THE TELESCAPE
Footage as Form • Screen as Format
Nicholas Zembashi History & Theory Studies Fourth Year Seminar Tutor: Doreen Bernath
Some truths are better kept behind a screen, Especially when they would look like lies; ‘T is strange,- but true; for truth is always strange; Stranger than fiction; if it could be told, How much would novels gain by the exchange! How differently the world would men behold! How oft would vice and virtue places change! The new world would be nothing to the old, If some Columbus of the moral seas Would show mankind their souls’ antipodes. What ‘antres vast and deserts idle’ then Would be discover’d in the human soul! What icebergs in the hearts of mighty men, With self-love in the centre as their pole! What Anthropophagi are nine of ten Of those who hold the kingdoms in control Were things but only call’d by their right name, Caesar himself would be ashamed of fame.
Don Juan, by Lord Byron
figure 1
Footage / a recorded fragment of reality - collected for journalistic purposes Telescape / an interspatial region facilitating an event seen from a distance (from Greek τελε-). the site of contemporary knowledge and memory
Screen / an apparatus on which telescapes exist and where footage acquires narrative purpose Mince / an action of editing footage and to reveal by degrees rather than directly (to deceive) Stir / an action of re-arranging footage and constructing the narrative in a different order Artefact / a piece of footage Fact / constructed by mincing and stirring footage Fiction / constructed by mincing and stirring footage Truthiness / the quality of a constructed fact Spectacle / the goal for narrative success and reinforcer of truthiness Time / exploded by the quantity of footage and compressed by mincing
OVERTURE / TRUE STORIES “Narrare necesse est - to narrate is necessary: We humans must narrate. This fact was so and remains so, for we are our stories and stories must be told” 1 But at what cost? Society’s imprisonment within the bounds of culture is what German philosopher Odo Marquard refers to as a symptom of humanity’s need to construct stories. A precarious condition in which stories are polymythic in nature, becomes exacerbated through contemporary media, whereby information production is prolific; 2 “The 21st century citizen is subject to the age of the polymyth, a time in which one can find many social forces in the form of stories vying for prominence within that entity we call the self.” 3 The widespread technological ease with which events are recorded and disseminated in the form of footage (increasingly live) only adds to the maelstrom of competing narratives. The predominant casualty becomes ‘fact’. The convergence of fact and fiction in the illusionary constructs of the screen is creating an unprecedented state of collective distraction within the narrative phantasmagorias of media spectacle. For Walter Benjamin, “architecture has always provided the prototype of a work of art that is received in a state of distraction and by the collective ... Buildings [and places] are received twofold: through how they are used and how they are perceived. Or to put it in a better way: in a tactile fashion and in an optical fashion.” 4 The optical becomes the crux of the argument: its apparatus is without a doubt the screen, the black glassy plain in all of its scales - from the human palm, to the private and public wall. Polymythic narratives of events, landscapes and architectures are flattened in the form of footage. The agglomeration of both footage and screen form an intra-spatial site of knowledge and memory - what should be seen as a new kind of Denkraum5 - the Telescape. It is crucial, however, to stress that the premise lies in the telescape as a positive illusionary device for new architectural form; and not in a relativistic polemic about fact or reality. In a Kantian sense, what matters is not to explain “... why illusions are illusions, but ... why they are structurally necessary, unavoidable, and not just accidents.” 6 Within such a context, the exaggerated degree of fact construction is discussed for its narrative use and not necessarily its authenticity. After all, fact itself poses a paradox. According to Bruno Latour “... fact can have two contradictory meanings. On the one hand, our quasi-anthropological perspective stresses its etymological significance: a fact is derived from the root facere, factum (to make or to do). On the other hand, fact is taken to refer to some objectively independent entity which by reason of its ‘out there-ness’ cannot be modified at will and is not susceptible to change under any circumstances.” 