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Weeks later, reading about cyborgs and posthumans, I was reminded of Dziga Vertov, an innovative Russian cinematographer who already in the 20’s pronounced himself ‘a mechanical eye, a machine’, who ‘freed from the boundaries of time and space, coordinate[s] any and all points of the universe, wherever [he] want[s] them to be. [His] way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus [he] explain[s] in a new way the world unknown to you’.

His Man with a Movie Camera, which shows a day in the life, is innovative for various reasons one of them being the idea of a film within the film; the film itself becomes the subject (the relevant sequences showing Vertov in most impossible positions from the point of view of human anatomy and physical accessibility!).

Reading around Vertov, I found two contemporary projects echoing his ideas:

Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake – one of the most creative uses of the Internet according to Google. Users contribute their own interpretations of Vertov’s sequences which are then streamed alongside, thus adding a twist to the original version. A day of encountering significant objects back in the 20 together with their equivalents in the contemporary times, filtered and processed by the contributor’s and final viewer’s imaginations. A dialogue reaching beyond temporal and spatial boundaries. Could that be another example of posthuman pedagogy?

dearphotograph.com, explored in detail by Ian Bogost, allows us to see what a photograph looks like in a photograph. It’s not only about sentimentalised human experiences but the object itself as the photograph becomes a salient entity encountered by the viewer. Bogost refers to it as object-oriented ontology which basically asks us to see the world of things as things in a world, rather than our world, with things in it. Another boundary blurred, another domination democraticised. Through visual turn …

Through the links fed into my lifestream earlier, I have been led to beautiful visualisations of Kerouac’s On the road designed and drawn by Stefanie Posavec. The starting point was a rigorous analysis of the text for various syntactic and prosodic features, which then were transformed into intricate,  ginkgo-like patterns or more geometrical structures of entangled lines. The complexity of the visual mappings reflects the complex subject matter of the book, ‘a mysterious, semi-nomadic subculture dramatically at variance with the conformist and materialistic American culture of the 1950s’ (http://www.ontheroad.org/). Similarly to Sal and Dean who are in quest of God and Kerouac who is experimenting with the writing style, a few decades later Posavec seeks a different kind of truth and discovers it in her  innovative and aesthetically remarkable ways.

George Dyson (from another lifestream feed) repeats after Barricelli that we might not recognize life or intelligence when we saw it, because our definitions of what it takes to be alive or intelligent were so narrow. Perhaps the same could be said about the way we perceive representation. ‘On the map’ by Prosavec makes me think how much we are tied to textuality and how this inclination ingrained in us for centuries might narrow our perception of visual literacy.

Essay Visions

PS I wonder what my blog postings could look like or even the final essay -