Distributing the Unsensable (in experiments with images)
Jan. 8, 2014 - Jan. 11, 2014
by CAMP
at
The Many Lives of Indian Cinema: 1913-2013 and beyond
Disciplines, Histories, Technologies, Futures
January 9th, 2014
at Sarai-CSDS, New Delhi.
With Screenings of
From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf
9th and 11th January 7:00 pm
We
are surrounded by landscapes that we cannot directly sense: Coal
reserves, electrical grids, climate, financial systems, art markets. The
chains linking these to individual perception or sense organs are long
and twisted. We can think of images as attempts to short-circuit this
situation. Images light up every available surface, fighting an
indirect, metaphorical battle against the disappearance of actual sites
of financialisation, valorisation, urbanisation, network
intensification, and so on. These images rearrange what can be seen,
felt or alluded to, and thus in the language of Jacques Rancière,
produce an overlap between aesthetics and politics.
In this talk we develop another side of this overlap, which motivates our own recent work, and is about the non-sensable aspects of images, or certain aspects of aesthetic process. That is, things that are not perceptible yet, but there is an experimentation that may burst into perceptibility or form at any time. This means the procedures, backends, tweaking of technological or organisational contexts, and other ways in which moving images are prepared for, thought of, and then made, cast or thrown. Starting with seven different clips of near-darkness in the online video archive Pad.ma, we describe the (also accidental, tentative) entry of cameras and intentions into different kinds of spaces, or worlds. The way or manner of entering, in relation to and transforming what is already there, is the key shift or interruption here. We give examples of our activities "behind the image" and anticipation of it, that try to catch in the plane and rhythm of image-making processes, some of what has receded from the immediate senses.
