The Telescape: AA Studio Research Thesis 2017 by Nicholas Zembashi

TELESCAPE FACtory of the World

Nicholas Zembashi AA Diploma Unit 9 Unit masters Natasha Sandmeier, Manolis Stavrakakis 2016 - 2017

CONTENTS

Preface

INTRODUCTION

What

The Telescape

Why

Exploding Events

How

The Screen

THE TELESCAPE

Overture: True Stories

The Form: Footage

The Format: Screen

Epilogue: Telescape as Spectacle

EXPLODING TIME

The Origins of Time

War in the Gulf

The Oil Well 1.0

The Oil Well 2.0

Quantity and Absurdity: The Story of Oil

Faceted World

TRUTHINESS

103

Truthiness by Dr. Stephen T. Colbert

105

Facts

109

The screen; a site for stories

Headline News: We Have Never Been Modern by Bruno Latour

Fictions

117

Non-Linearity: Mulholland Drive by David Lynch

PHANTASMAGORIA

125

Media Aesthetics

127

War Is Beautiful

Of Beauty and the Ugly

135

The Ugly by Mark Cousins

NESTED SPACES The Box

169 171

Harry Houdini

Exterior: Shaping the World

179

Michael Heizer’s Cities

Interior: Aediculae

183

Flattening Event Space

SURFACE WORLD

205

The Vatican of Screens

207

Conclusion

FILM SCORE

225

PROJECT SCROLL

229

BIBLIOGRAPHY

321

PREFACE

Ladies and gentlemen; You don’t actually need me to stand for anything; You just need me to stand; To be the strong architect, the man of action; My God you are addicted to actions and slogans. It doesn’t matter what I say. It doesn’t matter what I do. Just as long as I’m doing something spectacular, You’re happy to come along for the ride. And frankly, I don’t blame you. With all the foolishness and indecision in the discourse, Why not architects like me? In the end I don’t care whether you love me or you hate me, Just as long as I win! The deck is stacked. The rules are rigged. Fact and Fiction die in exploded time. Welcome to the death of the Age of Reason. There is no right or wrong; not anymore. Only Surface, Only Spectacle. There’s only being in ... and then being out. I give you the Telescape

INTRODUCTION

THIS IS A TRUE STORY. The events depicted in this book took place on the surface of a screen. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.

Telescape an interspatial region facilitating an event seen from a distance (from Greek τηλε-). the site of contemporary knowledge and memory Footage a recorded fragment of reality - collected for journalistic purposes Screen the apparatus where telescapes exist and where footage acquires narrative purpose Mince an action of editing footage; to reveal by degrees rather than directly (to deceive) Artefact a piece of footage Fact constructed by mincing footage Fiction constructed by mincing footage Truthiness the quality of a constructed fact Spectacle the prevailing Story and the reinforcer of truthiness Time exploded by the quantity of footage and compressed by mincing

WHAT The Telescape

The Telescape is the only site. If stories as rituals and events are constructed and displayed through architecture, then the site for such practises is no longer the building but the screen. A world of virtual volumes flattened in the surface of our media-infused world. The Telescape facilitates events seen from a distance (tele- from Greek τηλε). An ocular tele-hedonism at it’s utmost. We tele-communicate, tele-battle, tele-learn, tele-travel, tele-work. It is the site of contemporary knowledge and memory. Footage is its material and the surface of the screen its apparatus. The agglomeration of both footage and screen form the intra-spatial region of fact construction. What should be seen as a new kind of Memory Atlas, the Telescape is the site of architecture as story-telling and world building medium. The questions put forward by the Telescape are not to fetishize technology, to be technophobic or to consider devices as visual gimmicks within architectural design. It is about the site of surface itself. An increasingly dominant place via which our perception of the world is constructed and where memory and knowledge are formatted.

