This article questions whether there exists a difference between the actuality and the virtuality of land as a means of image or scapeness with regard to Ben Koder’s Looking Glass Quilt and John Power’s work on generative ambient screens in public spaces as encounters. It also challenges, but more along the lines of plays with, Jeff Malpas’s contestation of space as a concept that is central to the notion of geographical thinking in the absence of a geography, but with an emphasis on the relational view of space that has come to dominate geography and the social sciences as an elucidation of space itself. Indeed, the concept of space as place has come to represent the grounds for its own virtualisation in media and communications research, and to a larger extent through the recent digitisation and manipulation of the image via drone, rather than the perception of that image as an index, or the experience of that image as a spatialisation—a paraliminal conceptuality on the precipice of film philosophy, and a new, interdisciplinary field of research growing in response to the increasingly qualitative aspects of the computer sciences as they converge on topics of Language Learning Models (LLMs) and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
Tasked by the Virtual Experiences Laboratory (VXLab) at RMIT University, Ben Koder’s most recent experiments with mixed realities, machine learning, and games design, has led him to a qualitative crossroads to do with photography, image manipulation, and what the late Tom Gunning once referred to as "the truth claim of traditional photography (and to some extent cinematography) which has become identified with Charles Peirce’s term ‘indexicality’" (39). Gunning also makes the claim that, at least at the level of the concept of the image, the point of an index makes little to no difference between celluloid and the digitisation "of a physical relation between the object photographed and the image finally created" (40). The one is merely a chemical reaction to, the other a numerical representation of, the same datapoint—the object being photographed—but that celluloid can better assume the difference between the actual and the virtual, object for objet d’art, including the physical relation between the object being photographed with the (re)production of another object.
Koder finds the prospect of such a distinction frustrating, for the STEM College at RMIT tends to encourage a much more quantitative approach towards problem-solving that has ultimately left him pursuing an Honours in Media and Communication on my advice as a fellow in the Lab. It is this lasting, quantitative approach that current film studies tend to exacerbate whenever cinematography becomes too (film) philosophical, too, the so-called ‘indexicality’ of claims being made by the one exceeding the scope of the other, and, at the risk of my straying from the topic of land, landings, landscape altogether, the less than qualitative reach of an uncertain grasp that the computer sciences struggle to anticipate about LLMs and the question of consciousness. That not everything real can be quantified, yes, but that not everything quantifiable can be realised in any actual way beyond the virtual, or the philosophical. This newfoundland, as it were, begs the question of a paraliminal conceptuality in which Koder’s experiments verge on the tip of a new, interdisciplinary iceberg.
Gunning might have us put aside the concept of ‘indexicality’ for just a moment, in this case the use of a drone, rather than the camera on the drone, which enables the object to be photographed, despite that "what passes for progress (especially theoretical progress) often simply displaces unresolved problems onto new material" (39). In this sense, there is nothing all that dissimilar to a drone than to a change in perspective, one that could not also be achieved with a crane, or a plane, or a helicopter; although Gunning would probably draw the line at something like a John Olsen painting of Lake Eyre or a Mavis Ngallametta painting of Ikalath because the one is only an impression of the other. Indeed, the transfiguration from eye in the sky to paint in the brush is fraught with its own phenomenology of perceptions that, unlike cinematography, say, and Deleuze with the Cinema books, remains contested at the level of the concept of the image (notwithstanding Barthes or Sontag; or, as in the case of Ngallametta and Indigenous Australian cartographic paintings, whether or not the impression of a bird’s eye view is constitutive of an actual bird’s eye view). Vermeer almost precludes this debate entirely, and despite his purported use of optics while painting as per Teller’s Tim’s Vermeer (2013).
"But what problem does this change present", as Gunning himself puts it, "and how does it change indexicality?" (40). Consider not the perspective, then, but the ease with which a drone allows for such a point of view, and that, much like Deleuze’s interpretation of a bourgeoise woman who starts to "see" the world around her in Rossellini’s Europe ’51 (1962), again those "situations which we no longer know how to react to, in spaces which we no longer know how to describe" (xi). We are sat in front of Building 4, Bowen Street, for example, formerly the old Trade School building before The Working Men’s College became The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). There the drone sits. Not as clumsy or random as a Gaspard-Félix Tournachon taking pictures of Brussels while hanging out of a hot air balloon (as caricatured by lithographer Honoré Daumier), truly a precision instrument for a more binary age. In a little under 15 minutes, though, Koder will have digitised more than just a series of snapshots of the Melbourne CBD (see fig. 1). He will have produced a 3D Gaussian Splat (3DGS) soon to be reminiscent of Tournachon’s own Revolving self-portrait.
