Camera as Object and Process: An Interview with Victor Burgin

Introduction

In closing an essay on his 1986 six-panel photographic work Office by Night, Victor Burgin cites, presumably approvingly, an anecdote from the painter Philip Guston:

John Cage … once told me, when you start working everybody is in your studio – the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas – all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave. (Burgin, 2005: 17)

As a thinker, Burgin has also pursued this dialectic in influential essays on his own and other photographers’ practice (1982, 1986b), drawing on the work of Barthes and Lacan and later of Foucault, among others. A 2010 interview makes apparent the stakes of his particular concern with the relation between the concept (in this instance of politics) and the material:

There is no need for the western political artist, too often a disaster tourist, to ‘sail the seven seas’ looking for injustices to denounce. Inequality and exploitation saturate the ground on which we stand, they are in the grain of everyday life. (Burgin and Van Gelder, 2010)

Burgin’s turn towards moving images, a turn which has occupied a period of 20 years, strikes out from a long-term fascination with the iconography of film, notably in visual quotations from Hitchcock and other films, for example South Pacific (1958), stills from which he treated digitally to evoke the Family of Man photo exhibition (also of 1958) in his 1990 work Family Romance. On the one hand, Burgin has an abiding interest in what is revealed by coincidence, not least in works of comparison, like the digital video Venise (1993), which draws lines of historical, cultural and geographical connection between the port cities of San Francisco and Marseille. On the other, there is an interest, developed theoretically in The Remembered Film (Burgin, 2004), in the film not as cinema but as fragmented memory. The cinema film is of a piece: the remembered film is a rebus of scenes and sounds, reassembled in recollection according to a logic at best parallel to the logic of the originating viewing event.

It is in this sense that Burgin’s recent video works need to be considered as photographs that move. Even that hybrid description does not do justice: these works are not video as such, nor photography tout court, but deliberate, painstaking constructions of viable techniques from available technologies. To describe them as digital is to curtail both the means employed and the results. Where the image track evokes several forms of digital image generation and processing, from games to compositing, the soundtracks tend to be indistinguishable from analogue recordings, mostly comprising voices (voice-off in the French phrase clumsily translated as ‘voice-over’). Burgin’s sense of the ‘digital’ is no more stable than his sense of the photographic. What counts is the tension between formal elements – vision, sound, installation, venue in the case of site-specific works like Hôtel D (2009) – in a practice of formal tension stretching back through the photo-text works.

The following interview was conducted by email in spring and summer 2012. OPEN IN VIEWER

Ryan Bishop/Sean Cubitt: In a recent talk you sketched a genealogy of photography from the camera obscura to virtual photography and cinema (machinima), and you varied Bazin’s famous question ‘What is cinema?’ a few times to arrive at ‘What is a camera?’ Such a question places the apparatus of the camera as a transitional or temporary object within a much larger stream (or trajectory) of audiovisual tools, including perhaps most importantly the shift from a light reception and production device to light production solely. ‘When does a camera cease to be a camera?’ we might ask. Would you elaborate on some of the effects of this shift as well as the need to ask these questions?

Victor Burgin: My talk moved on from an idea in my book of 2004, The Remembered Film, where I write about what I call the cinematic heterotopia – a hybrid material and imaginary space in which we encounter a heterogeneous variety of fragments of cinema beyond the confines of the movie theatre. The internet, of course, is a major contributor to this space, and I spoke about two current internet practices which draw upon and reconfigure mainstream cinema: ‘video mashups’ and ‘machinima’. The remixed Hollywood film trailer seems the most popular mashup genre, often used to lampoon box-office hits. Other mashups satirize prominent politicians, or provide new image-track accompaniments to popular songs. In contrast to video mashups, which cannibalize contents from outside the software used to produce them, ‘machinima’ is a form of ‘film’ production shot entirely with virtual cameras in such virtual worlds as those of ‘massively multiplayer online role-playing games’ and Second Life.

Machinima originated in the 1980s when playback facilities were first programmed into video games to allow players to record the ‘speed runs’ in which they complete a level of the game. Since then, the form has evolved to the point where it now has its own annual ‘film festivals’. In 2005 a 13-minute machinima production even gained the attention of the international news media. The ‘film’ – French Democracy – was made in response to the deaths of two French teenagers who were accidentally electrocuted while attempting to escape from police in a Paris suburb. The televised response to their deaths by the then Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy prompted widespread rioting. Beginning with the two deaths the machinima film goes on to represent the frustration of French youth minorities in their routine encounters with racism and other forms of discrimination. A video mashup on such a topic would typically sample and remix television footage grabbed off air. As a machinima production French Democracy was made entirely inside a business simulation game called The Movies. The only imagery available is that of the virtual world that forms the basis of the game – so, for example, the electrical substation where the deaths occur is represented by a cowboy-movie style rustic shack, and the Paris metro is represented by the New York subway. Machinima films are ‘no budget’ extra-cinematic productions that nevertheless emulate the ‘look and feel’ of established cinematic genres through conventional continuity editing and montage. So I was making the observation that – in addition to transforming the highly capitalized productions of the film industry, most conspicuously in the area of spectacular special effects – digital technologies are also providing the de facto conditions for demotic practices based on the historic example of cinema but with amateur and professional artists enjoying equal access to the means of production and distribution.