7 Thus, the attempted objectivity of journalistic news reporting is of particular interest, since it is where fact is as constructed as fiction. In short, to return to Marquard, the modus operandi of the media is the mincing and stirring of myriads of fragmented polymyths to produce coherent and consumable monomyths as factual news spectacle. Before footage and screen to be respectively assessed one ought to briefly refer to the endgame; the spectacle: the construction of fact under the guise of story-telling; the apotheosis of which is ‘The Colbert Report (TCR). Stephen Colbert constructs a monomyhtic persona that encompasses the polymythic elements of extreme Republican rhetoric and its appearance in American media culture. The deployment of news footage becomes intrinsic in that “Colbert shifts the focus away from actual cultural signs and events … onto the storytellers who narrate those media stories. Consequently, by completely relying on the narratives and visual imagery of others, and by instantly internalising the stories coming from other newscasts, structurally TCR becomes ... modelled reality of modelled reality, whose focus is more on form ... and less on stories.” 8 The show, essentially, demands its viewers to overidentify with the form of media story-telling in order to interpret the parody. Although TCR parodies the U.S. media system, its methodology, rather prophetically (in light of the UK EU referendum and US election outcomes) points to a global condition of hypernormalised news consumption and an utter disregard for facts over narrative delivery. 9 In other words, assessing the plethora of footage on a screen has become an exercise of Orwellian doublethink. So much so, it is increasingly impossible to tell which is a form of subtle ridicule, sincere support, or a peculiar mixture of both. Competing distractors focus on the semiotic packaging and delivery of news rather than the plurality, veracity and authenticity of content. Hence Colbert’s neologism of truthiness 10 - what one wishes to be true and not what is known to be true - reinforces this hegemony of form. It is henceforth imperative to examine the nature of this form, the footage.
figure 2
THE FORM / FOOTAGE “... when reporters talk about authenticity they primarily refer to the ‘intrinsic aesthetic quality of amateur images’ and how their often grainy and unfocussed nature merely signifies rather than guarantees access to the real.” 13 The democratisation of recording through mobile devices, namely smartphones, has granted omnipresence to media organisations. Through the eyes of amateurs any occurrence is captured and, most importantly, in real-time. Since it is impossible to predict the unpredictable and be present to record it, the rise of ‘amateur’ journalism has become a paramount feature in the construction of almost every media narrative. The aesthetic value of the source footage engenders the most heightened permutation of unquestioned factual from. There is no understating the significance of footage in its current formal understanding. Footage finds its etymological root in silent films - in which 1 foot of 35mm film corresponds to one second of screen time. Its contemporary treatment has a far greater resonance, as recorded, raw and unedited material (hence often requiring treatment and as shall be argued, a more calculated form of editing: ‘mincing’). The very understanding of footage as a fragment of an event caught on camera establishes its nature within the ambivalence of ‘fact’ - as a constructed entity containing unalterable fact. It becomes a holy vessel for ‘fact’ as much as it is itself an ‘artefact’. As Latour sates, “facts and artefacts do not correspond respectively to true and false statements. Rather, statements lie along a continuum according to the extent to which they refer to the conditions of their construction. Up to a certain point on this continuum, the inclusion of reference to the conditions of construction is necessary for purposes of persuasion!” 14 Footage establishes its truthiness procedurally and through its own characteristics. These are surprisingly mirrored in the renowned renaissance fragment of the Torso Belvedere. To claim that footage is to journalists and spectators today what the Torso Belvedere was to artists and historians for centuries past, could be far-fetched. Although at first this seems as a perplexing comparison, there are certain aspects of the torso which can lend a critical reading to the form of footage and its narrative significance. Despite the Torso Belvedere’s lengthy history being beyond the scope of the argument, certain vitalities it possess become key. Firstly, they both subscribe to a hegemony of from. Since its ‘unearthing’, believed to have been around the early 1400s, the torso “... will more often be referred to by its shape than by its name.... [with] an unfailing fascination with its fragmentariness.” 15 The form hijacks its identity (a topic of intense speculation often concluding in Hercules). The aesthetic potency of amateur footage behaves much like the torso in that its very authenticity draws from its gritty and informal quality. Footage, like an ancient fragment, is assigned value for its emotional punch and evocative link to a memory or event. What is more, first-hand amateur footage delivers the most engaging form of empathy with the ‘witness’ of a situation; an artefact with seemingly powerful factual efficacy. Quite misleadingly, this creates a percieved authenticity. “Witnessing is thus conventionally the lot of the victim rather than the perpetrator, as it ultimately concerns who has the moral right to tell the version of events that is recorded in history books.” 