Research Statement

Beginning in reality, the film gives us concrete content and gradually begins to differentiate itself from it. It draws us into the cinematic dimensions of animation, editing and audio-visual experience. A cinematic takeover of our own consciousness that carries us beyond ourselves, performing our own selves as unlearning the difference. Our observing consciousness merges with the cinematic movement and forms a new, different set of references and perspectives. Based on and inspired by theoretical fragments, the film itself becomes a collective thought movement, the goal of which is not the understanding of theoretical structures, but the performative execution of theoretical movements. The cinematic movement allows us to express processes of actualization, in which we move out of the non-space of virtuality and into assemblages. We become collective apparatuses, intra-consciousnal bodies, whose multidimensionality breaks up the continuity of time and enables us to realize the previous and solid in new spaces, beyond our own constraints. Philosophical thinking itself withdraws into its own performative enactment, opening up to fields of virtual potential whose digital flickering reveals intra-consciousness that is yet to be fathomed.

Introductory Hypnosis

This is a first try. The attempt to make performance philosophy tangible and accessible in its entire temporal-performative effect. We ourselves are no longer thinkers of certain thoughts, but we ourselves become the expression, the performance of thinking. What is thought loses its linearity, opens up to unknown spaces, and transfers the performers into another self. Inspired by the thoughts of Bergson, Deleuze, Barad and others, we want to make it possible to experience one's own self in its performativity. We would like to make sense, apparatuses, virtuality and temporality tangible for the viewers of our film in a performative-affective structure. It is the absence of content, of topicality, that repeatedly confronts us with the possibility of the non-temporal, that pushes us into the still dimensionless spaces of a virtuality. From body to body, apparatus to apparatus, we pass over our own identity, become performers of our own animated being as temporalization, the digital crackle of a virtual underground. In every moment of our actuality, our present consciousness, the virtuality as a condition of possibilities melts away and remains in the simplicity of an ideality. Our performative-philosophical journey, however, leads us into atemporal multidimensionality, into the not-yet behind past apparatuses and becomes the causality of a respective duplication as performativity.

Dominance of Actuality

Our experimental philosophical film is an abstraction into virtuality, the experiment of penetrating virtual awareness through performative practice/experience. As the starting point of our film: topicality, reality, presence. At the moment of our actualization, the moment of a mattering of our access to the world while being connected at the same time, the de-construction of one's own actualized consciousness begins. By means of cinematic and acoustic stimulations and movements, the audio-visual experience remains a constant expression and at the same time a performative impetus for one's own immanent-empirical event. Piece by piece, the solidity of apparent objects thins out and reveals the underlying virtuality, which is withdrawing from them as the non-reason of their existence and actuality. An opening entanglement of dull solidity into withdrawing virtuality that refers to a multidimensionality of time, space and theory that obliges to collective performativity. As if one's own consciousness were relaxed, actualities become animations and animations become updates of the actual, in that the previous releases itself from the dominance of its perspectivity and temporalizes/performs itself as a level of virtuality in the field of other/untimely actuality and one's own virtuality. Our cinematic thought movement becomes a relaxing de-construction, a re-configuration of a transition into a field of digitality whose crackling and shimmering updates hint at the semblance of virtual awarness.

Mirroring Trance

Looking at the screen becomes looking in the mirror. The canvas itself becomes the expression of an unattainable center whose elusive ideality transfers the non-temporality of virtuality into a division between content and animation that has already been completed. In the mirror of our self, in our own animation, our being-connected to the world becomes an apparatus/structure, as mattering in the form of intra-actions to enable border-crossing collective consciousness. The cinematic-hypnotic experience in the virtuality of consciousness is the contraction of the actualization into the virtuality from the not-yet of the reconfiguration of a developing apparatus. It is everything at the same time, it is rapprochement, distance, understanding and alienation. A space of impossibilities actualizes itself in the potentiality of a temporalizing structure, the mattering of an apparatus. The border to the present, the level of actualization in the middle of a particular situation opens up a field of extremes, idealities, materiality; a mirror losing its superficiality, losing its center. Immersing yourself into the virtual, in the animated counterpart of your own reality, becomes a tangible option. Incipient decentralization. Apparent overlaps of diverse-dimensional apparatuses. On the screen you are the difference in virtuality, the potential of the future.