WHY Exploding Events

A war may last for moths; a football goal for seconds. In their media coverage the former lasts for years, the latter for hours or even weeks. Time is exploded and scale collapses. A moment is exploded in time and the event resonates globally. The great disparity between what happens and the footage it generates is exacerbated more than ever due to the velocity, variety and volume of data. In the re-telling of an event facts become as constructed as fictions. Truth is irrelevant in the surface of the screen. Spectacle prevails. The story is everything. In a world heavily saturated by imagery the exercise is one of omitting visual information and condensing fragments into a curated narrative of surfaces. Much like how renaissance fascination into classical fragments created new forms (such as the torso belvedere which had inspired the non finito of Michelangelo) so does the way we build our world through pieces of media snapshots. The way in which we allow for a multiplicity of realities to be reborn into coherent and consumable stories. The world as we know it is but a mas collection of facets, through which reality becomes a game of perception. The question is ultimately one of aesthetics rather than content. In the Telescape form beguiles more than the need to verify content. The spectacular is beautiful, the boring is ugly.

HOW The Screen

The screen is the apparatus for spatialising the condition of surface. Footage, as the principle material of our age, constructs the architecture of the Telescape. At least 3 years of a 20 year-old’s life will have been spent staring at a screen – for leisure time alone. The ceaseless stream of visual data becomes an aesthetic overlay to every activity and every space: from the public to the domestic and even the body itslef. In the past 2 years alone we’ve produced more information than all of humanity has been accumulating over it’s entire recorded history. The screen, essentially, grants a mydas touch to the user, turning the world into an image of sheer and utter spectacle. All is surface – the very reading of life: a scroll of headline feeds. What matters is how fast and for how long can you look.

THE TELESCAPE

“ 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. ” Lord Byron, Don Juan, 1865

figure 2

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.

OVERTURE: TRUE STORIES

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 storytelling; 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,

THE TELESCAPE

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.

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,

figure 3

figure 6

figure 4

figure 7

figure 5

figure 8

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

THE FORM: FOOTAGE

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 perceived 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’.

THE TELESCAPE

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.

Andén-Papadopoulos, K., Amateur Images and Global news, Edited by Kari / AndenPapadopoulos 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. LloydBarrett (eds), Media Texts: Authors and Readers, (Clevedon, Multilingual Matters, 1994), pp. 136-59

figure 9

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 9 and 11). 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.

figure 10

figure 11

THE FORMAT: SCREEN

“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 set-up 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. Thus, the president harbours enough momentum to resist the coup. In the meantime, a generation of smartphone holders record their tv screens

THE TELESCAPE

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.

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’, ‘opto-electric’, ‘optic foyer’ etc.). See: Friedberg, A., The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, (Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 2007), p.184

iPhone

iPad

iPhone

The World

Video Call Threshold

United Kingdom - Living Room

Cyprus Tool Shed

TV & PC Monitor

Media Threshold

iPad

Cyprus Bedroom

PC Monitor

Video Call Threshold

SLR Camera

THE FORMAT: SCREEN

figure 12

Video Call Threshold

iPhone

United Kingdom - Living Room

Cyprus Coastal Promenade

TV & PC Monitor

Media Threshold

iPad

iPhone

SLR Camera

THE TELESCAPE

figure 13

The World

figure 14

figure 15

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

EPILOGUE: TELESCAPE AS SPECTACLE

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 commodifying of footage (even in the aesthetic fetishism, in Benjaminian terms, of amateur footage), the Telescape is a

THE TELESCAPE

two-etched sword. However, like Warburg’s Mnymosene Atlas, footage can also become a critical trans-spatial 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). 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 / AndenPapadopoulos 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

EPILOGUE: TELESCAPE AS SPECTACLE

figure 16

THE TELESCAPE

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’s-filmography/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 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-beautyof-human-body-in-Greek-art/8?&id=3235&type=n figure 4: Ruhm und Rätsel – der Torso vom Belvedere, [Online] http://syndrome-destendhal.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/gazingball/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: Radio from Reina Sofia Museum: ‘Aby Warburg, detail of the Mnemosyne Atlas, 1924-29’, [Online] http://radio.museoreinasofia.es/en/fugue-ideas figure 10: ‘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 11: Creational Experiments: ‘Aby Warburg, detail of the Mnemosyne Atlas, 192429’, [Online], https://curatorialexperiments.wordpress.com/tag/universal-addressabilityof-dumb-things/ 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/ figure 16: Nicholas Zembashi, ‘Telescapes’, Test_04

