TEMPLE HQ
THIS DREAM AGAIN, DEJA VU!
FIVE PHOTOS OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Two Episodes in Gaming
Mirror’s Edge begins each level with a photograph. Faith in motion, communicating with her tracker, slows down, and looks over the skyline. A colored shape rises out of the sea of white, a set of color and silhouette drawing the eye to its peak. The ascent ahead is that of a mountain, the framed sublimity of Weimar Alpine Cinema, the grand challenge. Faith halts, the voice ceases, the player gains control of her and moves onwards along the microsteps of the image before her.
The image goes from its single shot to a path of that image. The frame of the photo becomes a doorway that Faith ventures into, achieving the image’s potential with the realization of her goal. Faith partakes here in a movement-based version of what occurs in the I-Spy series. There, the world is arranged in diorama form for the player to look upon, led through a series of mechanistic happenings by their interaction with the photograph.
The opposite, in INFRA. Markku moves through the crumbling ruins of the city, tasked with careful documentation of its corruption. Each burst pipe or crumbling wall, interesting documents or mural graffiti, he photographs with a loud flash of the screen and a comment. The player moves on.
Two cases of motion and photography - the photograph as dominant and subordinate. In Faith’s case, the photograph is dominant - she enters into it, a single moment she’s then tasked with fulfilling, her motion that implied by the scene before her, that of a plant branching from a seed,
Echoed here is the photography of Riefenstahl, particularly the 1936 Olympics and the Nuba people of Sudan. In both, her obsession is with coiled action in the midst of movement. Each photograph is a movement of anatomy frozen at its apex, an eternity of violence. The human body here is captured as her earlier work with Alpine Cinema captured the mountains of Europe - the long motions of geology, captured as the sublime eternal against the violent struggle of the climbers. Time is erased, action becomes the sum of its parts, with no decay or negation, action hovering at the apex, forever.
Faith’s parkour, her climbing, and that of Riefenstahl & co in their alpine summits, is the constant partaking-in and pursuit of this form of momentary action. The body becomes sublime, each leap or stride a moment of participation in the grand drama already set up by the photograph of the skyline.
For Markku, the photograph is subordinate. His motion is metainstantaneous, a single image is taken as one of many on a linear timeline, a frame of a film, as he moves through the world. His logic is that of linear time, rather than of a moment playing out on all its extrapolations. The moments become fragments in context, frames of temporal motion.
Both actions are unified in Mario 64, where the photograph becomes both subordinate and dominant in regards to Mario’s movement. At the micro level, each painting becomes an opening to its own set of extrapolations. The painting shows the world frozen in time, with Mario’s entry being the catalyst for its playground to be set into motion. From the moment, the whole world becomes alive in extrapolations from the moment - the photograph becoming the zero of a numberline.
Yet at the macro level, each photo is subordinate. Mario moves through the castle as a gallery, the photos making a filmic sequence of freeze-frames that punctuate his linear journey. The entry of each is a new dimension of movement, diversions to the vertical from the simple horizontal trajectory through the castle.
Discovery of the Momentary
Hobbes writes of the dual nature of thought, extending via causes or effects, from the moment. A thing is held in the mind, and its moment then becomes the basis for further transformations. For Hobbes, each moment is considered uniquely, a snapshot taken away from the world’s motions to become the static foundation - zero, upon which all transformations occur, either forwards or backwards.
A short time later this concept came to be in art. Dutch genre painting developed representation of the moment, the instant captured as zero above its fleeting existence as accumulation of qualities. A Vermeer is an act of elevation, the discursive shift of a transformed vector being treated as the basis for a second movement.
Genre painting continued from here, decreasing only with the early advent of photography - the art which would ultimately fulfill its promises far more efficiently. The genre painting that continued on was a false promise, the process abstracted to propaganda. Moments were, far from captured, constructed, assemblages of signs - Norman Rockwell’s visions of Hallmark Card America.