16 The ‘martyr’s’ (Greek - μάρτυρας: he who saw) participation in an event immediately legitimises his or her footage. The camera’s ‘objective’ seeing validates the martyr’s account. Consequently the lens becomes the martyr - joining both participant and spectator as authors of perceived reality. The fragment of footage is then delivered to media corporations, which become less concerned with further verifying it as they do with building it into a story. The torso retains a similitude in its author’s ambivalence: “...unique among all the rediscovered antiquities [is] the artist’s signature. Prominently displayed on the front of the base are the words: ‘Apollonios of Athens, son of Nestor, made [this work]’ ... However little can be proven beyond the signature, the artist cannot be traced ... [The signature] crucially provides an artist-centred destiny of the work.” 17 Once questionable, yet captivating-enough, evidence endorses a satisfying origin story the rest of the fragment - torso and footage alike - can be lent to further narrative constructions. Latour, not only acknowledges this condition but further refers to the passage of an ‘object’ from one network of interpretation to another. 18 The fact is on its way to being ‘stabilised’. Latour finds that “... the object becomes the reason why the statement was formulated in the first place. At the onset of stabilisation, the object was the virtual image of the statement; subsequently, the statement becomes the mirror image of the reality ‘out there’.” 19 In short, a story has the ability to render footage content as fact retrospectively. The factual origins of the torso immediately become irrelevant. Now it has transitioned into a network of artistic fantasy. It inspires Michaelangelo’s fascination with the non finito, William Turner is among those drawing it and Jeff Koons sets his identifiable blue orb upon it (figures 3,4,5). Footage transcends it’s own origins in the newsroom. In Oliver Laric’s ‘Versions’ the questionable authenticity of an Iranian media image showing a missile launch leads to a myriad of artist re-imaginings (figures 6,7,8). The treatment the torso was subjected to over centuries reoccurs with pieces of footage in seconds. Nonetheless, the Torso Belvedere inspires positive reconstructions, whereas footage is much more insidious in its power to render stories as ‘true’. The narrative purpose obtained via the format of the screen negatively distracts from the fact that “ultimately, both the fairy tale and the news account are stories.” 20 Having now established the form of footage and its various attributes, its mincing and stirring within the format of the screen will argue for the Denkraum of the Telescape. Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas becomes vital.
figures 3,4,5
figures 6,7,8
THE FORMAT / SCREEN “In this kind of material culture of an atlas technique Warburg found the ideal form for presenting his idea of an Ikonologie des Zwischenraums, an iconology of interval, or better, interspace, as he called his project in his notes to Mnemosyne” 21 Warburg’s seminal work consists of an unfinished collection of 79 panels (figures 11 and 12). In them, he sought to awaken ‘Mneme’; an ancient drive in pathos-laden meanings between fragments of art history and cosmography. Constellations of symbolic imagery, would jolt a spectator’s imagination, and stimulate memory. Warburg’s interweaving of visual media (chiefly black and white photographs) shows “… the ‘migration’ (Wanderung) of symbols, motifs, figures, gestures and pathos formulas he was interpreting … the situation turned the plates into a specific site of knowledge.” 22 Such an optical site of knowledge is found in the screen. Its formatting of dynamic imagery in the form of footage, flattens the world while ushering in a dangerously powerful wave of Wanderung. Places, packaged into media narratives, are internalised endlessly; drastically different scales and times exist behind clinically seamless, reflective interfaces. Thus, the reading of screens, just like the Mnemosyne Atlas, “... gets turned into a literal corporealisation of Warburg’s figure of Wanderung or Wanderstraße, which he invented in order to describe the ‘migration’ of symbols, images, and astrological figures from culture to culture in both time and space.” 23 The heterogeneity of the world, (its polymyths), are transformed into a homogeneous schematic image in order to be projected onto a two-dimensional panel, the screen. Fragments of footage are formatted to exist simultaneously over a surface, on different screens viewed at once or indeed on screens viewed within screens. “The illusory nature of film is a second-tier nature; it derives from editing.” 