PLICA - REPLICA – EXPLICA

Jane Norris 8. 2002

PLICA - REPLICA – EXPLICATION

(‘The Fold’[1] by G. Deleuze as a methodology for Video work on the N. Circular)

In his exploration of Leibniz and the Baroque, Deleuze uses ‘The Fold’ as not only as the overarching title for his book, but as a theoretical tool to analyse his subject matter. It is central to understanding the book that the reader becomes aware of ‘The Fold’ is not simply as a form of analysis but as his method of working. ‘Folding – Unfolding, Refolding’[2] becomes embedded not just as a useful analogy in his critique, but in his very process of discussion, in the stylistic form of his written work. As Tom Conley in his Translators Foreword notes: ‘ Deleuze’s sentences tend to be short, (and) simple … they break open and recombine, inviting the reader to isolate given clauses and reconnect them to produce mobile affects where verbal groups jump into or recur in other clauses.’[3] In this way Deleuze gives a clear example of the potential of such a dynamic approach to folding, when used in a linier creative process such as the written language. How much more can be explored then, when this theoretical process is applied to the dynamic and spatial nature of video. Taking his example, I aim to fold Deleuze’s chapter on ‘ Folds in the Soul’ together with analysis of my video work on the North Circular, in such a way that the resulting ‘unfolding’ or explication extends my understanding and sets up a working methodology for my video practice.

Perhaps we can start by taking a Pixel for a run, to corrupt Paul Klee’s saying[4]. This small element – the Pixel, operates in all visual digital work as a basic element, or electronic mark. It is this very fluid electronic nature of the Pixel that lends it its chameleon character and therefore makes it such an apt choice for this project. It is the ideal ‘ambiguous sign’ - ‘Ideality par excellence’[5] due to its ‘Virtual’ nature. It owns no inherent physical or visual properties it’s self, but rather is identified by a series of electronic codes that bare no relation to its visual character. It is ‘weightless’. Before being used, it is stored as potential, identified as memory capacity – operating (as Paul Klee states of the point or dot in drawing) as ‘a site of cosmogenesis … a non dimensional point … between dimensions’[6] it is an event that is awaiting an event. A Pixel is waiting to take its colour from received information or indeed copying the pixel next door. So beginning at this point, the pixel, we start at the point of ‘the pure Event of the line or the point’[7]– the performative potential of the pixel particularly when used in video. We start at the ‘Point Fold’ where a dot ‘shifting its position forward’[8] becomes a line, or a pixel running becomes a video.

What Deleuze describes as inflexion is this process of multiple performative internal folding that produces transformation. In making the video ‘North Circular 3L A’ the process of inflection in relation to pixels could be said to occur at three levels, parallel to Deleuze’s proposed three virtual transformations: ‘Vectorial’, ‘Projective’ and ‘Infinite Variation’. Each pixel operates at a vectorial level, articulating the movement and animating digital information. So each pixel becomes a turning point or point of transformation for the next point. This articulation is more pronounced due to the deliberately slow shutter speed of the video camera, causing a juddering movement where some frames are lost, which reveals more clearly the process of shifting from one set of pixels to another. This causes the viewer to become aware of tangential information progressing before them in a way that breaks up or interrupts the illusion of a flowing image. This technique is an important tool in disrupting an orthodox reading of the video as flowing narrative description of other magical reality – video as a window. Instead it works to break up the represented image, reducing it into information bundles whose jarring tangential relationships raise the viewer’s awareness of the medium being used.

The increased influence of medium on the viewer also takes the digital pixels into the area of being ‘Projective’. As the shutter speed is slowed whilst attempting to film the road passing at different speeds, the ability of the pixels to record sufficient information to present an ‘accurate’ or realistic image breaks down causing a range of morphologies …stuttering / stretching / blurring and extreme colour fluctuations. ‘That is … how every contour is blurred to give definition to the formal powers of the raw material, which rise to the surface and are put forward as so many detours and supplementary folds.’[9] When the resulting effects are replicated and folded back on top of them selves, the range of morphologies increase. These transformations again push the image towards a raw digital texture, by stretching the medium beyond its capacity and thereby exposing the nature of the medium. The resulting distortion and break up of recognisable imagery also conveys more accurately the experiential and performative nature of repetitive ‘folded’ journeys round the North Circular, or perhaps the multiple foldings of many commuter journeys each day. This is even before the film is projected on to a distorted surface in a gallery in the more traditional sense of projection.