EXPLODING TIME

THE ORIGINS OF TIME An Etymological History

The word ‘time’ is the most commonly used noun in English. It is deceptively versatile. It can be an abstract idea – the time that physicists talk about. But it can also be a discrete moment (‘I smile every time the cat dances’) or the exact hour of the day. Other languages use three words to describe these three senses. In French they correspond to temps, fois and heure. In German, they are zeit, mal and Ur. Even in Old English, we used two different words: tid, meaning a chunk of time (like ‘eventide’) and tima, which was their equivalent of ‘hour’. Gradually these distinct senses have coalesced into one, multipurpose word. The oldest root of the word time is dā ; a Proto-Indo European prefix meaning ‘to cut or divide.’ That makes sense – in all its various guises, time is a measure of the space between things. The Greeks went even further than we did in stretching this meaning. In Ancient Greek, dā-mo became the distance between different types of people, as in demos or ‘ordinary citizens’ and even between the Gods and humans: dai-mon meant ‘divider’ and gave us the words daimon or demon. In the International System of Units (SI), the unit of time is the second. It is an SI base unit, and it is currently defined as “the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom” In the construction of history and the arrangement of facts and events along a timeline issues would always arise. A prominent one being the Phantom Time Hypothesis. According to the Phantom Time Hypothesis, the period between 614 AD and 911 AD didn’t exist; the history normally attributed to that time is either a

THE ORIGINS OF TIME

Kairos (Time), fresco by Francesco Salviati, 1552-1554, Palazzo Sacchett

EXPLODING TIME

misinterpretation or a deliberate falsification of the evidence. If this were true, Charlemagne (reigned 768-814) never existed and the year 2012 is actually 1715 AD. The idea was created in 1990 by a man called Heribert Illig and has since been developed by other German historians as well as conspiracy theorists. Arguments in favour of the theory are as follows: The apparent stagnation in the development of architecture, ceramics and thought as well as the lack of substantial documentary evidence – this is why the first part of this period is called the ‘Dark Ages’ - suggests this period simply didn’t exist. There is very little archaeological evidence which can be reliably dated to this period; our account is based on a quite limited number of written sources (which could be faked or just wrong). The Pope introduced the new Gregorian calendar in 1582 to replace the Julian one, when it was 10 days out of sync. If the error had been building up since the introduction of the Julian calendar in 45 ad, it ought to have been 13 days out – so the intervening period must have been overstated by 300 years. Mainstream historians have a simple explanation, though: the purpose of the change was to bring the calendar into line with the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, not with 45 AD – which accounts for the discrepancy. Architect, astronomer, educator, philologist, folklorist, lawmaker, statesman - the range of achievements credited to Charlemagne is so great that it implies he is a mythical figure. If Phantom Time Hypothesis holds up, who created the fake, and why? Perhaps the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III wanted to be on the throne at the time of the Millennium, 1000 AD, so he got chroniclers across Europe to invent and document an extra 300 years. Illig’s followers face many difficulties of course: the theory has yet to explain how it would fit into the history of the world outside Europe, or into astronomical records, or into the tree-ring data. More interdisciplinary research needed, they say.

