E-Book, Englisch, Band 1, 229 Seiten
Grabbe / Rupert-Kruse / Schmitz Cyborgian Images
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-3-941310-66-7
Verlag: Büchner-Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
The Moving Image between Apparatus and Body
E-Book, Englisch, Band 1, 229 Seiten
Reihe: Yearbook of Moving Image Studies (YoMIS)
ISBN: 978-3-941310-66-7
Verlag: Büchner-Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
One of the big myths and metaphors of the postmodern age is the Cyborg, which includes a large amount of different meanings. The Cyborg often expresses the transformation and extension of the body and exemplifies a postmodern range of technical determinism and human comprehension. In this perspective the Cyborg is no longer a concept of science fiction, technical apocalypse or cyberpunk, but more a construct that highlights the relation of modern media technologies within our every day culture; as well as the body and mind of spectators and users of these media systems.
We are connected with a variety of poly-sensual media systems, and we use its potential for communication, multiplying knowledge, spatial and temporal orientation or aesthetic experience. Therefore we are a kind of Cyborgs, connected to media by complex multimodal interfaces.
This volume monitors and discusses the relation of postmodern humans and media technologies and therefore refers to Cyborgs, interfaces and apparatuses within the perspective of an autonomous image science.
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The »Biology of the Apparatus of Perception«: The Evolution-Theoretical Conditions of Illusion Media
Norbert M. Schmitz Abstract
With the question – what is an image? – the modern art theory tried to capture the specifity and autonomy of images to support an independent perspective beyond the technical access by iconography, semiotics or cultural theory. But this question also implies an ontological point of view that state images as self-contained artefacts far from its natural historic and cultural historic conditionality. This article argues against this ontological viewpoint of media and conceptualises the development of visual artefacts (between central perspective and cyberspace) as a capacity of adaption to nature by culture. In this media-anthropological perspective it is less about objectivity of representation, which still influences art- and media theory, but more about functional capacity of image media in the perspective of an image science. The history of art and media art is then a considerable special case of the common image culture and the article methodically connects iconology with the biological constructivism. Keywords
illusionism, realism, perceptual psychology, perceptual anthropology, Gombrich, biological constructivism, biological objectivity. 1.Body versus Mind – Nature versus Culture
When the moving images between apparatus and body are juxtaposed in the field of illusion media, then it apparently implies an antithesis: ›Authentic body experience‹, in German ›Leiblichkeit‹ in the tradition of phenomenology (e.g. Zur Lippe 1988), versus ›estranged machine bodies‹ or more fundamentally, the contrast of body and mind. To contradict this opposition deeply rooted in Western intellectual history today is almost a commonplace in discourses equally in both image and media studies. However, in my view, a consciousness of how much intellectual structures and in particular those of our perception are also themselves physical, functional structures incurred through evolution has not yet established completely itself in our ›theoretical daily lives‹. Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in the question of the representation status of the static and dynamic illusionary image, which is still understood as being an extrinsic factor of human nature. Especially in an image theory determined by the art of classical modernism it is necessary to free ›the eye‹ from the traditions of external representationalism. In fact, our ability to perceive an objective, external world and to orientate ourselves in it is the result of our special evolutionary adaptation to the environment and thus part of our physical structure. This fact is determinative for the particular nature of hominids as an essential ›engine‹ of the formation of the neo-cortex. Thus, the apparatus of simulation are only possible and comprehensible in their correspondence – I would like to say equivalence – to just this physical structure. This applies equally to the simple perception of forms in Palaeolithic cave paintings as it does to those ›optical illusions‹ from Renaissance painting to dynamic cyberspace. The question of the ›objectivity‹ of representation, which has long been central to the image sciences, should be reversed, namely towards the constitutive conditions and forms with which Homo sapiens as a species has attempted to represent certain sections of its environment in the course of its evolutionary development. This biological selection of environmental characteristics is the criterion of the ›objectivity‹ of human perception and not an ›ontological truth‹. Accordingly, the apparatus for the creation of static and dynamic images corresponds functionally to these physical structures. We are thus concerned with the biological-functional fundamentals of a visual turn in our culture (Mitchell 1995). The argument of the physicality of our perception in the following is limited to a classical