As the pixels are cloned and folded back on top of them selves, they layer up at varying intervals to form almost a gradient of imagery, a sedimentation of visual elements from the recorded journey. As a result of this process there also develops a possible ‘infinite variation’[10] of positions for any image or bundle of pixel texture. The translucent layers of video fold back and overlap in an infinite variety of ways, revealing to the viewer a multiplicity of different possible visual combinations. In doing this, the image again breaks away from the traditional ‘time line’ of film, and the linearity of narrative. As the ‘line of film’ is folded or looped back on to its self ‘the line effectively folds into a spiral’ [11] … with this the infinite possibility of pixel bundle variations, spiral round the process of the folded and looped film. What then becomes primary in the viewing experience is not necessarily the image or order of images, but the movement, fluctuation or spiralling of images repeated in a variety of orders. ‘it becomes vortical … Inflection itself becomes vortical and at the same time its variation opens onto fluctuation, it becomes fluctuation.’[12] The performative folding produces a sense of action or force at work in the video. ‘force itself is an act, an act of the fold … the fold is power.’[13] The more the video is folded back onto its self the more the sense of fluctuation or force gains visual priority over the image. If this is continued, and this ‘performativeness’ is multiplied then the methodology or process being used overpowers the image being communicated, the methodology becomes the image.

All this builds to produce ‘a new object we can call objectile… where fluctuation of the form replaces the permanence of a law; where the object assumes a place in a continuum by variation.’[14] ‘Object’ has become dynamic, on the move, continually changing and fluctuating. It is objectile as related to projectile. This almost calls for a similar new phrase, such as ‘Videoile’ or ‘Digitile’ to describe the related digital video work. A term that reflects the performative use of the medium that brings its formal qualities to the surface, rather than video’s more usual self-effacing transparency subordinated to the role of documentation. The objectile or video here ‘is manneristic, not essentializing: it becomes an event.’[15] But not an event like watching a film whose ‘performance’ is linked to ‘real time’. The method of making the video, or the process used is the ‘event’, - editing is the performance.

This ‘objectile’ requires a temporal and qualitative re reading of ‘the object’, or in this case the video work. ‘The new status of the object no longer refers its condition to a spatial mold – in other words to a relation of form-matter – but to a temporal modulation that implies as much the beginnings of a continuous variation of matter as a continuous development of form.’ The folding, layering and fluctuation in the North Circular video steps outside of a static sense of time and place as a range of different travelling, capture and editing speeds are used and then overlapped in the folding process. This presents the viewer with a variety of different expressions of time and space – of the same place – all at the same time. In addition to this qualitative elements such as extreme colour adjustments or fluctuations and sound stretching and distortion heighten the viewers awareness of a video recording of a geographical place as a flexible and modulated experience.

As the object or video becomes transformed into the dynamic ‘objectile’ so the viewer is transformed from being ‘sub’ject – under the authority or truth of a static and clearly defined object (as described by Descartes,) to Whitehead’s term: ‘super’ject which moves beyond relativism: ‘It is not a variation of truth according to the subject, but the condition in which the truth of a variation appears to the subject.’ In this way the subject or viewer moves into a dynamic relationship with the work. The sub-ject moves from a position of holding the object in their attention in a passive static way, to this role of ‘super-ject’ – as someone in a continually changing dynamic relationship to the object (in this case the video work) This can be understood as a moving or dynamic viewing of a continuous object: ‘because every point of view is a point of view on variation.‘[16] The subject or the viewer therefore experiences ‘point of view’ in flux for example when approaching the video instillation and walking round it. The visual qualities of the folded video work projected on to the floor in the form of an instillation act to disorientate the viewer from a mono temporal and mono conceptual understanding, pushing them to experience any particular moment as ‘a point of view on variation,’ – not just the view that the video camera captured, but also the view of the of the person walking round the instillation, so any number of ‘points of view’ intersect at the same time. A viewer’s experience of the video instillation becomes the total of these combining views ie: ‘what remains in the point of view’[17] at any time.