THE FIRST GULF WAR lasted

800 hours, but it generated over

20 000 hours of footage

WAR IN THE GULF Generating Footage

Operation Desert Storm (17 January 1991 – 28 February 1991) in its combat phase, was a war waged by coalition forces from 34 nations led by the United States against Iraq in response to Iraq’s invasion and annexation of Kuwait. The war is also known under other names, such as the Persian Gulf War, First Gulf War, Gulf War I, Kuwait War, First Iraq War, or Iraq War before the term “Iraq War” became identified instead with the 2003 Iraq War (also referred to in the US as “Operation Iraqi Freedom”). The Iraqi Army’s occupation of Kuwait that began 2 August 1990 was met with international condemnation, and brought immediate economic sanctions against Iraq by members of the UN Security Council. US President George H. W. Bush deployed US forces into Saudi Arabia, and urged other countries to send their own forces to the scene. An array of nations joined the coalition, the largest military alliance since World War II. The great majority of the coalition’s military forces were from the US, with Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, and Egypt as leading contributors, in that order. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia paid around US$32 billion of the US$60 billion cost. The war was marked by the introduction of live news broadcasts from the front lines of the battle, principally by the US network CNN. The war has also earned the nickname Video Game War after the daily broadcast of images from cameras on board US bombers during Operation Desert Storm. The initial conflict to expel Iraqi troops from Kuwait began with an aerial and naval bombardment on 17 January 1991, continuing for five weeks. This was followed by a ground assault on 24 February. This was a decisive victory for the coalition forces, who liberated Kuwait and advanced into Iraqi territory. The coalition ceased its advance, and declared a ceasefire 100 hours after the ground

WAR IN THE GULF

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campaign started. Aerial and ground combat was confined to Iraq, Kuwait, and areas on Saudi Arabia’s border. Iraq launched Scud missiles against coalition military targets in Saudi Arabia and against Israel. The Gulf War began with an extensive aerial bombing campaign on 16 January 1991. For forty-two consecutive days and nights, the coalition forces subjected Iraq to the most intensive air bombardment in military history. The coalition flew over 100,000 sorties, dropping 88,500 tons of bombs. The war was heavily televised. For the first time, people all over the world were able to watch live pictures of missiles hitting their targets and fighters departing from aircraft carriers. Allied forces were keen to demonstrate their weapons’ accuracy. In the United States, the “big three” network anchors led the war’s network news coverage: ABC’s Peter Jennings, CBS’s Dan Rather, and NBC’s Tom Brokaw were anchoring their evening newscasts when air strikes began on 16 January 1991. ABC News correspondent Gary Shepard, reporting live from Baghdad, told Jennings of the city’s quietness. But, moments later, Shepard was back on the air as flashes of light were seen on the horizon and tracer fire was heard on the ground. Still, it was CNN whose coverage gained the most popularity and indeed its wartime coverage is often cited as one of the landmark events in the network’s history (ultimately leading to the establishment of CNN International). CNN correspondents John Holliman and Peter Arnett and CNN anchor Bernard Shaw relayed audio reports from Baghdad’s Al-Rashid Hotel as the air strikes began. The network had previously convinced the Iraqi government to allow installation of a permanent audio circuit in their makeshift bureau. When the telephones of all of the other Western TV correspondents went dead during the bombing, CNN was the only service able to provide live reporting. After the initial bombing, Arnett remained behind and was, for a time, the only American TV correspondent reporting from Iraq. In the United Kingdom, the BBC devoted the FM portion of its national speech radio station BBC Radio 4 to an eighteen-hour rolling news format creating Radio 4 News FM. The station was short lived, ending shortly after President Bush declared the ceasefire and Kuwait’s liberation. However, it paved the way for the later introduction of Radio Five Live. Two BBC journalists, John Simpson and Bob Simpson (no relation), defied their editors and remained in Baghdad to report on the war’s progress. They were

WAR IN THE GULF

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WAR IN THE GULF

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responsible for a report which included an “infamous cruise missile that travelled down a street and turned left at a traffic light.” The war marked the use of highly advance technologies from precision guided missiles, to Airborne warning and communication systems and GPS. It was the first war where satellite technology was as important militarily as it was for live media coverage. In the context of media coverage of the Gulf War, Annex Foxtrot was the name given to a 10-page policy memo dated January 14, 1991. It outlined heretofore unprecedented Pentagon restrictions on news reporting of the Gulf War.“News media representatives will be escorted at all times. Repeat, at all times,” wrote Captain Wildermuth. The memo established press pools that gave the Pentagon control over who could talk to troops and under what conditions, as well as control over much of what could be reported. The restrictions also provided for prior restraint of material deemed dangerous to national security. Finally, the Gulf War oil spill was one of the largest oil spills in history. Early estimates on the volume spilled were at 11,000,000 US barrels (1,300,000 m3). These numbers were significantly adjusted by later, more detailed studies, both by government (4,000,000 US barrels - 480,000 m3 - to 6,000,000 US barrels 720,000 m3) and private (2,000,000 US barrels - 240,000 m3 - to 4,000,000 US barrels - 480,000 m3) researchers. The slick reached a maximum size of 160 km by 68 km and was 13 cm thick in some areas. Despite the uncertainty surrounding the size of the spill, figures place it several times the size (by volume) of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

