Project Background and Concept

“All seems to take place as if, in this aggregate of images which I call the universe, nothing really new could happen except through the medium of certain particular images, the type of which is furnished me by my body…” Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory

Durer’s reclining nude, an image re-produced in perspective craft manuals throughout the seventeenth century and beyond, is an early example of an image-media machine. Structured conceptually and materially as a kind of cyborg device that exploits, literally, the interaction between human perception, objectification, and the machinic interface, such machines were central to art practice and professional science communities throughout the early modern period. The image is intended as a demonstration of perspectival construction: the horizontal and vertical grids of Durer’s perspective machine translate the coordinates of the nude’s body via the optical-geometrical vanishing point, allowing for a kind of “photographic,” realist depiction of her in repose.  Within both art history and the history of science and technology, this image has become almost iconic as a representation of the “progress” of the history of techno-mathematical projection, and the relationship of such projections to both art and technoscience.  The “invention” of perspective as a technical and mathematical device is associated with everything from the high art of realist aesthetics, to the Cartesian coordinates of mathematical rationalism and their afterlives within video gaming environments and military targeting systems, as just two examples. 

Along with its anticipation of the photographic and “screened” image, Durer’s Reclining Nude sends up traces of the pornographic gaze; she is at once self-posed, exposed, and objectified within the economy of the image. The position of the nude is further complicated by the odd imbrications of clinical prostheses, represented in the form of angular machinery and examination table, and the free-floating energies of desire that threaten to disrupt the clinical precision at play – desire for release; desire for possession in the form of imaging and copying; desire for the exposed copy to translate into the naked lines of the natural scene just outside the studio’s window; the desire to move across, or look back.

While the scene does appear symptomatic of the mapped coordinates between a controlling gaze and the objectified female body (and the further parallels to be drawn with the projection of this scene over the “natural” setting in the background), there is perhaps a more interesting problem contained in the competing representations of the “affective” image. Affect, as I am using it here, refers to embodied perception that emerges out of the confluence of images, sound, tactility, and movement. A focus on affect requires re-imagining this scene as a site not defined by the static, linear control of the “perspectival eye,” but as a performance of how machines, bodies, and spatial coordinates combine to create a vast and diverse spectrum of sensory images – sensory images that rely on the body not as a passive vehicle of/for sight, but as a place where the image is “felt,” framed, and re-framed.

This project plays with some of the possibilities in thinking about embodied perception as a phenomenon that exceeds vision. The “technologizing of the image” has become a catch phrase for describing the social and cultural changes brought about by digital media forms. Yet, too often we revert to thinking of both technology and the image (and the new possibilities for “manipulating” images via new technologies) in terms of vision and the human gaze (eye/I). This installation offers some basic play with what Henri Bergson called the “concrete life of the body” and the image by appropriating Durer’s historically iconic Reclining Nude and re-configuring this image as an active installation piece that allows for multiple “affective” perspectives to materialize.

The Installation Sketch

Drawing inspiration from Marc Demey’s animation sequence of the Durer perspective scene (see a short clip at this site), Durer’s static image is re-constructed as an interactive space. Two platforms/forums will be employed and two phases of the project will materialize:

            Using large-screen rear projection, a 3-D “video-game grid” version of Durer’s Reclining Nude is projected onto a flat screen in a closed room. Using a computer station (with sep., smaller screen), participants can maneuver to different perspectival vantages – the vantages are arbitrary and include options to “look back” at the drawing artist through the screen; to look from the perspective of the screen or the pen; to look from the vantage of the nude’s resting hand, and so on (there is meant to be both a visual and tactile disparity between the 3-D projection through the computer software program, and the projection of the participant’s interaction with the perspective game on the large array). The computer records small cinematic loops of these POVs as short video clips. Video Recordings of participant’s engagement with the total installation are also active.

Networked in the same installation space is 8-channel spatialized sound and floor tracking. The sound itself is “mobile” and responsive to a participant’s movements toward different parts of the projected image. By moving through the room, participants can “play” sound perspectives that are responsive to their movements in interacting with the projected perspective image.

[Further technical aspects for the installation phase are in progress]

The second phase of this project is meant to engage Lev Manovich’s challenge to begin to think of the database and the archive as not just technical means of storage and retrieval, but as “living” cultural and embodied metaphors. To this end, the video, images, and sound clips from the installation will be translated into an on-line environment, accessible via a website. Participants visiting the site will work “through” the image of Durer’s Reclining Nude. However, rather than a static image, the image is an interface that leads to random clips from the installation.  The interactions are intended to be non-intuitive – sounds (generated within specific contexts in the installation environment), for example, are coupled with partially derived images from Durer’s scene.  At the site, participants are also asked to create narratives from their interactions with and combinations of database elements, to develop stories and speculative histories about the sensory images and elements they have worked with (The concept based loosely on the idea of excerpted “database narratives” talked about in the Introduction to “Cultivating Pasadena,” Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular: http://www.vectorsjournal.org/index.php?page=7|1&pageContinue=986&projectId=55 )

Conceptual elements:

o      The mixing of technical particulars of perspective with machinic and human vision

o      Reflexive and tertiary images combined with sound images and movement

o      Affect across various mediums and interfaces

o      Re-animating the historical and affective dimensions of western perspective

o      Obtrusive surveillance mapped over counter-perspectives and distributed creative input; the embodied image as perspectival consciousness.