The Human-computer experience of time warps organic becoming as innovation races to translate information flows within digital processes. Those with the fastest computer will get there first or fulfill twice as many tasks (hence the balancing potential of the cloud).
In his theological tracings of the digital and its relationship to art and media history, Charlie Gere recognises the importance of the human connection to time in a rapidly digitising environment. He notes that ‘if art is to have a role or a meaning at all in the age of real-time technologies it is to keep our human relation with time open in the light of its potential foreclosure by such technology’ (Gere 2006: 2). This cannot be overstated enough. The solipsistic disconnection of the mobile screen holds an immediate connection to others, it is merging all times and this one, it is both presence and absence.
And for this reason, the consideration of collective-machinic difference becomes of central importance and cause for further study.
Before the consumer spread of the Internet, Felix Guattari pointed to the future importance of the relations epitomised in those of a human-computer relationship:
The new planetary consciousness will have to rethink machinism. We frequently continue to oppose the machine to the human spirit. Certain philosophies hold that modern technology has blocked access to our ontological foundations, to primordial being. And what if, on the contrary, a revival of spirit and human values could be attendant upon a new alliance with machines? (Guattari, 1996:
267).
The spread of computers and their immanent connectivity suggests that Guattari’s proposition deserves full consideration and particularly in their relation to our current senses of shared machine time. Paradigmatic artworks in telematics (Paul Sermon, Roy Ascott), delay recording (Dan Graham) and spiritual sense (Bill Viola) explore these relationships and become important signposts for the evolutionary study of the Cloud and how to design for its applications through mobile technology.
When Bergson’s philosophy gave way to Einstein’s theory of relativity there were left unresolved arguments between their respective understandings of time. In short, Bergson’s plurality of durations would not reconcile with the dividing of time essential to the scientific apprehension of the observable universe. In his infamous work challenging the logic of relativity, Duration and Simultaneity (1922), Bergson distinguishes between measurable time and pure duration which is neatly represented in his words, ‘We are dividing the unfolded, not the unfolding’ (Bergson, 1999: 34). While Bergson had famously misunderstood the theory of relativity (a misreading that contributed to his work being largely overlooked until his resurrection by Deleuze), his philosophy remains an important method of thinking within embodied time and understanding intuition as a method. Indeed, he maintained that a complete understanding of time called for a deeper awareness of mind-matter processes – the prospect of which is both supported and
negated by the current plastic freedoms of the digital. On this rift between philosophical and scientific time, Robin Durie summarises that,
The fundamental issue separating Bergson and Einstein is in understanding the nature of the multiplicity that is time. For Bergson, the nature of relations determining the elements of time is continuity, the contraction of moments from which succession emerges, the continuity or mutual penetration between moments. Einstein, however, fails to account for the temporality of time, which is to say, fails to address the question of how time comes to be temporal, how
‘simultaneity’ comes to have a temporal quality. Irrespective, then, of whether or not there are specific faults in Bergson’s understanding of aspects of Einstein’s theory, it remains the case that Einstein’s theory as it stands cannot help us to determine what time is. (Durie, 1999)
Herein lies the potential for treating the digitally mediated image in terms of channels and plural durations rather than divisibles for authored constructions – to make time visible and help better understand the expression of shared time as co-narrative communication. For Deleuze, narrative film has the ability to reflect and reveal duration through techniques of montage, through the creation and manipulation of other times (images), spaces and characters. In turning inside-out the dispositif of cinematic production and distribution by re-thinking the image amongst a networked creator-audience, pure optical and sound situations enforce a time-image from which to develop, or reflect back an evolved movement-image. Further exploration could result in new techniques for co-realising narratives that might re-affirm the sensory motor function within future hyper-mediated environments.
Deleuze’s elaboration of the virtual, import of the differential, and articulation of movement, re-vitalised Bergson’s philosophy and fused it into a post-structural method.
As a prospect of film unfolding, the Lifemirror proposition of a co-evolving cinematic network begins by channeling remote sense into linear temporalities. Understanding cinematic difference (as initiated by the project) may then be understood as an initial stage for the becoming of collective sensation (Where the camera is but one of the sensors becoming available to mobilised digital technology21). Bypassing the author to filter sense through the cloud could help illuminate an understanding of time beyond the structures that have thus far shaped cinematic history as an effect of, and on, consciousness. In turn, network participation becomes a successive perception that makes visible a cinematic that is otherwise driven by authored or programmed constructions.
Time is no longer experienced through past measurements (clock time) or in the durational constructions of narrative film, but emerges as an ephemeral past-present of co-conscious perception. It is through gestures of thought and sense that the digital network, with exponentially increasing speed, memory and ubiquity, already mediates – it is a mediation of mediations.
