Lovers Leap: Taking the Plunge:
Points of Entry ... Points of Departure
by Timothy Druckrey
Artintact 2 CD-ROMagazine,
ZKM Center for Art and Media and Cantz Verlag, 1995
We find certain things about seeing puzzling, because we
do not find the whole business of seeing puzzling enough.
(Wittgenstein)
Two central issues have grounded the development of photography. First, the
idea that the production of the image established a fixed relationship to events. Second, that the reception of the image short-circuited the viewer into the temporal space of the original moment. Both perhaps myths when subjected to critical scrutiny and both perhaps fallacies when the image is situated within the conditions in which it was produced. Yet we know that the image in photography is a far more complex set of circumstances than mere historical analysis presented. While rooted in temporality, the image is propelled by a relationship with on-going events not fully realized by dialectical means. The discursive moment-established at the moment the world is imaged-is not limited to subject and object, but rather to a process in which subject and object are mediated within a system of representation.
It is no coincidence that photography, technology and modernity were maturing on parallel tracks. The industrial revolution and the emergence of the bourgeois economy linked representation with both the commodity and with the mastery of nature. More than a sheer witness, the archive of imaged experiences traversed by the fossil record of photography exists as a dynamic archaeology. To a culture inebriated by ocular consumption, the characterization of the 19th century as that of "the scopic regime," as Martin Jay asserts, or as obsessed with the "the frenzy of the visible," as Jean Louis Comolli suggests, seems to identify a rather startling realization concerning the relationship of the visual with the intelligible. Knowledge and identity became fused with the experience of representation.
Yet, representation within modernity also invoked forms of control and issues of power. The coercive representations invoked by Walter Benjamin, George Orwell, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, Edward Said, and many others, are those in which the image, word, technology, archive, and imperialism are embedded within structures of control rooted
in the technologies of representation. Contingent, episodic, terse, and simultaneously embedded in lived-time, photography compelled culture to encounter its presence as historically specific and
as temporally loaded.
As the technologies of reproducibility evolved, the implications of visualization expanded. What could be recorded could be controlled. Surveillance stood astride sentiment as scylla and charybdis of representation. How this diametric relationship could be assessed is one of the essential issues in the study of photography. How this issue is exploded in so-called post-photography is crucial in understanding the image in digital culture. Indeed, as Edward Said, wrote, "what we must eliminate are systems of representation that carry with them the authority which has become repressive because it doesn't permit or make room for interventions on the part of those represented."
Traditional models of representation, as reflexive and hinged on an analogical relationship with the material world seem to have lost their efficacy, supplanted by the fascination with the digital, the artificial, the simulated, and the virtual. It is as if photography can no longer to serve the interests of electronic culture, a specious assumption for experience so immersed in optical metaphors. The acceleration of the visual now challenges more than just the grounds for an optical epistemology, it initiates a critical phase in which cognition, rather than perception, becomes the object of interest.
What seems so necessary is a reconceptualization of photography beyond the limited terms of aesthetics, memory, sentiment, or phenomenology. Instead, a consideration might be made of the image not only as a signifier, but rather as an event. Retaining photography's crucial link to perception, the idea of the image as event extends its legitimacy as mere description by registering it as experiential. Suddenly one might imagine the navigation of the image as more than the scrutiny of its signifiers, but as a dynamic process in which the stability of the moment itself is extended. With all the hoopla around simulation and the artificial, theory has yet to account for the efficacy of the image as experience. And while the stakes of immersive technologies often seemed to leapfrog over the transition, the fact remains that photography has not exhausted its potential-especially as it is assimilated into the digital. Most interesting in this is the distinction drawn by Paul Virilio between simulation and substitution and, in particular, the recognition of the screen-television and computer-as "the third window.".
The world has lost its pivot; the subject can no longer even dichotomize , but accedes to a higher unity, of ambivalence or overdetermination, in an always supplementary dimension to that of its subject...A system of this kind could be called a rhizome...The rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing...Perhaps one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it always has multiple entryways...
(Deleuze & Guattari)
Miroslaw Rogala describes the experience of Lover's Leap in two ways.
First, as a moment in which an opposition occurred: "Traveling from Chicago to Jamaica, I visited a place called "Lovers Leap" (a legendary location of tragic lovers--such places exist all over the world): there was a military radar scanning the sky. This physical surprise created a conceptual leap as well." Conjunction and displacement collide in this moment in which the relationship between emotion and technology are juxtaposed. Second, Lover's Leap is described as the "movement through perspective," a project in which the image is a point of entry. One could speculate about an elaborate electronic geometry in which non-euclidean gymnastics could be performed within an environment of computed space. But Lover's Leap is rooted within the tradition of photography. Its "space" is not virtual. Its image is not static. It is an event-image, a dynamic system in which movement and perspective are related-not as a criteria of the tradition of the static observer, but as a consequence of the reconfiguration of the experience of perspective as interactive.