Rockwell’s art is interesting in this development however - with the ideas of genre painting now performed in an industrial, indefinitely replicable capacity via photography, his art is a marked step backwards, by centuries. The techniques of genre painting are instrumentalized to produce abstract assemblages of signs, taken from time and space and laid out with relation to neither, a sort of constructed noumenal realm.
This speaks to the purpose of art before the moment was discovered. The tableaus of Bosch, monastic icons, illuminations upon manuscripts, the Bayeux tapestries… all of which carry with them the same concept. A large empty space is unveiled, a celestial realm, upon which the things of the world are abstracted to signs, to noumena, then laid out nonlinearly.
It’s telling that most national or capital-T Traditional art takes this noumenal form. A story becomes a myth, a man becomes a hero, processes become signs.
The photographic, momentary art however, works on creating new planes of the phenomenal, perpendicular to the vast river of processes/qualities. Rather than a process of raising to the noumenal, art now becomes a process of creating a new level of the phenomenal - functioning as “big bang” type starting points, from which all numbers explode outwards. Seeds, rather than templates.
This mechanic becomes the basis for Max’s powers in Life is Strange. She rewinds time from the photograph, the power of the medium now the doubling-up of time, the redoing of its linearity across changed paths. With the ability to create indefinitely many seeds, time becomes a trainyard, linear trajectories arranged alongside each other.
It’s with Max’s powers, those inherent in photography itself, that art enters the era of temporality. Both comprehended in all its implications and manipulable, the seas change dramatically. This is the dramatic movement of the reproduced image - beyond the recording of things, where time and space were hindrances that had to be translated into the noumenal realm, and into the recreation of things, each work of art a seed for a new parallel timeline.
Drink Full & Descend
The portal-photograph is a new technology in its creation, but not in its mechanism. Max’s entering of parallel timelines, via the portal object is something that was known for ages before it could be realized in art. We see “scrying” appear again and again, as the usage of such occult objects. An opaque surface of a chaotic substance one descends into via sight.
On Reddit and Tiktok, this has a modern analogue in dimensional jumping - the practice wherein one uses a mirror to shift dimensions, similar to Max’s photographs.
A “dimension” here meaning exactly what it does to Max - a parallel timeline alongside the current one, a vertical (spatial) movement along variations of the horizontal (temporal).
The shifting of timelines is something that occurs again and again in American culture. We often speak of “the wrong timeline”, seeing our own as a distorted, sidetrack from what would be the just and right course of events. In Twin Peaks, at the end of the original series, Mr. C smashes his head into the mirror, looking into the shattered glass, laughing as Bob’s reflection appears. The mirror is broken, as is the world, shifted into a poisonous diversion.
This goes a step further when speaking of portals and death. At Dealy Plaza there are X’s on the ground, marking where Kennedy was shot. Michael Judge remarks in his series on the Fourth Reich, that from those X’s, the underworld merged with the surface. Death is, beyond its loss, a hole in the stability of reality’s surface. The underworld rises up through this newly formed vacuum and merges with the surface. Camelot sinks into the waves as the city of Dulles rises.
It’s these vacuums - portals, that timelines come into the world as physical places. To dimensional shift is to turn these parallel timelines into places, locations to work through via physical doorways - the oil-puddle in Twin Peaks, the scrying mirrors of countless rituals, the paintings of Mario 64 or Dark Souls.
Consider then, parallel timelines transposed, like multiple exposures over a photograph, each moment occurring simultaneously as its other possibilities. The assassination creates a rupture beyond the physical event, and into the events parallel to it. Time can now function on the logic of space, as parallel worlds merge together, form doorways between each other, once distant possibilities now bleeding into the original timeline.
This, the nature of the portals that opened and merged at Dealy Plaza, is what is always intended with spectacular violence. Derrida writes of hauntological spectres over the world, that of communism, hanging over Europe. To commit violence is to midwife these into being, things known once only in parallel, now brought violently into being in ecstatic ritual, the corpses as portals, emptinesses in space where the other-realm is able to pour in.