24 The mincing of footage elucidates a heightened editing condition. To mince is to reveal by degrees rather than directly. It is conducted both ways - by the media outlet’s selective formatting and subsequently the spectator’s own filtering. Hence, with a deceptive undertone, mincing on screen refers to the multilateral editing process that influences a distracting rather than contemplative version of ‘Wanderung’. Therefore, mincing for journalistic purposes becomes more sinister. The wandering eye of the spectator, the hand of the author with a corporate or government agenda, find power in manipulating narrative outcomes. This is not to entertain conspiratorial notions and the like. The power of mincing is far greater not in formulating lies but in omitting truths. Warburg chooses his images - what to include and what to omit. He is mincing. On his panels, he proceeds by stirring. Stirring becomes the rearrangement of minced footage for the production of stories. The panels are a result of both operations, with gaps of conceptual and visual omission. These intervals provide the space for contemplation. “Even a well-established fact loses its meaning when divorced from its context.” 25 In the Mnemosyne Atlas new, constructive meanings emerge in the interval of a ‘Denkraum’; in the screen this interval is the Telescape. A twenty-first-century Warburg would, without a doubt, be deploying the form of footage on the format of the screen for his atlas. “The iconology of interval that structures the configuration of the plates is accompanied by a different concept of interspace as part of a theory of acting. Here the interspace is the Denkraum, regarded as the aim of all civilising work in order to produce a distance to the outer world, and at the same time it is described as the ‘interval between propulsion and acting’.” 26 Hence the wandering that enables contemplation amongst the rearrangement of his panels - what he sees as the creation of a Denkraum - is arguably a trope concurrent within screen-space as well. This is the Telescape: the intervals of optical action in a continuous state of mincing and stirring footage. In contrast to the static panels and conceptual space of the Denkraum, the Telescape is literally intra-spatial and ominously powerful in the screen. On the basis of this formatting, president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan topples a military coup through a video call. The setup was one of ‘screens speaking to screens’. Erdogan’s villa, a lavishly secure interior (of which a cream curtain is all that is seen), is on call with a CNN Türk newsroom. The news anchor holds up her smartphone screen to one of the studio cameras. Live footage of the president, engulfed by the news anchor’s hand, is then being disseminated throughout the country. Thusly the president harbours enough momentum to resist the coup. In the meantime, a generation of smartphone holders record their tv screens from other interiors and subsequently disseminate their own footage over social media (figure 9). The format encompasses both virtual and physical mediums of mincing and stirring. Disconnected spaces become minced into a narrative that commands action: stop the army! The Telescape should not be understood as an attempt to establish an architectonic type of ‘screen effect.’ 27 It is more conceptually critical in the sense of Warburg’s Denkraum and as a contemporary mnemonic construct. On an architectonic level the question of the Telescape is concerned with the consequences of spatial narrative construction through the formatting of footage on screens. The Telescape is explored as medium for rethinking architectural form and design by acting via the screen. Figures 12 and 13 depict tests whereby both live footage (video calls) and recorded footage are minced on screens, traversing interiors, landscapes and media events.
figure 9
figure 10
figure 11
iPhone
iPhone
iPad
iPhone
Cyprus Tool Shed
Media Threshold
iPad
United Kingdom - Living Room
TV & PC Monitor
Video Call Threshold
Cyprus Bedroom
PC Monitor
Video Call Threshold
Video Call Threshold
SLR Camera
The World
figure 12
Cyprus Coastal Promenade
Media Threshold
iPad
iPad
iPhone
iPhone
United Kingdom - Living Room
TV & PC Monitor
Video Call Threshold
Video Call Threshold
iPhone
SLR Camera
The World
figure 12 13
EPILOGUE/ TELESCAPE AS SPECTACLE “Magician and surgeon behave like painter and cameraman. The painter, while working, observes a natural distance from the subject; the cameraman, on the other hand, penetrates deep into the subject’s tissue.” 