Lover's Leap posits the image as a challenge to the objective history of linear projective geometry as it considers the encounter with the randomand subjective juxtapositions of experience. In disregarding the logic of the image as a fixed form, Lover's Leap uses it as a site for investigation. What will immediately be apparent in this work is that the image offers an encompassing view of a subject enacted through participation. One of the unique possibilities of interactive forms is precisely this moment when the passivity of observation is superceded by necessity of activity. A new understanding form becomes necessary, one that is both generative and analytical.
A new understanding of subjectivity is necessary as well, one that accounts for the reflexivity of both the image and the behavior it initiates. But the significance of interactive media is in the extension of agency into the formation of narrative. In the coupling of spatial and narrative forms, Lover's Leap dramatizes the moment without succumbing to the simple linking mechanisms of hypermedia. Instead, the spatial becomes a sphere of activity, and the image a site of reflection.
In coupling the image with its performance, Lover's Leap implicates more than it reproduces. Within the image is a set of possibilities, partially controllable and partially uncontrollable. "Such happens," as Rogala remarks, "in matters of love as well." In this new order of representation, metaphor and performativity are intimately connected. To be in the image is to be in a set of circumstances that are reflexive and evolving. Every nuance of the image extends the meaning. Seeing. like gesture, is provoked by desire. "What is the desire", asks Lacan, "which is caught, fixed in the picture, but which also urges the artist to put something into operation?" The inversion of the subject implied in the interactive gesture, demands new thinking about the position of the subject. "For it is a structural fact, if not a structural effect, that when man comes to terms with the symbolic order, his being is, from the very start, entirely absorbed in it, and produced by it, not as 'man,' but as subject." In Lover's Leap one is subjected to incalculable possibilities as one subjects the image to boundless scrutiny.
"Eyes don't lie/They Are Where they Go," Rogala wrote in a poem accompanying the 1989 interactive theatre work Nature is Leaving Us. In this work the spectre of technology overwhelms reflection. Rogala writes of this complex video theatre work that it "is composed of simultaneous provocations of contrasting rhythms, a panoramic polyphony between urbanity and nature; thus it is a metaphor for the simultaneity of experience of modern life." Accelerated experience without accelerated reflection. Nature is Leaving Us is both and castigation and eulogy. It's message exists in the imbalance between information and being. Enframed in, as Paul Virilio identifies it, "vectors of representation which, in the electronic interface, affect the order of sensations," he asks, "How can we no longer believe our own eyes and then believe so easily in the vectors of electronic representation?"
Invoked metaphorically in Lover's Leap, the phrase, Nature is Leaving Us, echoes the affinity between the mechanism of perception and the act of consciousness, between the stability of perception and the instability of chance, between technology and love. Amplifying this relationship, the issues raised in the performance of the image in Lover's Leap transform the 'phenomenology of perception' into a phenomenology of reception. And if the terms within the seeing of the image are no longer those of correspondence, but those of behavior, then a 'leap' has been made over the limitations of the material image into the realm of the cognitive process. Above all, interactivity is predicated on the realization of experience affected by conduct. This is accomplished in two ways.
Utilizing newly developed software, Mind's-Eye-View=81 (developed by collaborator Ford Oxaal and a 12-D design environment (contributed by Ludger Hovestadt), Lover's Leap reconceptualizes the photographic image in terms of its ability to encompass an event as a navigable environment. Two photographs taken with a fish-eye lens establish a "view' that, when joined, encompass 360=B0. The digitized image is the point of entry into an experience based on the ability to render curvilinear perspective as process. Indeed, the image becomes an immersive geometry, one in which traditions such as point-of-view become mutable rather than fixed. The single image, so long considered a finite form, suggests a new possibility, perhaps like what Ernst Cassirer called "physiological space," or what might be thought of as psychological optics. Indeed, the linking of psychological and mathematical
conceptions of space raises important issues about the ability of the image to generate meaning. This space, indeed, could be understood as a form of narrative in which the conditions of the moment are episodic and ineluctably simultaneous. In this narrative space, one is paradoxically performing and and observing.
The installation version of Lover's Leap implements Mind's-Eye-View in terms of location on a grid. The image is projected in terms of "three parameters: focal length, direction of attention, and perspective setting-which can vary from conventional perspective to a full 360 degree view."