THE OIL WELL 1.0

iPad Cam - time elapsed 00:00:00

GoPro Cam - time elapsed 00:00:00

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iPhone Cam - time elapsed 00:01:01

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THE OIL WELL 2.0

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THE OIL WELL 2.0

iPad Cam - time elapsed 00:00:00

Web Cam - time elapsed 00:00:30

iPad Cam - time elapsed 00:00:00

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iPhone Cam - time elapsed 00:02:38

iPhone Cam - time elapsed 00:03:05

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THE OIL WELL 2.0

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QUANTITY AND ABSURDITY The Story of Oil

- You flip on the camera, it’s news. I can’t believe we’re staring at the rape of Kuwait with a camera ... and we’re not shooting! - We’ll get a story. We’re in Kuwait. - Nobody’s in Kuwait. Come on! - We’re in hell! - This was the biggest forest in the history of the world. Dinosaurs! Then it all died, rotted, and turned into oil. Now we’re here. Basically, we’re fighting to see who gets to desecrate the cemetery. Who gets the oil. No wonder there’s been so much bad blood. It’s always been lousy karma to be a grave robber. ‘Three Kings’, directed by David O. Russel, 1999

The absurdity between event and reconstruction is as extreme as being blissfully ignorant of the facts. The story of oil and the interest in manufacturing narratives that allow for wars to secure its possession, is evident in bottled water: • Producing bottles for annual American consumption requires the equivalent of more than 17 million barrels of oil, not including the energy for transportation. • Plastic water bottles can take between 400 and 1,000 years to decompose. • 1/4 of the amount of a bottle of water is the amount in oil required to produce it. • Bottled water costs over 1,000+ times more than tap water. • Last year, the average American used 167 water bottles, but only recycled 38. • It takes 17 million barrels of oil to produce plastic bottles yearly. This could fuel 1 million cars for a year. • Through aggressive smear campaigns, powerful soft-drink manufactures flood the media with anti tap water adds to manufacture demand for bottled water and decrease interest in maintaining free, good quality, tap water.

QUANTITY AND ABSURDITY

‘

this bottle . . .

EXPLODING TIME

. . . took a lot of oil to make

’

by Scientist, from lab findings, in recent years

QUANTITY AND ABSURDITY

‘

this story is so done . . .

EXPLODING TIME

. . . waste of my fucking time

’

by actress, acting as a Reporter, in a film

FACETED WORLD The Screen; a Site for Stories

Footage is nourishment for the eye; innumerable fragments of a world woven into digestible stories – The screen, their narrative yarn; an apparatus weaving polymyths into a monomyth served up as news. The event is exploded; footage of what happened is a snow flake turned into an avalanche. The earth as we know it, is but a collection of facets representing itself. As information in the form of imagery is constructed with exponential velocities, varieties and volumes, place becomes elusive – time is exploded. Fact and fiction become indistinguishable in a world where truth is more fiercely replaced by truthiness. Never has the world been seen in slower-motion, in more scrutinising detail, in higher definition – more space, more time more and more and more and more. Be it a screen, virtual image or all-out augmentation, surface is the new creed; all else is a prop for displaying a multifaceted world that seems to have no z-axis. In the Telescape, despite the eradication of conventional time, scale and even volume, a new space of memory and knowledge is constructed, with its own depth and volumetric attributes. It goes beyond the body of the screen itself; it merges the immaterial and the tangible; the meticulously staged and the accidental of the everyday; it blurs the boundary between facts and fictions; interiors and exteriors. The search for truth in the Telescape is less important than an obsession with story-telling. It is a place of wonder; an imaginarium. Truthiness is the only measure by which reality is confirmed in the screen. Truthiness has an aesthetic. It occupies space and it has tangible consequences. Above all it can be designed.