Possibility takes place via rupture. A revolution, more than taking over the current and burning it down for new growth as in the forest-fire logic of the traditional dynastic cycle, is a midwifing of the hauntological outside and bring it forth, through the holes made via violence. The Soviet Union already exists before the revolution, but was only brought into force when the Bolsheviks destroyed the old, using its ritual death to bring forth the new. From this logic, we find the need to kill the entire family of the Tsar - not just as realpolitik, but as the ritual destruction of the throne itself, in order to bring the new state into being via the portal made by their deaths.
The substates, like that which brought the new era after Kennedy, or the Bolshevik revolution into order - whether as deep states or insurgencies - work via manifesting a potential hidden, the new brought into being through portals created. Violence works for itself, not as a means to an end, but a means to deaths, the absences of departing souls now holes in spacetime for the potential to be actualized.
Klein Bottle Perspective
Trout Fishing in America begins with a description of its cover - a photograph of a city park. From the statue mentioned, signs facing the four cardinal directions read WELCOME for each. The text references itself as an object in this first section, stating “The cover for Trout Fishing in America (...)”. This is the first vision of the character Trout Fishing in America - the object being held by the reader.
The narration of the text is in first person, with Trout Fishing in America as the pivotal object. It appears both as object and as person, which the narrator interacts with, in order to bring about the pieces of each section. In one revealing section, Trout Fishing in America is imagined as a corpse being autopsied, with its condition and the narrative of its travel detailed - “as if Trout Fishing in America had been Lord Byron (...)”. In another, it’s imagined “(...) as if Trout Fishing in America were a rich gourmet (...)”. And so on. Various punctuations, contexts continue the text, the phrase remaining but the textual orientation around it changing wildly, a sort of axis for the text of each section.
In looking upon the text, we look into a circularly refracting mirror. The object, or character, Trout Fishing in America is the book itself being held. After establishing the shot itself, the text goes into great detail about life in the scene depicted, schedules of people, routines, daily rituals, that play out in that scene. The static image becomes a portal from which to view the world - a doorway, rather than a capture. Yet that’s only the macro-level entry. The same pattern of using it as an entry into the text continues, with each section having the reader’s entry into it Trout Fishing in America, however that should orient and provide entry to the text.
The text of Trout Fishing in America functions the same. Each mentioning of the thing is the narrator leading the reader down a similar doorway. The text, rather than a picture frame for a painting, becomes a picture frame for itself, a Klein Bottle looping around to open back into the world. Each circuit through the frame recreates and reimagines the world in some perspective.
What distinguishes this from the typical set of vignettes is that each looping orients the text around the text as a character - each looking-out centers the reader in a new zero-point, upon the scene. In a traditional work of this type, the text inevitably becomes narrative, the words weaving together in the typical linear, river-logic. In this however, each text becomes a reflective mirror-puddle - in other words, a photograph - a new zero point from which the world plays out anew, in each section.
The photos are then not arranged as film, but as mere montage, a collection of images. The scene develops from Trout Fishing in America each time like the scene develops from a camera shutter. The characters and their actions frozen in time, the narrator taking the reader by the hand through the doorway, to start time from zero at each.
Fluent in Hanafuda
With each photo, the viewer is led by the hand - as Brautigan unveiled. His text demonstrates backwards the nature of the art of photography.
In Twin Peaks the Return, Cooper is about to exit the Black Lodge when he finds himself locked into Mr. C’s trap. The glass box fills with a dark smog of rupture, as he finds himself temporarily floating within it. Through this, he’s sent into a series of motions that ultimately lead to his temporary imprisonment as Dougie Jones. Mr. C’s goal was always to prevent Cooper from leaving - and thus prevent his own forced re-entry. The glass box was surrounded by cameras, and a single viewer, whose purpose it was to change out the memory cards and silently watch the apparatus work.