Each location in the grid corresponds with an image sequence linked with these variables. In the installation version, the body and the eye merge, gesture transforms image. This embodied space is rooted not just in the possibilities of the single image, but also in the moments in which the spatial narrative is ruptured by episodes and samples of images and sound from the actual site of Lover's Leap in Jamaica. These moments collapse the borders between location, technology, and expectation and shift the emphasis from the analytical image by introducing discontinuities into the system. In Lover's Leap, coincidence is a reminder that an encounter with technology is a collision with Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle as much as it is a rendezvous with representation.
The CD-ROM version shifts the emphasis from the physical transformation to the cognitive one. The movement of the eye outdistances the movement of the body while the image is transformed by the movement of the mouse. Yet this does not undermine the logic of the work. Rather, it refocuses the issue of sight into gesture. Material space is replaced by the interface. The screen, itself a geometrical frame, transmits the image as projective space. Cartography and cognitive mapping converge. More than this, the screen version compresses the theatrical distance of the installation into "the third window," a space in which, again citing Virilio, "what was visibly nothing becomes 'something,' the greatest distance no longer precludes perception."
The city is redundant:
it repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind...
Memory is redundant:
it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist...
The catalogue of forms is endless,
until ever shape has found its city,
new cities will continue to be born.
(Italo Calvino)
Every instrument in the repertory of the scientific instrument maker
is a possible sense organ...
(Norbert Weiner)
The fiction of Calvino and the theory of Weiner. Related issues in the interface between machine and person and the refunctioned issue of storytelling that are essential to conceptualizing the development of interactive media. Indeed, while issues of space and duration dominated discourses of modernity, the related issues of interface and narrative have come to stand within postmodernity as signifiers of a far more intricate situation. Worn traditions of the public sphere, the sociology of post-industrialization, the discreteness of presence, have been supplanted by a form of distributed imbeddedness-or better, the
immersion-of the self in the mediascapes of tele-culture which must generate a communicative practice whose boundaries are not mapped in physical space. Instead, the technologies of new media map a geography of cognition, of reception, and of communication emerging in territories whose hold on matter is ephemeral, whose position in space is tenuous, and whose presence is measured in acts of participation rather than coincidences of location.
A revamped theory of the relationship between reception and representation must accompany experiential media. More than simply new technical questions arise about the role of technology in creativity. Modes of experience and modes of perception can no longer be so easily theorized-no less expressed! This, conjoined with the development of what could be termed post-optical technologies for the apprehension of images, make it clear that digital media pose more than novel techniques for representation. An inclusive approach will need to conceptualize quickly shifting technologies as intrinsic to digital media and will have to approach the contingency of form as a guiding principle. Simultaneously, the ability to suggest an algorithmic affinity between the real and the symbolic is a challenge to the entire history of image making.
The photograph in Lover's Leap is a jumping off point. The intricate connections between space, single and multiple point perspective, the development of diverse approaches to curvilinear perspective, the ability of the computer to render geometry, the shifting role of the viewer/participant, and the more speculative issue of space as narrative, converge and diverge simultaneously-information and symbolism meet. Rendered, sequential, or arrayed, information canbe created in forms that suggest that the usefulness of the single image can no longer serve as a record of an event but rather that events are themselves complex configurations of experience, intention, and interpretation. In this sense, the narratives of electronics are non-linear and kinetic rather than linear and potential. The image suggests transition and not resolution. More pertinently, Lover's Leap reframes the problem of the distinction between physical space and visual space, by fusing them as experiential and interactive.
The image of the city, the signifier of memory, the technology of representation: these metaphors of geography, consciousness, and visualization are at the heart of Lover's Leap. At its periphery is another entry.
coda:
The closing paragraph of Edward Tufte's wonderful book Envisioning Information:
Perhaps one day high-resolution computer visualizations, which combine slightly abstracted representations along with a dynamic and animated flatland, will lighten the laborious complexity of encodings-and yet still capture some worthwhile part of the sublety of the human itinerary.
notes:
1. Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations (Blackwell, Oxford, 1958) pp. 2/11.
2. Edward Said: "The Imperialism of Representation, the Representation of Imperialism," (Wedge, #7/8) p.5.
3. Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1987) pp. 7, 12.
4. Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis (Norton, NY, 1981) p. 92.
5. Hubert Damish: The Origins of Perspective, (MIT Press, Cambridge, 1994) p. 20.
6. Paul Virilio, The Lost Dimension (Semiotext(e), NY, 1991) pp. 52, 41.
7. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, NY, 1972) pp. 19, 139.
8. Norbert Weiner, The Human Use of Human Beings (Doubleday, NY, 1954) p. 23= .
9. Edward Tufte Envisioning Information (Graphics Press, Chesire, Ct., 1990) p.
Research : Press : Essays 