28 The very nature of surgical penetration into reality digs into a far deeper realm of distraction. A pit in which any fragment of footage, as has been argued, can be served up as fact if the aesthetic qualities and narrative format amount to an emotionally ‘authentic’ spectacle. In other words, as one probes deeper into the camera, or indeed the screen, the proximity to fact only fades to reveal the magician staring back at the other end. Fiction, as heightened reality, is all-over the Telescape. Its distracting potential, spear-headed by the practises of media operators, does not necessarily centre around the intentional construction of lies. It need not be intentional deception at all. The mincing, stirring and omission of over-abundant footage can generate multiple fictions, even accidentally, while maintaining ‘authentic’ fragments. The Telescape is at once distracting and contemplative. “Twenty-first-century century journalism, like the nineteenth-century-novel, is a realist cultural form which generates the effects of reality rather than straightforward representations of reality itself ” 29 The dangers of distraction lie in the spectacle. As delineated by the aesthetics of amateur footage and the hegemony of form, contemporary methods of narration employ such an authentic degree of visuals that fact and fiction are indistinguishable. News reporting is the zenith of contemporary fictional realism, with its content taken by its spectators as unquestionable and objective fact. “…Cinema does not include attentiveness. The audience is an examiner but a distracted one.” 30 The spectacle draws from the Telescape’s qualities of distance and collapsing of exteriors into interiors. 31 With the proliferation of both footage and screens, one interiorises the world in their palm, often without even having to crawl out of their bed. Footage, generated by anyone finds its way into narrative spectacles that follow society beyond the public realm, burrowing deep inside their most private and intimate spaces. The mobile screen has annihilated the stationary theatre or cinema goer and (what has been for centuries) a relatively fixed relationship with the stage. Susan Buck-Morss, in her essay ‘The Dialectics of Seeing’ refers to the Arcades of Paris as the urban pinnacle of societal mass distraction within the bounds of capitalism. “The covered shopping Arcades of the nineteenth century were Benjamin’s central image because they were the precise replica of the international consciousness, the unconscious of the dreaming collective. All of the errors of bourgeois consciousness could be found there (commodity fetishism, reification, the world as ‘inwardness’), as well as (in fashion, prostitution, gambling) all of its utopian dreams. Moreover, the arcades were the first international style of modern architecture, hence part of lived experience of a worldwide, metropolitan generation.” 32 Retail utopias, collective wishes, even nostalgia for constructed pasts, have manifested in contemporary technologies of glass and metal. No longer an arcade but a screen. If an altar of consumerism could elevate one singular object it is that of the screen. Inside it, a religion of pure cult constructing its dogmas. The interspace between footage, the Telescape, is easily manipulated to distract. “This religion does not primarily function through a set of ‘ideas’ on the level of an ‘orthodoxy’, but rather on the level of material practises, an ‘orthopraxis’, an ensemble of ‘normalising’ practises and rituals” 33 The construction of fact is consequentially intrinsic to a global consumerist orthopraxis. Footage has become a commodity of neo-liberal capitalist spectacle; and glass, the material of its formatting apparatus - the screen. The conceptual role of glass merely heightens the sense of technological irony in regard to modernism - once a symbol of political transparency it has come to define near-absolute obscurity. The Telescape has to become a space for contemplation and constructive thought not of distraction. It is compelled to complete Warburg’s unfinished project, that envisaged the impossibility to synthesize a pictorial knowledge (the astrological map), the order of space (the Wanderstraßenkarte), and the episteme of descent (the genealogical schema), into one model; the Atlas. 34 Therefore, in an age of infinitesimal production and commodification of footage (even in the aesthetic fetishising, in Benjaminian terms, of amateur footage), the Telescape is a two-etched sword. However, like Warburg’s Mnymosene Atlas, footage can also become a critical transspatial and trans-historical tool. One could refer to filmic works such as those of Harun Farocki to perhaps begin understanding interspatial contemplation amidst the mincing and stirring of footage. “Influenced by Bertolt Brecht and Godard, [Farocki’s] sharp gaze tinged with moral intent was fixed on the links between individuals, society, politics and moving images; on the efforts that shape and condition us; and on the violence all around us. The direct, manifest and brutal violence we know and recognise, and the less explicit but pervasive and therefore insidious violence that passes via the media and technology.” 35 Although much could be said about his oeuvre, a 2015 posthumous exhibition brings all his projects together into an Atlas. Narratives that question the perception of current affairs are set against each other to further provoke relationships. It is as close as one could parallel an contemporary atlas of footage and screen to Warburg’s Mnemosyne (figure 14).