FACETED WORLD

EXPLODING TIME

At last! The 1991 Show! The ballet on the burning stage. The documentary seen Upon the fractured screen The Situation Tragedy Cliffhangers with no hope The water-colour in the flooded gallery...

Though you doubt your leader’s moralities you decide it is more at ease In the Land Of Do-As-You-Please than outside in the cold. But the backdrops peel and the sets give way and the cast get eaten by the play There’s a murderer at the Matinee, there are dead men in the aisles And the patrons and the actors too are uncertain if the show is through And with side-long looks await their cue but the frozen mask just smiles.

TRUTHINESS

TRUTHINESS by Dr. Stephen T. Colbert

Truthiness is the belief or assertion that a particular statement is true based on the intuition or perceptions of some individual or individuals, without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts. Truthiness can range from ignorant assertions of falsehoods to deliberate duplicity or propaganda intended to sway opinions. Stephen Colbert, portraying his character Dr. Stephen T. Colbert, chose the word truthiness just moments before taping the première episode of The Colbert Report on October 17, 2005, after deciding that the originally scripted word – “truth” – was not absolutely ridiculous enough: “We’re not talking about truth, we’re talking about something that seems like truth – the truth we want to exist”, he explained. Colbert refreshed “truthiness” in an episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on July 18, 2016, using the neologism “Trumpiness” regarding statements made by Donald Trump during his presidential campaign. According to Colbert, while truthiness refers to statements that feel true but are actually false, “trumpiness” does not even have to feel true, much less be true. Do facts or fictions even matter when both are as constructed as each other? Any means necessary to stretch an event are exploited, truth becomes a casualty of time – the story’s power lies in truthiness! It doesn’t matter what you’re saying, only how many times you say it. Repeat it enough times and it becomes fact nonetheless. It boils down to belief – detached from fact and addicted to narrative. The Story prevails - Truth has always been highly overrated since representation always taints the event. Source: Truthiness, Wikipedia [online]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness, accessed 23rd June 2017

105

108

FACTS Headlines: We Have Never Been Modern by Bruno Latour

On page four of my daily newspaper, I learn that the measurements taken above the Antarctic are not good this year: the hole in the ozone layer is growing ominously larger. Reading on, I turn from upper-atmosphere chemists to Chief Executive Officers of Atochem and Monsanto, companies that are modifying their assembly lines in order to replace the innocent chlorofluorocarbons, accused of crimes against the ecosphere. A few paragraphs later, I come across heads of state of major industrialized countries who are getting involved with chemistry, refrigerators, aerosols and inert gases. But at the end of the article, I discover that the meteorologists don’t agree with the chemists; they’re talking about cyclical fluctuations unrelated to human activity. So now the industrialists don’t know what to do. The heads of state are also holding back. Should we wait? Is it already too late? Toward the bottom of the page, Third World countries and ecologists add their grain of salt and talk about international treaties, moratoriums, the rights of future generations, and the right to development. The same article mixes together chemical reactions and political reactions. A single thread links the most esoteric sciences and the most sordid politics, the most distant sky and some factory in the Lyon suburbs, dangers on a global scale and the impending local elections or the next board meeting. The horizons, the stakes, the time frames, the actors — none of these is commensurable, yet there they are, caught up in the same story. On page six, I learn that the Paris AIDS virus contaminated the culture medium in Professor Gallo’s laboratory; that Mr Chirac and Mr Reagan had, however, solemnly sworn not to go back over the history of that discovery; that the chemical industry is not moving fast enough to market medications which militant patient organizations are vocally demanding; that the epidemic is spreading in

