaking while computer artwork involves a choice of output device, one could say that this is also true of photography or film but the range of outputs is very narrow). But to claim that the frame buffer stores an image is itself deceptive. What it stores is information and that information cannot give rise to an image with any true identity. The same information can produce quite different images, none of which has any priority as the true appearance. The contents of the buffer could appear equally well as a video image, photograph of an image or a work in any one of a variety of other media, each looking different although derived from the same file of numbers. Where does one find the digital image after all? A picture of the frame buffer is just a picture of number and a picture of a number is just the number itself. One cannot in fact make a picture of a number. A number is an abstraction with no physical substance that could have a physical appearance14 . This is why the frame buffer can be moved around from monitor, to disk, to printer because they are abstract concepts and are not uniquely embodied by a particular medium.

Such an image has no identity but that does not mean it is a lack rather here the cut is a flow (diversion to the information output).

It is the flow and the click which Brad Miller attempts work in such a way that it operates on the model of a rhizome where the interactor can connect any point to any point. Miller attempts to illustrate Deleuze's rhizome by building a virtual structure based on conjunction "...and...and...and..." cued by sound buttons that move you from screen to screen. It is composed not of units but dimensions. One can enter the options as plateaux . He takes Deleuze's position on language in Mille Plateaux where he claims language would have nothing to do with the transmission of a signified content (as Derrida would have it ) but instead assembles and regulates signifying regimes, stitching bodies and ennunciations together. Instead of resemblence there are variable links between ever changing elements. Thus there is no representation only images and speeds intersecting aspects of bodies in motion. With the interactor in the multimedia work we witness a phenomenon which would perhaps be something similar to Deleuze's "living - image" except of course that in relation to the digital we cannot strictly speaking define it as an image. What it provides us with is an ontological discourse based on an artificial conception of nature, a nature that is produced in practice.

Digital Rhizome was exhibited during the "Filmmaker and Multimedia:Narrative and Interactivity" Conference staged by the Australian Film Commission in Melbourne in March '95. Details regarding the work can be obtain through the artist. email Brad.Miller@unsw.edu.au.

It was also exhibited in Revue Virtuelle # 2 Centre Georges Pompidou Paris 1994 and was produced as part of a Master of Fine Arts degree in the College of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales.


CyberFlesh GirlMonster: by Linda Dement


CyberFlesh GirlMonster is somewhat like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein where electricity is added to cobbled body parts to activate the monster. A bio-technology that creates technological artefacts. Dement has acted as a body snatcher compiling a library of body parts and voice fragments from which to manufacture her monsters. 1 She has perhaps, also made monsters out of us by wedding our bodies, the willing bodies of the interactor, to electricity. Here the interactor is as much an actor as the girlmonsters of the piece forming a theatre within the co-ordinates of the work. What we have, is perhaps not simply an illustration or speciman of monstrosity, although Dement's creatures are certainly that and the acts described in the narrative inserts are monstrous. It is more a diagram of monstrosity at work in the structuring of the piece, not so specifically via the coupling between we and the appartus or within the monstrosity of an image that is in fact, not an image (see above). It is rather in the hobbling of spatial and temporal shifts that occur when we click between images, declarative statements, animated boxes, text filled screens and hotspots. It is an architectonic that is somehow unnavigable.

At one level, an inscription of text, for instance, appears on the screen in front of a close up image of a body with a tattoo or scar or piercing. Medical information is animated line by line over the top of this if one of the graphics of mouths on the screen is clicked upon. Here narrative and information conventions are overlayed violating each other so that a structure of knowledge of what is presented cannot be arrived at via either model, if it is assumed that either of these conventions could in fact provide us with a knowledge. But nor however, can any of the other textual or visual conventions put to work or the patterning of selection of options. There is no commerce in emperical or psychological essentialisms. This is not a diagram of communication. For what Dement presents is somehow incommunicable, in the manner that it is claimed that the phenomenon of the holocaust in incommunicable. It is not simply about what is unrepresentable in terms of the banality of evil or unimaginable in terms of its scale or consequences but how Dement is able to use the technology to show that we have no technology or relation to technology that could.

Shelley's demand was that "Frankenstein' should ..."awaken thrilling horror..." and that the monster "...speaks to the mysterious fears of our nature...Dement speaks to these fears in a form of address that bears the mark of extraordinary composure.

Cyberflesh Girlmonster was exhibited during the "Filmmaker and Multimedia Conference:Narrative and Interactivity" staged by the Australian Film Commission in Melbourne in March '95.


© Heather Barton writes around new imaging technologies and is undertaking post-graduate research in the area at the University of Melbourne.
MESH#5 Summer, 1995. MESH film/video/media/art is the journal of Experimenta Media Arts


Footnotes