In Blow Up, a 1966 film by Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni, the main character is a posh British fashion photographer who also has aspirations as a ‘serious’ artist but bears no name and is played masterfully by David Hemmings. The film is based on the 1959 short story, Las babas del diablo (The Devil’s Drool) by Argentinean writer Julio Cortazar. On a side note, it is worth noting that this was one of Calvino’s favourite stories by Cortazar.
By chance at a park and without asking, the photographer take pictures of a couple of lovers, and the young woman (marvellously played by Vanessa Redgrave) argues with him after discovering the interruption in their privacy (http://youtu.be/-ywa6qeYJAg). During the scene and off camera, one perceives a sort of metallic sound, barely audible, and one then sees the woman running back over her steps looking around and soon ‘disappearing’. Something strange has happened that the photographer (and we, the audience) cannot see. Later on, while developing the negative, a tiny detail grabs his attention: in the corner of the printed plate there is something he had not seen earlier. ‘Blowing up’ the zone many times reveals a blurry image of a hand holding a pointed gun; and, on further enlargement of another area of the image, what looks like the face and head of a man lying on the grass, or at least he gives the illusion of such an image represented in ‘his’ print.
Blow Up is a cult-movie, a master-piece in the fullest sense of an art film can be;
conceived, shot and presented as an arrangement of visual narrative around a story whose central object is visibility as a web of other possible or impossible narratives. It is the saga of an unexpected discovery, revelation and reconstruction of meaning, centred on an image that everybody can see, but will remain invisible (at least on the surface)
throughout the film, and whose several deeper levels point to a multidimensional narrative. Despite these fragments being photographs, their ultimate meaning and
symbolism cannot be anchored beyond an uncertain frontier between illusion and reality. In this way Antonioni introduces a vector of liminality in the film, which causes the protagonist to cross the boundaries between the visible and the invisible, the possible and the uncertain, over and over again and, along with him, we the public in the theatre. Semiotics reveals that ambiguity is one of the essential functions displayed by art images. So in the film, the photographer is the ‘only’ witness of an image of what seems to be a dead body in a park; but this will not be true (visible) because he will not be able to share the meaning of its fragment to collectively construct an interpretation, however illusory, let alone reconstruct a real meaning to relate it to. This of course amounts to being blind, which seems to be Antonioni’s hidden message: due to his opseoscopic method in the film (putting our gaze under his command), he will be able to reveal to us, the audience, our scandalous role as blind accomplices.
Is our gaze destined to isolate us from one another? Are the images condemned to a fate beyond our control? What kind of cultural signs are film and narrative images under these conditions? These seem to be some of Antonioni’s thematic (and stylistic) questions as an artist. In the final sequence, the distance between a bad dream and reality becomes
ostensibly blurred: the photographer—back at the crime-scene for the second time— discovers in stupor that there is no longer a corpse lying in the ditch. Under these
conditions, being the ‘only’ witness (with us on the other side of the screen, of course) of that tiny photographic detail, the meaning he has ‘recreated’ does not provide enough visible, reliable, credible evidence.
The final scene shows him again in the park, this time in a different area, watching an illusory tennis game between two mimes (pranksters actually). He has merged
inadvertently with the public around the tennis-court: a troupe of prankster-mimes as well. One of the players sends the ball off the court: an invisible, imaginary tennis ball, thrown in the direction of the photographer, who is prompted to retrieve it and send it back to the court. He walks in the direction indicated by the (female) mime-player and ‘sees’ the ball; Antonioni’s camera follows him allowing us to also see the ball, emphasising the role of his gaze embedded in the audience’s eyes. The photographer
‘finds’ the ball and tosses it back to the court in one full plane-sequence. Then invisibility takes pre-eminence above the visual appearances of the real because now, besides the mimes’ troupe, the film director and the photographer, we, the public in the film theatre, become unveiled as co-authors of an act of prestidigitation and liminality. The viewers have been there all the time, included as collective witness (or accomplices) of
Antonioni’s inner image orplot within the plot if you will. Then, in the last seconds of the film, the photographer in the foreground fades out from the scene and the film’s credits come up to the front of the screen, accompanied by particularly diegetic music49 and Blow Up ends. Since the year the movie was released, the awe this masterpiece produces among public, film students, academics and critics continues to grow (http://youtu.be/9o11LTgXPtM).
I have connected this film masterpiece to Bryn Oh, in the first place thinking of her hidden plots, mutable-meaning images, and the layering stories around that curious fate of the image, which in Bryn’s case condemns images to fabricate their own reality through illusion, fragmentation and multiplicity. In Bryn’s places after all, that is what ‘we’ as avatars do: interplay with the fate of (digital) images in the process of becoming something else, like the audience in Blow Up.
In this sense, Bryn’s managing of plots parallels Blow Up, indeed in the way she sorts and layers, multiplying the ‘user’s gaze’ into the stream of the author’s ideal(ised) hidden story of images. In fact Bryn performs very similar signature operations to those of Antonioni’s in Blow Up. In essence the process of acknowledging that your avatar has found something hidden in a work of art, connecting it to secrets (that others possibly have missed) or meanings in her œuvre, are the elements that I believe allow the viewer to add themselves to Bryn’s machinima as if they were having a ‘real’ experience in Immersiva.
49 “Diegesis is a Greek word for ‘recounted story, the film's diegesis is the total world of the story action.