In his article, ‘The Scattering of Time Crystals’ Michael Goddard reads Deleuze’s crystalline account of the time-image in relation to Bergson’s static and dynamic religions to endow cinema with the potential for mystical experience. It is interesting to note that Bergson was probably writing his last book on The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Bergson, 1935) around the time he renewed his position on cinema (See
p168). Where static religion relies on a closed morality maintained though organisation,
21 Kris Pister’s ‘smartdust’ project began over 15 years ago and is now ‘finally here’ and fused into Hewlett-Packard’s project, ‘Central Nervous System for the Earth’ (hp.com, 2016).
dynamic religion is creative, vital and crystalline in that it is an ‘open morality’ sensitive to spiritual currents that elude the probing intellect. Goddard relates this distinction to the time-image by suggesting that its very openness as a pure aesthetic transcending the movement-image can be a tool for creating mystical experience. He argues that
cinema, in its crystalline forms, can become a spiritual tool, capable of facilitating an experience of ecstatic subjectivation in which spectators experience cinema as a pure optical and sound situation, a vision and a voice, a scattering of time crystals that leads them beyond the boundaries of their static selves and into profound contact with the outside. (Goddard, 2001: 62).
The inversion of cinema from the authored film-object to an open stage of contingent contact forms a crystalline foundation for such experience. Where the organic regime ‘is entirely reliant on sensory-motor schemata, which are habitual images that stand in for any direct experience of the spiritual’ (Goddard), a reterritorialisation of sense suggests the potential re-engagement of spirit through the image of time on screen. Goddard continues:
Like an iceberg, the majority of which remains submerged beneath the surface of the ocean, mystical experience gives rise to a form of temporality that crystallises powerful virtual forces, beyond the power of an individual body or discourse to actualise: the body plunges into the virtual or spiritual depths which exceed it, rather than containing the spiritual as a personal property (Goddard, 2001: 57).
In a time-led cinema, interconnected movements and virtual connections are submerged in the past and are superpositioned onto the brain-screen via the digital mediation of
mobilised sensation and contact. What is left, are connection and delay points between actual and virtual times emerging through a human-machine process where, opposed to a cinema that produces sense, instead complicates an engagement with collective sense.
This process resonates with Deleuze’s earlier descriptions of the brain drawn from Bergson: ‘The brain does not manufacture representations, but only complicates the relationship between a received moment (excitation) and an executed moment (response). Between the two, it establishes an interval’ (Deleuze, 1991: 24). A meta-cinematic machine that has no production processes outside the community encounter makes way for an understanding of narrative and vitalising of myth through co-emergent
‘films-to-come’. Understood as such, the Lifemirror becomes an elongated community-driven perceptual interval, or meta brain-screen (Fig. 30).
Figure 30. A Sense of Logic
To recapitulate, moments of ‘sensed life’ can filter through the network into the collective perceptual schemata of the Lifemirror screen. A contraction of temporal sensations offered by mobile agents reflect an accidental community perspective (through the reciprocity of co-consciousness on screen) and so the creator-audience forms a ‘sense of time’ through collective participation. This contingent and evolving actualization of time occurs through the Earth sensing itself through the collective cinematic evolution of consciousness. Earth realises her own time through sense mediated by us. In terms of Hegel’s dialectics in which humanity surges towards
‘absolute knowledge’ through the teleological sublation of opposing forces, the spiritual path for humanity reaches an essential collective image in order to make a planetary sense connection. Here, if only as a utopian ideal, the ‘voice of cinema’ may be purely aesthetic but also a pure communication. Here we already see transformations of thought finding ‘middle’ or ‘exterior’ voices such as Malabou’s ‘voir venir’ derived from a temporal reading of Hegel22, or complete breaks from human-subject correlation as found in the radical contingency of speculative realism. Earth’s historical sense in the Anthropocene stems from recorded science reaching limits in both directions, from the infinitesimal ‘God’ particle, to the shape of universal light. Cinema and the digital may then be seen as pivot points of mass reflection in an evolution in consciousness where we experience contact (through separation) of mind. If Lifemirror fractures the spectacle, it does so by using the contingent fragmenting of the real against itself and without capital so creating a diffractive mirror through which elements can pass and reform anew.
22 Where Derrida’s project found in writing a way to navigate and bring to light the ever present otherness in a text, Malabou finds in reading a neuro-plastic function that can fuel and disarm either side of a dialectic. In the act of reading, Malabou identifies the temporally plastic notion of ‘voir venir’, which can mean both to ‘be sure of what is coming’ and to ‘not know what is coming’. For more detail see (Malabou, 2004).
Philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy observes the singular artwork as a fractal space and relates this to the plural terms of the world:
We have done so much fracturing, fraying, wounding, crumpling, splintering, fragilizing, shattering, and exceeding that we would seem to have begun to exceed excess itself. This is why worldliness may appear to be the reverse, in tiny pieces, of a totalisation madly in love with itself. (Nancy, 1997: 123)
As we enter the proposed Anthropocene, a way of making and contemplating art without an author or appreciating narrative without a hero (just as science now progresses in networks rather than through the solitary mind) may help balance the film-earth relationship (the worlds and world we make) and further, help define ourselves in the cloud consciousness we are making.