Intra-consciousnal Divergence

Mantra-like we repeat the content-emptying formulas of immanent movement, perform an expanding perspective. We delimit ourselves from the present and symbolize the animation of the transition as a virtual awareness of a multidimensional perspective. The audio-visual event becomes an expression of an interlocking of current updates/actualizations, the simultaneity of which refers to the diversity of their virtuality spaces. Like a cinematic-acoustic prosthesis, the film connects with the apparatus of our self, in that we are expression, mattering, actualization out of a hidden virtuality, whose phenomenological body the film inscribes in the multidimensionality of references. The diversity of self-acting apparatuses is integrated into the impossibility of virtuality, the event becomes intra-consciousnal. The resulting question remains, how is the performativity of multidimensional temporality to be reconciled with the actualization of a present whose validity does not collapse from any virtual? Because the possibility itself becomes and is already a virtual realization of an atemporal actuality, a matted space whose lines of perspective refer to a different structure. The other aspect of actualized virtuality is a collective apparatus, an existentiality of the untimely, an intra-consciousnal being moved out of the beyond of virtuality through the temporality of the actual. We are now one with the apparatus of the film. The distance between the observer and the observed dissolves in a permanent transition to virtual consciousness like the peak of a continuous wave, at the peak of which actuality and virtual animation diverge into temporality.

Performative Potential of Collective Temporality

In the end: the apparent dissolution, the actuality in virtuality as a digital field of animation, a deforming and performing apparatus/body in the decentralization of the previous and the perspective of the future. A distinction between animation and actuality becomes obsolete. Out of the cinematic, the digital lays itself over virtuality as a vibrating potential, sketches spaces and times of multidimensional entanglements and withdraws the updated consciousness into the beyond of its apparatus. Animation is actuality on the level of digitality, which can neither be assigned an apparatus from outside of ourselves, nor can it be the mattering actuality of the apparatus viewing it. The perspective actualizing lines are enabled by references coming from the virtual to the respective difference. The animated, in its referential actuality, is made possible virtuality, the virtual-mattering of which would entail the virtuality of an awareness whose collapsing reality consists in untimeliness. Merely the networked connectivity of a future collective, in transcending previous perspectivity, is the execution of an intra-activity, from which an apparatus/a consciousness springs, whose actuality in its references requires differentiated virtuality. The animation has updated itself in a reciprocal approach to reality by temporalizing the perspective difference of its withdrawal as the visibility of collectivizing inra-consciousness to enable a multidimensional virtuality.

Out of virtuality we enable the performative understanding of the not-yet, integrating virtual spaces beyond ours in collective intra-consciousness. The theoretical construct degenerates into the impulse of a meaningless enactment, whose creative potential opens up a field of multidimensional collectivity.

References

Barad, Karen: Diffracting Diffraction, Cutting Together-Apart, in: Parallax (Leeds, England), 2014-07-03, Vol.20 (3), p.168-187 (Routledge)

Barad, Karen: Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press , Durham London, 2007.

Bergson, Henri: Matter and Memory. George Allen & Unwin, London, 1962

Cavell, Stanley: Contesting Tears. The Hollywood Melodram of the Unknown Woman. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996.

Deleuze, Gilles: Nietzsche. Ein Lesebuch von Gilles Deleuze. Merve Verlag, Berlin, 1979.

Deleuze, Gilles: Das Bewegungs-Bild. Kino 1. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a. Main, 1997a.

Deleuze, Gilles: Das Zeit-Bild. Kino 2. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a. Main, 1997b.

Deleuze, Gilles: Differenz und Wiederholung. Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 3. Aufl., München, 2007.

Derrida, Jacques: Aporias?: Dying, Awaiting (one Another at) the "limits of Truth". Stanford Univ. Press, Stanford, Calif., 1993.

Leitner, Birgit; Engell, Lorenz (Hrg.): Philosophie des Films. Verlag der Bauhaus Universität Weimar, Weimar, 2007.

Nagl, Ludwig; Waniek, Eva; Mayr, Brigitte (Hrg.): Film / Denken – Thinking Film. Film and Philosophy, Synema – Gesellschaft für Film und Medien, Wien, 2004.

Nietzsche Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden. (KSA). Hrg. Giorgio Colli,

Mazzino Montinari.Walter de Gruyter, München/ Berlin/ New York, 1980.

Pipin, Robert B.: Fatalism in American Film Noir. Some Cinematic Philosophy. University of Virginia Press, London, 2012.

Trinh, T. Minh-ha: Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism, and the Boundary Event. Routledge, New York, 2011

Peer Reviews

All reviews refer to original research statements which have been edited in response to what follows:

Review 1: Accept submission subject to minor revisions of written statement.

