ON THE EDGE OF MOBILITY
OR: THE UNCONSCIOUSNESS OF KINETICS
Thesis
about aesthetics in space and time
Wolfgang Bock
Bauhaus, Weimar
Abstract
The article tries
to reflect the relation between space and time in different fields: the development
of media and art, the concepts of modern and traditional cultures and traffic
and the public sphere in the city. It shows that even the modern concept of
time and speed is related to a point of standstill ans space. Also in modern
physics all speed is a relative one and followed by a shadow or a
unconsciousness in the form of a space-category. This is shown in the Japanese
idea of iguse, a thought-picture that contains in a standstill alredy all
possible movements as a monad.
Keywords | Media |
Art | Monad | Public Space | City
I. Iguse
The Japanese
concept of iguse is basing on a still
position of a body, which contains all other possible movements, as in a
nutshell.
Iguse does not mean a single film still, which stops the
film at a certain point and cuts out a part of the floating stream. It is
closer to the idea of a whole virtual film in one picture, from the
beginning to the end – comparable to the monadic idea, popular in Baroque
times: Each part of a mosaic contains the plan of the whole picture in itself –
not evidently in apperception, but dreaming in perception – as
Leibniz would have called it.1
In analogy to this concept, one might say, that all
movements refer to a still point as framing the possibility of mobility
itself. Instead of using the term frame, one may also talk about an unconsciousness
of moving as a pattern of reference, where all movements are starting or ending.
Needles to say, it might be that such a configuration is not static, but must
be imagined as moving itself.
II. Modernity
and mobility
Physics
Modernity can be described as a kind of mobilisation
– in the double sense of making to move and preparing a war. In the ancient
paradigm of the Greek, Romans and the early Christianity, the ground – the
earth itself – is not moving, but standing still. Copernicus presented a new
picture of the cosmos and Newton’s description of a space based on the assumption,
that gravity turns the static world as its normal status out to the moving as
the new status of normality. Einstein could show, that even the former fixed
position of the spectator is in movement and, in relationship to his position,
the dimensions of the cosmos are changing within certain parameters themselves.
From the painting to the cyberspace
Close to the development of the physical image of the
world, it might be easy – referring to Lászlò
Moholy-Nagy and Walter Benjamin – to describe the expansion of the materialistic
base of aesthetics from immobility to movement in a sequence as:
painting (and sculpting), photography,
film, video and three-dimensional objects in cyberspace,
in which we are able to zoom in and out.
The canvas painting shows objects, which cannot move themselves;
·
the film uses
still photography and puts single images in a chronological order as Edweard Muybridge does the first time in his chrono-photography or Marey
and Anschütz, which managed to put the line of images
in one picture.
·
video fixes
floating pictures on a magnetic strip,
·
while new digital
equipments is based on data-storing no longer in an analogue way, which opens
up possibilities not available though analogue processes.
But also the most
advanced modern techniques of imaging – as to be seen in Matrix I (USA
1999) directed by the Wachowsky brothers – leads back
to the principles of chrono-photography,
by posing hundreds of cameras around the object and connecting them trough a
computer.
With this
equipment one is able to go back and forth in order to create a new kind of
three-dimensional film still. The high-speed cameras are so fast, that the
shown composed image is again a still picture, but now to be seen from all
angels. It is closer to the iguse-concept
as to the cut of the traditional film-still.
Modern painting
As the Swiss architect Sigfried
Gideon shows, the photographers Muybridge, Marey,
Edgerton, Gilbreth and others influenced many modern
artists, which took the principle of movement and transferred it back to the
immobile painting.2 Kandinsky, Duchamp, Delauney, Boccioni, Klee or Miro used principles of movement in static painting.
Especially Klee
tries to show in his Bauhaus-course from 1925, how a point starts out to be a
line, and a line to be a square; Moholy Nagy experimented
on that base with early thee dimensional pictures.3
Modern abstract
painting is refers to an imaginary space, which is not the same as real
physical space. It has more to do with psychic-space, body-space
and dream-space outside the real physical sphere of space and time.
These movements are inside and outside movements at the same time.
Also contemporary digital films – as one may explain
with Gilles Deleuze – are going away from picturing
the outside (moving) world and tending to show an imaginary (time based) world
with new physical concepts and possibilities such as moving though walls and
material, as if they would be real.4 The
Australian director Gregory Godhard dives in his
films “Wormholes” (1996) and “Mind’s eye (1998) into space and time.