Conclusively, the argument for a critical implementation of the Telescape in Architecture, is necessary at a time when the process of fact construction is so directly spatialised through the form of footage and the format of the screen. U.S. politician and academic Daniel Patrick Moynihan, famously stated that everyone is entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts. This is no longer the case. Anyone can also be entitled to their own facts - Colbert’s truthiness triumphant. Meanwhile, “The subject of knowledge only ever obtains knowledge via his or her senses [now screens], via how things appear, and hence the truth thus sought will itself always be corrupted by appearances.’ ” 36 The ultimate question being, what new forms could architecture pursue by using the Telescape as a positive illusionary design tool?
figure 14
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NOTES
OVERTURE / TRUE STORIES 1 Marquard, O., Philosophie des Stattdessen, (Stuttgart, Reclam, 2000), p.60 2
From IBM’s definition of Big Data: “Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. This data comes from everywhere: sensors used to gather climate information, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos, purchase transaction records, and cell phone GPS signals to name a few.” see: https://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/bigdata/ what-is-big-data.html, accessed December 1st 2016 3 Funk, W., Gross, F. and Huber, I.(eds.), The Aesthetics of Authenticity: Medial Constructions of the Real, (Bielefeld, Transcript Verlag, 2012), p.84 4 Benjamin, W. and Underwood, J.A., The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, (London, Penguin Books, 2008), p.33 5 Aby Warburg’s Denkraum (thinking room) and the Mnemosyne Atlas will be paralleled to my definition of the ‘telescape’ in the pages to follow 6 Žižek, S., Slavoj and Žižek, S., Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, (London, Verso Books., 2013) p.9 7 Latour, B., Woolgar, S., Laboratory life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, (2nd edn., United States, Sage Publications., 1979), p.175 8 Funk, W., Gross, F. and Huber, I.(eds.), The Aesthetics of Authenticity: Medial Constructions of the Real, (Bielefeld, Transcript Verlag, 2012), p.80 9 Alexei Yurchak refers to hypernormalisation as a condition that emerges from the Russian term stiob “differed from sarcasm, cynicism, derision or any other more familiar genres of absurd humour in that it required a [incredible] degree of overidentification with the object, person, or idea at which [it] was directed” He argues that this reality-destabalising, late-socialist conundrum is reappearing in the neo-liberal West. See p.181 from: Yurchak, A. and Boyer, D., American Stiob: Or, What Late-Socialist Aesthetics of Parody Reveal about Contemporary Political Culture in the West, Cultural Anthropology, 25, p.179-221, (2010) 10 “truth that comes from the gut, not books” and “the quality of preferring concepts of facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts of facts known to be true”; see http://www.obsnews.com/stories/2006/12/12/opinion/meyer/main2250923.shtml,
THE FORM / FOOTAGE 14
Andén-Papadopoulos, K., Amateur Images and Global news, Edited by Kari / Anden-Papadopoulos and Mervi Pantti, (Bristol, UK, University of Chicago Press, 2011), p.205 15 Latour, B., Woolgar, S., Laboratory life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, (2nd edn., United States, Sage Publications., 1979), p.176 16 Barkan, L., Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture, (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2001), p193 17 Ibid, pp.194 - 195 18 This evident in Latour’s observation that only by virtue of shift between one network and another could a particular statement begin circulation as a fact. See: Latour, B., Woolgar, S., Laboratory life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, (2nd edn., United States, Sage Publications., 1979), p.153 19 Ibid., p.176 20 Graddol, D., ‘The Visual Accoplishment of Facaulty’, in D. Graddol and O. Lloyd-Barrett (eds), Media Texts: Authors and Readers, (Clevedon, Multilingual Matters, 1994), pp. 136-59
THE FORMAT / SCREEN 21