Diegetic sound or music whose source is visible on the screen or whose source is implied to be present by the action of the film: voices of characters; sounds made by objects in the story; music represented as coming from instruments in the story space … . Diegetic sound is any sound presented as originated from source within the film's world.” http://filmsound.org/terminology/diegetic.htm (accessed October 11, 2011)
As Bryn has already mentioned, her audience is the kind of people who have the patience and curiosity to look beneath rocks in awe, looking beyond the secret life of bugs. The immersion in which she is most interested, comes from looking below the surface of a work and under the hidden layers.
4.3 Concluding Remarks
Bryn’s work is notorious for its para-oneiric conditions of the immersion techniques that rely on an intensive process of transference between the real subjectivity behind the avatar (‘her’ real mind and eyes) and the projected subjective-patterns imbued in the avatar that represents ‘her’, but whose gaze is imposed at least momentarily in ‘your’ avatar. On the other hand, the affective exchange produced, amplified and accelerated through narrative and poetry contributes to the construction of interpersonal and intimate bonds across our expanded subjectivity. To achieve this, the quality of Bryn’s poetry, unifying both visual and textual realms, guarantees attracting the attention of visitors and aggregating them to her narratives.
Figure 15: Lacan Visiting Virginia in Bryn Oh’s Virginia Alone, 2011 (Personal Screenshot from Second Life)
Examples of this are, as I have already mentioned, Dreams and The Path, both collaborative projects, and also the recent and touching Virginia Alone. Following D’Aloia’s theory of autoempathy and, to some extent, Goffman’s theories of the unavoidable self-interlocutory presentation and representation of the ‘self’ in public, I have elaborated upon playing with inter to intra-subjectivity patterns across narrative and interaction in virtual environments. These two fields implicate identity, subjectivity and telepresence (in the sense of having your ‘self’ represented virtually in a synthetic world), and both are areas in which Bryn’s work excels.
The complex process in which playing with real and non-real, true and false identity within a liminal circuit connects this world with the virtual, so that the artist invests SL (in the process) with the atmosphere of an almost ideal venue for residents interested in playing with dynamic structures of the self. subjectivity and the ineffable projection of an alter-image in a 3D virtual environment—two or more selves responding to one mind via digital technology and virtual mediation. This is the point of insertion that connects Bryn’s work to the term fate of the image (and its future) of which Rancière writes extensively in “The Future of the Image”, a reflection on the multiple nature of the link between words and images. His central purpose is to explain the image’s constitutive relation between two components: the sayable and the visible which, according to him, might not be fully adequate, nor easy, to separate from one another.
There exists, almost permanently, a “certain idea of fate and a certain idea of the image … tied up in the apocalyptic discourse of today’s cultural climate” (Rancière 1). In other words, Rancière affirms that the image serves several functions at once and that,
ultimately, it is the ‘material’ from which today’s reality is made and, consequently, reality cannot be apprehended universally and univocally. The main “labour of art” in this sense, is to provide paths to reorganise the alignments of such oscillation and
proliferation of functions through meaning.
I am deliberately trying to re-phrase the terms Rancière uses, to disclose, at least
analogically, two components that Bryn, more intuitively (as a visual artist), and Calvino and Antonioni, more professionally as writer and filmmaker respectively, follow in their
assemblage of stylistic and aesthetic paths, the plasticity of which seems to embrace a certain ‘multifunctionality’ of images signalled by Rancière. It is ostensibly manifest that the three of them understand the idea of ‘image’ in its vastest sense, transcending the visual. The image does not exhaust itself in its iconicity. The first impression Lacan (and I) had of Bryn’s SL art triggered a natural connection to many and varied visual and literary memories, including Italo Calvino, Rancière’s conference and Antonioni’s Blow Up.
In the first reference, not surprisingly, I have followed a path to the idea of utopia in Calvino. According to some specialists, Calvino’s utopia is an idea amply grounded in the principles of visibility, lightness and multiplicity. These same values are present, although in a distinct way and responding to different objectives, in Blow Up,
Antonioni’s movie. Bryn Oh’s work can be strategically examined through these same principles via, to be precise, her enchanted doors of perception that she applies in her work as a principle of visibility and imagination. Hence my aim, set out in the
introduction of this Chapter, was to approach this topic from the vectors of visibility, imagination and telepresence, which are consistently manifest through myth-making or narrativeImmersiva.
On a purely theoretical level, Bryn’s ‘puzzle-like’ method actually reveals, from my perspective, a possible fourth vector to my analytical ‘plot’, and one that is worthy of
future study: her perspective on machinima and SL-based art work is twofold, being narrative and fictional literature on the one hand, and making collective the subjective vision from the artist to the virtual world audience via liminality.
4.4 Links and SLURLs
Bryn Oh’s Immersiva
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Immersiva/28/127/21 Bryn Oh YouTube channel
http://www.youtube.com/user/BrynOh/featured Bryn Oh blogspot
brynoh.blogspot.com Bryn Oh bliptv http://blip.tv/bryn-oh
Antonioni’s Blow Up, Trailer (extended) http://youtu.be/2Xz1utzILj4
Antonioni’s Blow Up, At the park http://youtu.be/-ywa6qeYJAg Antonioni’s Blow Up, End part http://youtu.be/9o11LTgXPtM