The snapping of a photograph is often seen this way, as a method of capture. Various times and places, it’s been stated that to be photographed is to have ones soul stolen. For countless establishments, where presence is sacred, either by elite status or ritual sanctity, photography is strictly prohibited. To be photographed in these cases is to be taken, like Cooper in Mr. C’s apparatus, down the whims of the photographer and their viewer. The shot begins the world anew and for the subject, that beginning is at the framing and ideologies of the superior behind the camera. It’s this that’s feared, whether in the need for discretion of those who scrub photos - as in the infamous Streisand Effect case - or in more mystical interpretations. But in all cases, the feared action is an action of capture, to ends not sanctioned.
And the opposite is seen equally. Countless people engage in the economy of self-capture. Beginning from the earliest, when an official portrait was commissioned. The portrait initially meant entry, vindicated into a set of symbols, with the portrait hanging up in a gallery of an office, or with the portrait showing the self arrayed around actions and objects akin to a blazon.
Into the modern age, the portrait evolved into more diffuse forms. Home video and polaroids evolved into selfies and social media shots, entire economies, monetary and otherwise, emerging around the transmission of these photos. Like the original case, all of these are a method of capture - whether into the institution behind portraiture, or into the networks of communication created for the selfie or home video.
At the same time as all of the previously mentioned things are true of a photo, the power of photography comes in the reproducibility and portability of something as weighty as a moment. Each shot can be cloned, some, such as the Windows XP Bliss image have been cloned to the point of possibly being the most seen images in human history. The economy of images, where an image becomes the medium of communication, allows for the creation of an entire language of seeds. Each photo in a gallery, as a seed, and each gallery infinitely mutationary in the recombination of seeds. Through photography, a second language, a language of captured moments, can be spoken.
At the most microscopic level we see this in emojis. Copying the conceptual idea of Hanafuda cards, a standardized set of moments is distributed to be used in communication on medium of images, rather than words.
Through it all, photography has recreated the noumenal in a synthetic form within the phenomenal - the noumenal as diffused seeds. Each image becomes a new foundation, arraying meaning both vertically (from the image), and horizontally (the images in linear sequence), creating a two dimensional fractal structure for communication.
Far from simplifying as many commentators have stated, this hieroglyphic abstraction infinitely deepens communication. Words can only work temporally, while images function in two, and in distribution and sequence, three dimensions. It’s from the image economies then, that not only explodes a new complexity in communication on the verbal face, but a complexity in meaning transmitted, one increasing by cubes with each increase in transmission volume, from the first mass-production of newsprint photos to the internet of today.
The traditional cases of communication are linear, with either competition for the linearity of one’s life (as in a novel or stageplay), or was an attempt to relay and merge linearities, as in sharing memories, information via word of mouth. This new dimension however, allows for communication on the level of timelines. Time becomes a movable object, each photograph its own timeline, its own set of linear mechanisms.
To photograph, is to create art via the creation of moments. Each closing of the shutter is a dip of a ladle into the river of time. A small scoop of water lifted up, examined, with all the potential of water in that small piece. The river is infinite - and with photography, the artist expands that infinity evermore beyond the riverbank. With the art of photography, time joins the three spatial dimensions under the purview of the artist.
Bibliography
Mirror’s Edge - DICE
Leni Riefenstahl’s photographic work with the Nuba & the 1936 Olympics
I-Spy video games - Walter Wick
INFRA - Loiste Interactive
Mario 64 - Nintendo
Life is Strange - Dontnod Entertainment
Leviathan - Thomas Hobbes
The Bayeux Tapestry
The Paintings of the Dutch Golden Age
/r/DimensionalJumping
Death is Just Around the Corner podcast - Michael S. Judge
Twin Peaks - David Lynch & Mark Frost
Trout Fishing in America - Richard Brautigan
Hanafuda - Nintendo