Weigel, Sigrid, Epistemology of Wandering, Tree and Taxonomy, Images Re-vues [Online], (Hors-série 4, document 15, 2013), Accessed on October 2nd 2016: URL : http:// imagesrevues.revues.org/2934 22 Claudia Wedepohl, Ideengeographie. Ein Versuch zu Aby Warburgs ‘Wanderstraßen der Kultur’, Mitterbauer, H., Scherke, K., (eds.), Ent-grenzte Räume. Kulturelle Transfers um 1900 und in der Gegenwart, (Wien, Studien zur Moderne, 2005) p. 227-254. 23 Weigel, Sigrid, Epistemology of Wandering, Tree and Taxonomy, Images Re-vues [Online], (Hors-série 4, document 15, 2013), Accessed on October 2nd 2016: URL : http:// imagesrevues.revues.org/2934 24 Benjamin, W. and Underwood, J.A., The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, (London, Penguin Books, 2008), p.24 25 Latour, B., Woolgar, S., Laboratory life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, (2nd edn., United States, Sage Publications., 1979), p. 110 26 Weigel, Sigrid, Epistemology of Wandering, Tree and Taxonomy, Images Re-vues [Online], (Hors-série 4, document 15, 2013), Accessed on October 2nd 2016: URL : http:// imagesrevues.revues.org/2934 27 Not in the sense the sense that Paul Virilio quite vehemently tries to describe screens in several neologisms of his (‘teletopographical’, ‘optoelectric’, ‘optic foyer’ etc.). See: Friedberg, A., The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, (Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 2007), p.184
TELESCAPE SPECTACLE 28 Benjamin, W. and Underwood, J.A., The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, (London, Penguin Books, 2008), p.25 29
Andén-Papadopoulos, K., Amateur Images and Global news, Edited by Kari / Anden-Papadopoulos and Mervi Pantti, (Bristol, UK, University of Chicago Press, 2011), p.203 30 Benjamin, W. and Underwood, J.A., The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, (London, Penguin Books, 2008), p.35 31 One could even dare over-simplify Deleuze’s philosophy of the Baroque Fold and compare it to the materiality of the screen - the seamless separator of interior from exterior where both inform each other infinitely whilst never interacting However, this comparison could be an interesting discussion in a separate investigation, even drawing relationships between the spectacle to baroque philosophy and the current state of screenic distraction a Neobaroque condition. See: Lahiji, N., The Adventures with the Theory of the Baroque and French Philosophy: Deleuze, Lacan and Badiou, (London, United Kingdom, Bloomsbury Academic, 2016) 32 Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, (8th edn. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1991) 33 Benjamin, W., ‘Capitalism and Religion’, in Walter Benjamin, Selective Writings, Volume I, 1913-1926, ed. Bullock, M., Jenbnings, M. W., (Cambridge, MA, The Balknap Press of Harvard University Pres, 1996), p.41 34 To radically stretch the argument even further, the Telescape could even become a technological, intraspatial tool for joining ‘culture’ and ‘nature’ in Latour’s sense, as he argues for the need to do so in ‘We Have Never Been Modern’. Interestingly; in the book he introduces his premise through his reading of a news article and the thematic ßrelationships, or indeed lack there of, between the articles of news. See: Latour, B. and Porter, C., We Have Never Been Modern, (3rd edn. Cambridge, MA, Prentice Hall / Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993) 35 The Atlas of Harun Farocki’s Filmography, 2015, [Online]: https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/asset/atlas-of-harun-farocki’sfilmography/8wGD6OfEo3J5tg , Accessed December 2nd 2016 36 See Alain Badiou, Conditions, from: Lahiji, N., The Adventures with the Theory of the Baroque and French Philosophy: Deleuze, Lacan and Badiou, (London, United Kingdom, Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), p.5