This continual folding, repetition and refolding of a 3-minute piece of video, which layers up multiple versions of the same image and is slowed to reveal the visual nature of the folding, effectively stretches the ‘event’ until it takes 20 minutes in real time. The resulting effect of this process can perhaps relate to Deleuze’s use of the term ‘extension’: ‘Leibniz can define extension (extensio) as “continuous repetition” of the situs or position – that is, of point of view.’ This video piece would appear to operate in the same way, by stretching perception through replication and fluctuation, ‘ the status of the object, which now exists only through its metamorphosis’ [18] These morphemes are evident in the video work in a variety of ways from simple visual distortions like blurring, stuttering, colour fluctuations, replication and pixel interpolation, to the anamorphosis of the route name itself appearing at the end of the video ‘Vertical long play’ like Holbein’s skull in ‘The Ambassadors’ painting, and difficult to read in the apparently surrounding flat perspective of the rest of the video. This like all the other distortions acts as a contrast and perhaps critique on normal or expected forms of film or video, both within this body of work and in the broader context of fine art video.

The ‘ soul (or in this case the viewer) always includes what it apprehends from its point of view, in other words inflection.[19]’ So we are what we see / what we are / what we see. ‘Inclusion … has a condition of closure or envelopment’[20] The video as an event is folded in to our experience and we make the event by being there. The individual experience of the journey round the video instillation is only folded into each viewer that took a route round the work. Inflection is this act of enfolding’ that causes extension in the ‘envelop’, and by doing this inflection’s by product is ‘defining the fold’. Inclusion however is the act of digesting the inflection it is ‘what envelopes the fold’. Both of these could apply to the piece of video work or the viewer. Folding and stretching of the video extends both the time and visual complexity of the piece. The folding of the event of the video in to the viewer’s experience extends the viewer’s understanding becoming a point of inflection. This point of inflection is not a static geographical or mathematical type of point; it is more of ‘a position, a site, a focus, a place, a point of conjunction of vectors of curvature or, in short, point of view’[21] a moment of change.

To recap Deleuze refers to three kinds of ‘singularities’ in relation to points, firstly the ‘physical point’, which is ‘the point of inflection itself.’[22] This is not a static object or place like an atom or geographical point on a map, but more like a pixel it is an ‘elastic or plastic point fold.’ The second is the ‘mathematical point’ – an abstract understanding of position or site or focus, again not an exact formula or point on a graph but rather a place of conjunction of different vectors – ‘point of view.’ The third is the ‘metaphysical point’ – the soul / subject / viewer, that is what occupies the point of view, it is the place of inclusion.

This leads to ‘the name that Leibniz ascribes to the soul … the Monad’, which represents a ‘unity that envelops a multiplicity, this multiplicity developing (it) in the manner of a series.’ So the more folding is included in the video or the viewer, the more there is a stretching of the monad or envelop structure. The ‘envelope’ could also be understood as the performative nature of filming and editing the A 406 itself, over a multiplicity of journeys stretching it out to a series of videos.

‘since the world only exists in subjects that include it…’ – the North Circular experience exists only for those who have travelled it. [23]

[1] Deleuze G ‘The Fold’ 1993 London. Athlone Press.

[4] The original well known saying that drawing is: ‘Taking a line for a walk’ appears in Klee P ‘Pedagogical Sketchbook P 16 trans Sibyl Moholy-Nagy 1953 London. Faber & Faber.

[6] Attributed here by Deleuze as from ‘Theorie de l’art modern’ However it does appear in ‘Pedagogical Sketchbook’ p.18

[7] Deleuze G ‘The Fold’ p15 1993 London. Athlone Press