It is notable, however that neither mashups nor machinima depart significantly from the contents and forms of mainstream media productions. One line of discussion, then, would take us into an exploration of alternatives to such contents and forms in what I have elsewhere called the ‘uncinematic’. In the talk you heard, however, I took another path – which was to raise precisely the question to which you refer: ‘What is a camera?’ In brief, I argued that the history of the camera is inseparable from the history of perspective, and that this history is not to be reduced to lumps of metal bearing such insignia as ‘Nikon’ or ‘Canon’. I suggested that given the preponderance of computer simulation in our image environment, we should now be prepared to rethink the ‘camera’ in terms of a multi-dimensional representational apparatus, comprising such intersecting practices as architectural and engineering drawing, theatre design and scenography, cinema, virtual world building, and so on. This requires nothing more than a different way of looking at a very familiar history, but to do this might allow us to better theorize what is probably the most fundamental representational regime governing our society – the ideological chora of our spectacular global village.

RB/SC: Baudrillard argues that with the advent of television, as well as other broadcast devices, the subject-object relationship that is played out within the social space of a scene yields to the obscene of nodes-networks relationships, a full emptying out of interiority as it is displaced in public and exterior technologies. How might Baudrillard’s formulation from the 1960s regarding the effects of television on this alteration of the subject-object relation come into play, if at all, with virtual cinema/photography?

VB: Back in 1990, the year the world wide web was invented, I published an essay in which I describe everyday life in the ‘developed’ world as taking place in an image environment which increasingly resembles the space of subjective fantasy turned inside out. At that time television was the primary agent of this tendency. The arrival of the web vastly accelerated what Lev Manovich subsequently called the ‘trend to externalize mental life’ and continues to contribute, in previously unimaginable ways, to the mechanization and exteriorization of previously purely ‘internal’ associative processes. For example, if I go to a YouTube website to search for a particular clip, I will be offered not only the clip for which I am looking (assuming I am successful) but also a column of thumbnail images of other clips that the programme ‘believes’ are related to my search. Clicking on any one of these will again summon not only the selected clip but a further column of apparently aleatory alternative choices. I may quickly find myself far from my original point of departure. To immediate appearances it may seem that a spontaneous ‘drifting’ of associations has taken place analogous to the type of free movement of thoughts in, for example, daydreaming. In reality, a computer programme has formed a chain of associations between images from a database on the basis of key searchwords, ‘metatags’, attached to those images – in effect replacing ‘free association’ with bound association. Such mimicking of spontaneous human mental processes may produce the uncanny impression of an auxiliary intelligence at work, forming associations on my behalf and in my place. In these and other ways the internet is weaving a seamless continuity between physical and psychical processes.

In replicating what psychoanalysis calls ‘primary process’ thinking, the internet now represents a form of prosthetic unconscious as well as a form of prosthetic memory. We should note that technology is not the only agent in the process of exteriorization and objectification of subjectivity. I recently came across a book by a French psychologist who points to purely discursive aspects of this phenomenon. [Marilia Amorim, Petit traité de la bêtise contemporaine, Paris, Érès, 2012.] The writer gives the example of the language of those little texts one finds in the box when one buys, say, a kitchen device or an over-the-counter medication. She lists the contents of one of these and remarks on the displacements of subject positions in its enunciative form. The text begins with such questions as ‘How does this medication work?’, and ‘What symptoms may this medication alleviate?’, but then alternates these with such first-person subjective forms as ‘How should I use this medication?’, ‘How should I store this medication?’. Here, the subject position in the text is no longer that of the implied doctor but that of the patient – the external voice of authority masquerades as a kind of subjective internal musing but one which is in fact located in the outside where it functions as a commonly imposed consensual voice. What is objectively external is subjectively internalized, in a discursive analogue of Foucault’s optical panopticism. The writer goes through a number of other examples – such as the talking chocolate cake that says ‘To give me pleasure, please recycle my packaging’ – and describes the infantilization of the subject in these increasingly ubiquitous forms of address, and the subject’s discursive subordination to what the writer calls a ‘false democratisation of the relations of knowledge’ which, to invoke Foucault again, we may recognize as a false democratization of the relations of power. OPEN IN VIEWER

RB/SC: These quite different examples presumably illustrate how the discursive and the imagistic both contribute to the ‘ideological chora’ you alluded to in your talk.