BIBLIOGRAPHY BOOKS • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Byron, L., The Selected Poems of Lord Byron, (London, United Kingdom, Wordsworth Editions, 1994) Marquard, O., Philosophie des Stattdessen, (Stuttgart, Reclam, 2000) Funk, W., Gross, F. and Huber, I.(eds.), The Aesthetics of Authenticity: Medial Constructions of the Real, (Bielefeld, Transcript Verlag, 2012) Benjamin, W. and Underwood, J.A., The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, (London, Penguin Books, 2008) Žižek, S., Slavoj and Žižek, S., Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, (London, Verso Books., 2013) Latour, B., Woolgar, S., Laboratory life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, (2nd edn., United States, Sage Publications., 1979) Andén-Papadopoulos, K., Amateur Images and Global news, Edited by Kari / Anden-Papadopoulos and Mervi Pantti, (Bristol, UK, University of Chicago Press, 2011) Barkan, L., Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture, (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2001), Graddol, D., ‘The Visual Accoplishment of Facaulty’, in D. Graddol and O. Lloyd-Barrett (eds), Media Texts: Authors and Readers, (Clevedon, Multilingual Matters, 1994) Claudia Wedepohl, Ideengeographie. Ein Versuch zu Aby Warburgs ‘Wanderstraßen der Kultur’, Mitterbauer, H., Scherke, K., (eds.), Ent-grenzte Räume. Kulturelle Transfers um 1900 und in der Gegenwart, (Wien, Studien zur Moderne, 2005) Lahiji, N., The Adventures with the Theory of the Baroque and French Philosophy: Deleuze, Lacan and Badiou, (London, United Kingdom, Bloomsbury Academic, 2016) Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, (8th edn. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1991) Benjamin, W., ‘Capitalism and Religion’, in Walter Benjamin, Selective Writings, Volume I, 1913-1926, ed. Bullock, M., Jenbnings, M. W., (Cambridge, MA, The Balknap Press of Harvard University Pres, 1996), p.41 Latour, B. and Porter, C., We Have Never Been Modern, (3rd edn. Cambridge, MA, Prentice Hall / Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993)
JOURNALS •
Weigel, Sigrid, Epistemology of Wandering, Tree and Taxonomy, Images Re-vues [Online], (Hors-série 4, document 15, 2013), Accessed on October 2nd 2016: URL : http:// imagesrevues.revues.org/2934
WEB • •
IBM’s definition of Big Data, See: https://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/bigdata/what-is-big-data.html, accessed December 1st 2016 The Atlas of Harun Farocki’s Filmography, 2015, [Online]: https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/asset/atlas-of-harunfarocki’s-filmography/8wGD6OfEo3J5tg , Accessed December 2nd 2016
IMAGES • • • • • • •
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figure 1: Nicholas Zembashi, ‘Telescapes’, Test_01 figure 2: Salon: ‘Stephen Colbert’s greatest hits: Our favorite moments from 9 years of “The Colbert Report”, [Online], http:// www.salon.com/2014/12/19/stephen_colberts_greatest_hits_our_favorite_moments_from_9_years_of_the_colbert_report/ figure 3: Couns Weekly: ‘British Museum explores beauty of human body in Greek art’, [Online], https://www.coinsweekly.com/ en/Archive/British-Museum-explores-beauty-of-human-body-in-Greek-art/8?&id=3235&type=n figure 4: Ruhm und Rätsel – der Torso vom Belvedere, [Online] http://syndrome-de-stendhal.blogspot.co.uk/2013_08_01_ archive.html figure 5: Jeff Koons, Gazing Ball (Belvedere Torso), plaster and glass, 71 1/2 x 29 7/8 x 35 1/8 inches, 181.6 x 75.9 x 89.2 cm [Online], http://www.jeffkoons.com/artwork/gazing-ball/gazing-ball-belvedere-torso#sthash.RT8iiN9U.dpuf figures 5, 7, 8: Oliver Laric Missile Variations, official webpage, [Online], http://oliverlaric.com/missilevariations.htm figure 9: ‘Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan President Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks on CNN Turk via a FaceTime call in Istanbul on Friday, July 15, 2016, after members of the country’s military attempted to overthrow the government’, [Online], http://edition.cnn.com/2016/07/15/asia/turkey-military-action/index.html figure 10: Creational Experiments: ‘Aby Warburg, detail of the Mnemosyne Atlas, 1924-29’, [Online], https:// curatorialexperiments.wordpress.com/tag/universal-addressability-of-dumb-things/ figure 11: Radio from Reina Sofia Museum: ‘Aby Warburg, detail of the Mnemosyne Atlas, 1924-29’, [Online] http://radio. museoreinasofia.es/en/fugue-ideas figure 12: Nicholas Zembashi, ‘Telescapes’, Test_02 figure 13: Nicholas Zembashi, ‘Telescapes’, Test_03 figure 14: Art Agenda: ‘All the World’s Futures’, View of Atlas of Harum Farocki’s Filmography, [Online], http://www.art-agenda. com/reviews/all-the-worlds-futures/ figure 15: Pinterest, Explore Aby Warburg, Librarys, and more!, [Online], https://www.pinterest.com/pin/510947520207801833/