Reply to comment

Thanks so much to Ben for arranging to bring his colleague Pete Rose to visit our group yesterday. I am haunted by a number of the films we viewed together, as well as by some of the language we used to describe our experience ("Light in the form of touch reveals new aspects of the world: all those tangible fine details that are mostly hidden from our viewing"). I know that I will be showing those images to friends and students for some time to come. For the record, and as an aid when I do those showings, an archive of some of my thoughts from both our group conversation and from dinner afterwards:

Of much interest to me was the question of whether Pete saw his film-making as a creative activity in the service of a critical idea. He was trained in math, but @ a point where he "no longer knew what he was proving," was inspired by an art show to explore the ways in which film's "formal structure" might be used to "restructure time and space" (an especially interesting move, in the context of our discussion, that morning, about the limits of formal systems). Or were Pete's aims, as he also said, "more naively aesthetic," as in, "let's see if I can make something visually interesting"? (He has "no idea ahead of time" what his films will look like, but engages in an experimental process--say, subtracting every 15th frame--to see what it will produce.) Asked once what audience his work addressed, Pete quipped that he was "loyal to his internal community."

I would say that our own discussion also moved back and forth between two poles: the critical and the mystical. On the one hand, Paul was interested in reading the films as representing how the brain works (putting together, for example, a "temporal scan," from the series of snapshots the retina takes from different directions). On the other, Bharath was asking whether such a reading--getting beyond everyday perception to "real perception"--wasn't an attempt to replace our experience with a metanarrative about it.

We had quite a discussion about what words to use in describing what Pete was up to. "Metavision," invites us, for example, to "see all of Einsteinian block time in a glance," as "temporal displacement gives you a map of the whole space." Would we call such work "mystical"? "Opening"? Does it "redeem" experience by aestheticizing it"?  Create "resonances"? "Ring our experience, like a bell"? "Distill" it? Does it "make the experience fuller," by capturing the  mystery that is "left aside by naming," "not describable in language," that which we "normally foreclose with language"?  And is that "something" Platonic or more Zen-like? Does "Pneumenon," for instance, reveal, Platonically, "the tree behind the tree behind the veil"? Or is it more Taoist, revealing that there is "no man behind the curtain"?

A second strand that interested me in the conversation had to do precisely with this matter of the relation of language to visual images: how necessary is it to have written commentary for films like these? How much does such commentary constrain our perception of the images? How might it, for example, open up our perception, enabling us to see what we otherwise might not? As an intermediary between the film and its viewers, language can  "clarify" (providing "categories for seeing" both the world and the work), but those categories can also "coarsen" our perception.