perspective for the sake of brevity. However, the same biological-functional statements can be applied to moving images, whether analogue or digital. In the invitation to this Yearbook of Moving Image Studies, the editors determine that: Modern perspectives on the structure of moving images exemplify a complex multimodal mechanism that interacts in specific ways with the recipient and various levels of the perception of images. In this case, neither moving images nor the subjective reception are passive processes. Movement, time, space and different modalities interact with senses, memories and anticipation and create a complex hybrid structure of medium, recipient and sensory stimulus processing. And it is exactly this which can only be completed within a given anthropologically determined framework. The apparatus in turn simulates certain functions of these physical structures of perception incurred via evolution. Of course, this is only partially possible, given the complexity of the human body. However, the technological developments are extraordinary particularly regarding the potential illusions of moving as well as still images. Since the rash utopias of AI research into the possibilities of artificial simulation of homo sapiens have been fulfilled as little as the promise of complete illusion in the sense of total immersion, it seems to me to urgently suggest the drama of changes not only in our visual everyday culture to re-shift the perspective towards the biological conditions of our perception, in order to then put them back into a relation to the cultural genesis of simulation technologies. We are thus concerned with the integration of cultural and natural history. Of course, this cannot be done here in its entirety, rather the biological preconditions of world recognition as a building block or – from the point of view of the image sciences – the reasons why we make images should be explained from a position of biological constructivism. It is precisely this perspective by Riedl (1980), but also principally by Maturana and Varela (1983) which allows us to understand how much our world, i.e. the possibility of simulating it using apparatus, is the result of the constructive power of our brains and thus our bodies, without having to slip into any form of culturalism or even into the radical, idealistic tradition of the philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte. But first, the biological argument in the following is made strongly in order to refute the fashionable adaptation of biological research in the humanities of the present in certain aspects, namely inasmuch as it is to be shown that a human being can certainly only be understood from the perspective of its unique adaptation and thus ultimately, albeit surprisingly, remains the epitome of creation, or at least the one we know. It would be really interesting to attempt some discourse-historical considerations. In the face of the brevity offered above however I wish to take a different and ultimately friendlier path by attempting to make modern evolution-theory thinking simply fruitful for particular problems in the humanities. The astonishing thing is an inner-biological perspective change. While older biology initially stressed man’s relationship with animals in the sense that they rightly showed us phylogenetic conditions, i.e. they concretely showed us how primate behaviour remains effective behind idealistically excessive cultural reshaping, a newer, namely neurobiological viewpoint is characterised by the fact that it emphasises the specifics of mankind as a result of evolutionary-biological thought (see McGinn 2001, Paun 2001, and Hoffman 2000). This is to be discussed in the following based on the question of the objectivity of perception. To what extent this is fundamental for the current media-theoretical debate on simulation needs no discussion. In the sense of the long tradition of debate in the image sciences, but also from the perspective of the issue itself, I shall begin with the discussion of the central perspective as the most important, modern, illusionary technique not only of the old but also the new digital media. While their relative objectivity is initially represented as the simulation of particular, natural adaptations to the environment, in the second part and based on this I shall at least touch on the evolutionary conditions of the natural history of a vertebrate’s eye. In doing so, we are naturally not concerned with a concrete phylogenetic demolition, moreover the decisive factor is the evolutionary perspective whose understanding, in my opinion, is the condition of the discussion on the most sophisticated cultural techniques of image generation. In a reversal of the evolutionary process, the argument proceeds as it were from above, i.e. from the most complex and the youngest down to the oldest and original. This is partly due to the brevity offered, but corresponds however to the purely humanistic interest in knowledge. For, in the following, we are concerned with the relevance of evolutionary biology for some of the currently much debated questions on the status of human perception. My aim is a pronounced departure from the biologistic reductionism of the past, which has been hawked in humanistic literature to date, in order to create understanding for the cultural-historical relevance of evolutionary biology for the image sciences (see Lepenies 1976). For some, it may come as a surprise to...