In this
perspective, contemporary aesthetic theory – as media-an archaeology –
is once again interested in the proto-forms of film, because newest film technique
refers to the early films.5
In this perspective the concept of mobility is also
changing from linear movements to circles and loops, which brings us back to
the relationship between time and space or the frame of movement. But unconsciousness
of the moving as we called it in the beginning, also means, that the modern
digital films are no longer films in the sense of documenting the outer world –
as the first films still did. They are closer to the spaces of inner worlds,
than to the reality of material objects. But in film images the outer world is
still represented in analogy to the principle of reality, which is still to be
interpreted through the psychoanalyse of an individual’s dreams.
III. Space and
time in early symbolic forms
The German philosopher Ernst Cassirer argues in an
early essay, that the idea of aesthetics changes in a modern society based on
an time concept such as the one Kant developed in transference of Newton’s
ideas. Ancient societies are based on a mythological concept which belongs to
an idea of contiguity.6 In this archaic place nothing gets lost: All the dead
are present and so are all things. Cassirer uses the renaissance astrology and
it’s series of objects – minerals, plants, animals, temperaments, illnesses,
wind directions, human characters, planets and astrological signs – as an
example for a quality of time based on a schedule of moving in space.
Other popular
examples for such a cosmos are Malinowski’s description of the
Kula-Ring-exchange in Polynesia: The mwali arm
rings and the soulava necklaces are moving in
periods of twenty years from the left to the right and from the right to the
left in the archipelago.7 Also Sigmund Freud shows, that in animistic societies
the magic of similarity and mimicry – as it is for example shown in the voodoo
ceremonies – are based on a contiguity of the both parts of influenced objects
in a certain space.8
Cassirer
explains, that the central relation of cause and effect in these systems –
which includes, by the way, also the metaphysical implications of Christianity,
Islam and Judaism with their resurrection of all dead at the Last Judgement –
is based on a concept of mythological space.9 Cassirer contends, that these systems are
proto-philosophical systems. They a for him a step to a further step towards a
development of science.
But these descriptions may not be a testimony of a
lower level of knowledge, rather a clarification of the constant relationship
between space and time. In his critic of Kant's experience and metaphysics,
Walter Benjamin tries to explain, that such a spatial concept – of children, barbarians
and lunatics – is close to the spatial concepts of modern literature and art
(and we may add: and the digital image).10
This concept of space is also very close to Martin
Heidegger’s form of technique as a Gestell,
which does not mean a frame as a gentry, but an unseen condition of its appearance,
which is not part of the technical sphere itself.11
IV. Mobility
and slowness
For a democratic speed
That would mean, that in the modern time-concepts the
space is present as a frame, a barrier or as a unconsciousness moment. That
leads us back to the afore mentioned sense of mobility as strategies and
preparations for war.
In that case, modernity and enlightenment are
confronted with the dialectical opponents of their intention, which brings back
the slowness at the same time, that the official plan tries to speed up the
society. Not only in a sense of art and philosophy – as Paul Virilio showed in his works about the relation between war
and cinema and racing stagnancy in the negative horizon –, but also in the
meaning of sociology for the public space.12
Let me just mention the research of my colleague Ivan Illich, who has shown, that the higher speed of a traffic
system – for example as the automobile concept – affects the slower motion of
other participants in public traffic space – as bikers or pedestrians, who have
to pass around the highways, bridges and tunnels: Isolation through traffic.
His concept of a democratic speed from the 1970s needs a new discussion
in before mentioned context of new mobilisation.13
Public policy is decided in the public space.
The public space is not just an aesthetic room, but also involves the
“economic” traffic of distributions and private moving. Physical movements are
representative for all members of the society. Violence here is an negative
index of democracy in the society. Therefore accident rates are not only
tragic as a blind faith, but also an expression of the level of
democratic development and civilisation.
On the edge of mobility
But the old sense of faith
also is present in an other meaning. In modern concepts of mobility, the space
is a kind of resource, which might be eaten in the way as in the old Greece
triple concept of the Heptamychos chronos,
the allegory of time, eats chton, the allegory
of material in the frame of zeus, the allegory
of space and ether.14 It may show, that space is more than just a resource.
One might say, that the public space is like an kinetic unconsciousness of
mobility. It represents the backside of the willingly formed strategies.
That
brings back the interest to a new slowness. Also in aesthetics – as in mobile
communication – one needs not just sudden appearance, but also distance and a
space for reflections. The need of speed is always related to running away. But
this pattern is something, which can not be done away with. As Franz Kafka
expressed it:“The more horses you stretch tide, the faster it goes – not the
lifting of the block out of the base, what is impossible – but the rupture of
the strip and therewith the empty lucky journey".15