This work, which deals with the issue of research on the immersion of virtual worlds, combines two dimensions of experience: practical-artistic and theoretical-philosophical. This is not an easy task because, through a philosophical commentary linking the findings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Karen Barad, Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson, the authors try to explicate the most important research hypotheses articulated in the image through theses regarding the interpenetration, coexistence of the real and virtual worlds. Based on the review of the work, it can be concluded that when entering the VR reality and, as one might suspect, Second Life, the entity is duplicated and becomes part of the virtual world that is its reflection. This duplication, originating from the writings of Henri Bergson and developed by Gilles Deleuze, becomes the subject of a monologue on the coexistence of the actual and virtual world, impression and expression, configuration and reconfiguration, center and decentralization. 

The author's perspective tries to specify the subjective experience of the subject immersed in virtual reality, taking into account in particular the relation between the aspects of movement and the relation of the subject's awareness to the environment while navigating in real time between images recorded in the actual exposure and digitally generated images. The background commentary emphasizes the subject's loss in the virtual space, where he must face new challenges. The suggested assemblage derived from the writings of Gilles Deleuze and the mentioned multiplicity is intended to reflect the variable of jumping through specific graphic elements in the work, signaling immersion in a media environment full of screens. Secondly, the relativization of the reception experience, of truth, goes back to Friedrich Nietzsche's essay „On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" and "Thus Spoke Zarathustra". The digital video essay also raises the issue of human interactivity and performativity in virtuality. However, the text is complicated and difficult to understand. Undoubtedly, this essay is an interesting study of research on the specificity of immersion in the virtual world, using a number of quotations, the multitude of which is somewhat overwhelming. From the adopted perspective, the research and theoretical context seems coherent and comprehensive, although the excess and density of the text poses an intellectual challenge to the listener. 

On a practical level, I would suggest, if the editors deem it appropriate, to slightly slow down the flow of images, the flow of which makes it impossible to concentrate on individual objects of the presented world. In this virtual 'horror vacui', the layering is a bit like running through a computer game. The viewer does not always feel in control of what is visible to be able to take a good look at it. It is certainly an essay worth attention, although the distraction creates a slight disorientation in the viewer. I would suggest publishing the work if the narrative in the work is slowed down a bit for the benefit of the viewer. There is no room for contemplation in this work, which unfortunately is one of the most important elements of the journey through the interior of the virtual exhibition.

Review 2: Accept submission subject to minor revisions of written statement.

I consider the film to be an interesting exploration of well-established philosophical ideas, and even though such concepts have been explored in a lot of practice-research, the film contributes with a new spin and initiates philosophical (conceptual and affective) thinking in a significant manner. However, I have some reservations regarding the statement and therefore recommend publishing this work with some revisions as they could be helpful in improving the work’s combined quality.

 I think the statement could be clearer about its use of certain concepts since the statement, stylistically, mirrors the film and thus merely doubles the propositions made by the artwork itself (the text is itself an artistic, performative piece). Yet the artwork has other layers that undercut or complexify these. I would suggest more clearly defining the theoretical perspectives and terms employed/challenged. On a related note, it is very strange that Nietzsche is not mentioned anywhere else (except for the film’s subtitle) since the thought of the untimely (and its image) stems from his thought. Furthermore, the statement frames the thought that the film is supposed to generate in slightly misleading ways, and these should be made more tentative/open or could use more reflection (that is, I think the film does something more interesting than it is framed as doing by the statement). For instance, the author(s) should contemplate the role of the digital more clearly since the film constantly vacillates between virtual/actual (not simply reverse their relation as the statement seems to suggest) and implies that our virtual is already permeated by the digital. Other instances, such as the sentence “On the screen you are the difference in virtuality, the potential of the future” as well as the title “Unlearning Nihilism”, imply a new potential for actualization and for the future, but watching the film one experiences something quite different, which is supported and facilitated by the film’s structure (is not merely a spectator’s associative, subjective response). One affectively becomes more and more lost in different dizzying layers of the actual/virtual (as similarly reflected in the film’s intensified breathing sounds), losing one’s center (as a subject) and experiencing a new form of nihilism (transhumanism as nihilism?). I would therefore reframe the explanation of the film’s philosophical effect (or separate the intended effect from the actual/possible ones). Also, in the statement, entanglement and “intra-consciousness” are said to be revealed as something new, but, to my mind, the film exposes that as always already having been the case.

Finally, I suggest that possibly the most interesting aspect which could be reflected and elaborated on (currently not addressed in the statement but rather prominent in the film) is the making sensual and affective of a certain thought. While the words spoken and the quotations used that are related to thinking the assemblage/trans-human often sound optimistic (the statement also mirrors this perspective), the other audiovisual (sounds, images, movements, etc.) layers evoke an underlying uneasiness, undercutting the words and their conceptual content – sense becomes sensation.

All reviews refer to original research statements which have been edited in response.