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FACTS

sub-Saharan Africa. Once again, heads of state, chemists, biologists, desperate patients and industrialists find themselves caught up in a single uncertain story mixing biology and society. On page eight, there is a story about computers and chips controlled by the Japanese; on page nine, about the right to keep frozen embryos; on page ten, about a forest burning, its columns of smoke carrying off rare species that some naturalists would like to protect; on page eleven, there are whales wearing collars fitted with radio tracking devices; also on page eleven, there is a slag heap in northern France, a symbol of the exploitation of workers, that has just been classified as an ecological preserve because of the rare flora it has been fostering! On page twelve, the Pope, French bishops, Monsanto, the Fallopian tubes, and Texas fundamentalists gather in a strange cohort around a single contraceptive. On page fourteen, the number of lines on high-definition television bring together Mr Delors, Thomson, the EEC, commissions on standardization, the Japanese again, and television film producers. Change the screen standard by a few lines, and billions of francs, millions of television sets, thousands of hours of film, hundreds of engineers and dozens of CEOs go down the drain. Fortunately, the paper includes a few restful pages that deal purely with politics (a meeting of the Radical Party), and there is also the literary supplement in which novelists delight in the adventures of a few narcissistic egos (‘I love you ... you don’t’). We would be dizzy without these soothing features. For the others are multiplying, those hybrid articles that sketch out imbroglios of science, politics, economy, law, religion, technology, fiction. If reading the daily paper is modern man’s form of prayer, then it is a very strange man indeed who is doing the praying today while reading about these mixed-up affairs. All of culture and all of nature get churned up again every day. Yet no one seems to find this troubling. Headings like Economy, Politics, Science, Books, Culture, Religion and Local Events remain in place as if there were nothing odd going on. The smallest AIDS virus takes you from sex to the unconscious, then to Africa, tissue cultures, DNA and San Francisco, but the analysts, thinkers, journalists and decision-makers will slice the delicate network traced by the virus for you into tidy compartments where you will find only science, only economy, only social phenomena, only local news, only sentiment, only sex. Press the most innocent aerosol button and you’ll be heading for the Antarctic, and from there to the University of California at Irvine, the mountain ranges of Lyon, the chemistry of inert gases, and then maybe to the United Nations, but this fragile thread will be broken into as many segments as there are pure disciplines. By all means, they seem to say, let us not mix up knowledge, interest, justice and power. Let us not

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mix up heaven and earth, the global stage and the local scene, the human and the nonhuman. ‘But these imbroglios do the mixing’, you’ll say, ‘they weave our world together!’ ‘Act as if they didn’t exist,’ the analysts reply. They have cut the Gordian knot with a well-honed sword. The shaft is broken: on the left, they have put knowledge of things; on the right, power and human politics.

Source: Latour, B. and Porter, C., We Have Never Been Modern, (3rd edn. Cambridge, MA, Prentice Hall / Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993)

111

IT DOESN’T MATTER WHAT YOU’RE SAYING

ONLY HOW MANY TIMES YOU SAY IT

116

FICTIONS Non-Linearity: Mulholland Drive by David Lynch

Non-linear narrative, disjointed narrative or disrupted narrative is a narrative technique, sometimes used in literature, film, hypertext websites and other narratives, where events are portrayed, for example out of chronological order, or in other ways where the narrative does not follow the direct causality pattern of the events featured, such as parallel distinctive plot lines, dream immersions or narrating another story inside the main plot-line. It is often used to mimic the structure and recall of human memory. This trend is exacerbated in the way news media try to construct linear stories out of often disjointed fragments. The battle for linear truth only reinforces truthiness. In Mulholland Drive, a dark-haired woman is left amnesiac after a car crash. She wanders the streets of Los Angeles in a daze before taking refuge in an apartment. There she is discovered by Betty, a wholesome Midwestern blonde who has come to the City of Angels seeking fame as an actress. The woman adopts the name Rita. Together, the two attempt to solve the mystery of Rita’s true identity. The story is set in a dream-like Los Angeles, spoilt neither by traffic jams nor smog. For the first part of the film the non-linearity of Lynch’s narrative structure is most evident. The characters, Rita and Betty aside, appear to have little links between them and their plot trajectories. The narrative threads begin converging in the second part of the film however notable gaps and unresolved plot points still appear. In the final part of the film, Rita and Betty are revealed to be other characters entirely. The entire film was an illusion, a dream in Betty’s real identity, Diane. Diane is a heartbroken actress after her lover film star Camilla (Rita) leaves her for director Adam. She hires a hit-man to murder Camilla but the guilt is too overbearing and she commits suicide.

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