Fig. 1: April 2024, the original perspective as seen by the drone at 0 degrees, what Koder refers to as the 'Ground Truth'
It is the temporal aspects to this Splat, in particular, that intrigue me the most as a film philosopher, what with my own thesis on time, affect, and the moving image. That time can (and does) express itself as itself spatially, and yet, invisibly, inimitably, inseparably, if only briefly, as a time and a space through us—through the affection of the image—a spiel about Deleuze that Koder is more than familiar with my talking about. Deleuze would doubtless attribute this affection to the "loosening of the sensory-motor linkage, [that] it is time, ‘a little time in the pure state’, which rises to the surface of the screen. Time ceases to be derived from the movement … . Even the body is no longer exactly what moves; subject of movement or the instrument of action, it becomes rather the developer [révélateur] of time" (xi). It reveals (révèle) the spatio-temporal, ipso post facto, being-in-time-ness of a substance that, in my opinion, can no longer adhere to its own origins a minute or two ago, and of which Heidegger touches upon this notion of contemporaneity as Befindlichkeit as affect as mood: "mood assails. It comes neither from ‘without’ nor from ‘within,’ but arises from being-in-the-world itself as a mode of that being" (129).
Of course, neither Heidegger, nor Deleuze for that matter, go so far as to suggest that time and affect are interchangeable concepts, as I do, but the one implies the other through a change, I argue, often through a change in the perspective of an individual, and quite literally when it comes to the Splat of Bowen Street, which needs to be seen from just the right point of view, ideally from the drone’s original perspective brought to a relativist scale; otherwise, when shown from behind (from where there is no data), the two-dimensionality of the image betrays itself. Jeff Malpas might then go on to suggest that, from "Deleuze through to Peter Sloterdijk spatial ideas and images are constantly in play, and yet what is at issue is the very idea of space and the spatial … . With some notable exceptions, very few thinkers, no matter what the discipline, have given serious attention to the phenomenon of space, any more than to the phenomena of time and of place, but have tended instead to deal with various forms or modes of space" (226).
Malpas, I think, is right to question that we, as much as we are thinkers as we are humans first of all, tend to designate the phenomenon of space in much the same way that we are predisposed to utilise the reality of those spaces as places as concepts; not just through our perception of somewhere like a forest as a form of natural resource, but our own perspective of a standing dead or dying river red gum as an unsightly, and thus, undesirable mode of tree that, in any traditionalist park or garden setting, would sooner be cut down than left to hollow out as habitat for local wildlife. Edward Soja also touches upon this notion of a third space that "is not confined solely to geographers, architects, urbanists and others for whom spatial thinking is a primary professional occupation" (3), but this idea of a "constantly shifting and changing milieu of ideas, events, appearances, and meanings" (2). I also think a part of the problem with such appearances stem from the fact that spaces are nonhuman (to begin with), such that spaces become places over a period of time, and that we affect those spaces into places.
We bring the phenomenology of a time and a place to a space, in other words, because our appreciation of the one only goes so far as our understanding of the other anthropomorphically, epistemologically-speaking, not unlike Guy Debord’s description of a psychogeography "whether consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals" (8). Malpas himself only goes so far as "to draw the concept of space as it appears within geography, in particular, into the sphere of what I term "philosophical topography’", which is itself just another kind of "mode of thinking that reverses much of the standard philosophical thinking in regard to space and place and that, while it gives a central role to the notion of space, as well as to time, also understands space as itself given from within the structure of place (topos)" (227). For as long as that topos remains topos (re: temporal, temporality, history, historicity, what Bernard Stiegler might instead refer to as the epiphylogenesis of man), the phenomenology of phenomenology itself will always be limited by the ontography of its own methodological approach; regardless if that ontography is object oriented or not, our very own perception of perception itself, to recall Ian Bogost, is inherently and inescapably anthropological by design. One of the hopes that current and future AGI research hopes to resolve, specifically by allowing the machine to "see" the world around us, not only subjectively, from its own point of view, but objectively, for what the world does not already mean to us as ourselves. "Insofar as the nature of ontological inquiry is such that it proceeds by attending to concepts (which does not mean that it attends to only concepts)," according to Malpas, "so one way of understanding ontology is at the inquiry into what is most fundamental" (230).
Fig. 2: ca. April 2024, the Quilt as it appears in its raw format, a series of individual photographs taken from different points of view
Koder would sooner help us to "see" ourselves through the machine, and by rendering the Splat on two of the Lab’s new Looking Glass displays: one 32-inch screen, another 65-inch screen, capable of rendering up to 100 photographs simultaneously on a series of individual planes into a Quilt (see fig. 2). Each individual plane represents just one photograph, and with each photograph taken from a different point of view, the Splat appears to be holographic. What is perhaps even more remarkable is that the displays themselves require no additional input from us, no glasses, no goggles, no form of special, virtual, and/or augmented aid. The actuality of the virtuality takes place from our own perspective, through our own field of vision, so that as we move our bodies from side to side (preferably at an angle no more than 60 degrees), we can view the Splat from that perspective in relation to our own (see fig. 3). I take this movement as an opportunity to remind Koder of John Power’s generative ambient screens, works "motivated by Malcolm McCullough’s notion of the ambient commons … that [are] premised upon the right to attention", while "preserving a sense of present and the local in urban spaces in the age of ubiquity as a matter of social amenity" (4).
Fig. 3: ca. April 2024, the Quilt after it has been 'swizzled' into one omnipresent view, which is then refracted through a lenticular lens at the front of the Looking Glass display
In such places, "we invest meaning in spaces through embodied and aesthetic experiences, ritual, signs, language, social mores, stories and laws", according to Power, "(all of which can and are now mediated in urban space through screens). Human geographer Tim Cresswell sees place as a concept that has seen a resurgence in the era of global media" (21). My emphasis on the use of the term Human here, almost as if the word itself necessitates the difference between the actuality and the virtuality of land as a concept of scapeness that Malpas might instead refer to as "an openness or extendedness within it (a notion inadequate thought in terms of mere ‘containment’)—to a modern conception, adumbrated amongst the atomists, in which what is primary is the idea of an extendedness that no longer stands in relation to any notion of boundedness at all (or if boundedness does appear, it is as arbitrary or conventional)" (234). It contains its own conception of ‘containment’ as if it were adumbrated by the very notion of.
Koder is still a way off from this level of abstraction—of infinity. Deleuze, Sloterdijk, Malpas, are epistemological horizons that would both limit and contain the phenomenology of his perception, and to such an extent that his spaces would invariably become their places, their abstractions of conceptions, given enough time. For now, they remain boundless in their potentiality, as well they should, and precisely because they are not "seen as simply a division within the structure of [an] extendedness [that] increasingly takes on a dominant role in the thinking of all of the concepts that appear here", to recall Malpas, especially "when we look primarily to emergence, and to emergence as also the establishing of a form of duration, then we see the beginning of the idea of time. The development of the more abstract concepts of space and of time undoubtedly contributes to, while also being a function of, the tendency to separate out the basic phenomena that are at issue" (236).
To preserve, often through a sense of the present, as well as the local(ity) of one’s own perceptions, actions, reactions, a calmness, like a placelessness, that Power’s own "Locus [hospital] installation alleviated a feeling of being stuck inside, feeling blasé (bluntedness) or ennui, by imparting a calm circadian feeling of the time of day (especially to staff and particularly patients who had not been outside)" (142). The virtuality of the place transcends the actuality of the space itself as itself as opposed to the presence of an absence of something like the sensory-motor linkage. Moreover, "one of the basic forms of change is movement", as Malpas puts it, "and one of the basic modes of movement for Aristotle is change of place—‘local’ motion … and so a part of Aristotle’s investigation into that which is understood specifically as emergent [taking note of the way the Greek physis already contains such an idea within it (see Heidegger, 1998)], as changeable" (235). Take that note away, and the actual is the virtual; take that note away again, and the actual is the virtual is the actual, and so it goes. So that as we move our bodies from side to side to side, the actuality of a perception betrays the virtuality of a screen that partially reflects the movement of a greater image we can never actually "see".
It is only upon this reflection, however, that Koder’s experiments reveal several other, deeper levels of and to dimensionality; firstly, as part of an ongoing affection-image, one where the (pre)dominant role of the space is embodied, as much as it is extended into, and in relation to, the perspective of an individual; secondly, as a perspective that is placed within and without the scapeness of its own boundedness; thirdly, as part of a greater, inter, action-image, one where the body is exactly what moves, as both the subject of movement and the instrument of action, reaction, and interaction; and fourthly, as an expression of both time and space as place, through the perception of the image, and in a far, far more phenomenological way that Deleuze himself could never have really anticipated, either photographically, or cinematographically.
It also makes for a much more philosophical, if not human, topography within the context of an interplay between agents and their own (sense of) agency, one where the contemporaneity of an encounter is "still recognised as forming a basic unit of social structure", as Power puts it, while "interpretively exploring the ways that ambient media are emotionally woven into practices of place making" (71). What to make of this encounter, then, not just because language somehow determines everything, to paraphrase Malpas, "but is rather a simple consequence of the fact that thinking requires language … in beginning to explore the concept of space, place, or any concept" (232). This space, that which precedes the word, is not the space, or the place, or the Tao, that can be named as such. It is instead the very medium through which language and thought, actuality and virtuality, transpire. Koder’s experiments, therefore, unfold not only as visual or conceptual explorations of understanding itself, but as an inquiry into the fundamental fabric of our own experiencing of experience. That horizon place, where time and space converge.
References
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———. "Home". 31 Jan. 2024. 8 May 2024 <https://benkoder.itch.io/>.
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Source: journal.media-culture.org.au