VB: I was referring to the psychical space in which the talking chocolate cake and the memory trace of the YouTube clip equally ‘take place’. I have tried to describe this space in various ways, admittedly mainly psychoanalytic, in previous publications – in The Remembered Film, but also in such earlier writings as those collected in In/Different Spaces (1996). More recently I have been working with 3D computer modelling software and have been struck by how the on-screen space constructed by these programmes – a space common to all of them – suggests the Platonic idea of the chora, not least in Emmanuel Levinas’ de facto representation of this idea. In my talk I quoted a passage from Levinas’ Totality and Infinity in which he describes a ‘space of light’ in which everything comes into being, and describes it precisely in terms of geometry – in terms of points, lines and planes. I was struck by how Plato’s idea, and Levinas’ articulation of it, seems to perfectly describe the primal void of 3D computer space. As this computer space is increasingly the site of the industrial production of the popular imaginary – ‘industrial light and magic’, in the name of George Lucas’ aptly named company – then the expression ‘ideological chora’ seemed appropriate. It seems to me that the subjective space of associations in which the fragmentary dispersals of elements in the cinematic heterotopia may become reassembled and reconfigured has much in common with the phenomenological and algorithmic-parametrical space of 3D computer modelling.

This immediately suggests a connection with architecture, as well as cinema, and it is obviously the case that architecture – no less than cinema – is providing spectacularly visible manifestations of the associative capacities of computer drawing, and moreover that these are deployed in an space no longer entirely circumscribed by the Euclidean parameters that Plato and Levinas imply. In an essay published in 1987 in the Architectural Association’s journal AA files (‘Geometry and Abjection’, reprinted in In/Different Spaces), I referred in passing to Jacques Lacan’s use of non-Euclidean geometrical figures – the torus and the Borromean knot, the Möbius strip and the Klein bottle – as heuristic aids in the representation of unconscious structures, where inside and outside, manifest and repressed, form a single continuous surface, and where absences are structuring. In more recent years such topological figures have become ubiquitous sources of reference in architectural design; but it seems to me that here their use tends to take the form of what the architectural historian and theorist Anthony Vidler has characterized as ‘illustration’, and bears out his observation that questions of space in contemporary architecture have been largely subordinated to categories of style. This failing of architecture is for the most part a result of the political, ideological and financial conformism of the business of architecture, but architecture is also inescapably constrained by the force of gravity itself – which computers and the mind may ignore. I believe there is more to be made of the analogy between computer space and psychical space than contemporary architecture has so far been able to represent – which is why, in my talk, I was careful to pass via Winnicott on my way to Plato and Levinas.

RB/SC: Your discussion of space leads us to ask a question that contains a few elements, especially as they pertain to your more recent video work (your machinima work). How does site specificity remain intact with these works, especially given they are commissioned to be site specific? And given the aspersions some contemporary media theorists have cast about the indexical capabilities of digital media, how do you assess or construct the relationships between these recent pieces (e.g. the one for Istanbul, or the Hôtel Dieu in Toulouse) and the places to which they refer? How does the 3D space of a computer relate to the place of reference? Or is the relationship something other than referential? A follow-up to that pertains directly to the Istanbul piece. Part of what makes the video so haunting is movement and/or stasis, both within the frame of the image and with the camera. The camera moves ceaselessly but does so as if filming photographic stills, for nothing in nature moves (e.g. the leaves of the trees or the Bosporus). Can you comment on the effects these create, ones unique to machinima, and that also seem to archive early forms of visual technological image-making? In this respect, the video also proves haunting as it seems an oblique allusion to Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog, with its juxtaposition of still images and moving camera, black and white and colour, and its exploration of a deserted space.

VB: First, a note on terminology. I do not, myself, make ‘machinima’ works. The philosopher and film theorist David Rodowick has spoken of a ‘crisis of naming’ in respect of works such as my own – not films, not videos, what should we call them? If the definition of the word ‘machinima’ were not already established in the quite restricted sense I have already remarked on, then I might agree to using it in the broader sense you seem to be suggesting now – certainly it would establish the requirement that the work be made with virtual cameras within the confines of the virtual spaces allowed by the software. I tend to refer to my own production as simply ‘digital projection’, but admit this may not be very helpful as it is a category that may equally include films and videos, as well as such other artists’ productions as slide projection pieces. On the question of indexicality, I suppose that if I have been unable to share in the excitement over the question of ‘indexicality’ in relation to digital photography – or computer simulation – it is because I never considered traditional photography to be indexical in any fundamentally epistemological way. Take the example of those news reports that refer to images of a massacre but with the caution that the veracity of the images ‘cannot yet be confirmed’. This has become a familiar refrain throughout the reporting of the recent and ongoing conflicts in the Arab world. The image is never enough, at some point someone has to step forward and say: ‘I was there, I saw this’ – and then even this statement has to be interrogated and either substantiated or denied by others. It makes no difference to this process whether the image is digital or was shot on film. The most epistemologically profound register of the indexical is discursive and affective, the optical is quite literally superficial.

In relation to the ‘site specificity’ of my works, what is ‘indexed’ here is not simply the material substance of the place, or the optical imprint of the light reflected from it, it is the registration of the material world on a consciousness. The ‘image’ is not simply a material thing – a photographic print or the variegated light on a screen – nor is it just an optical event, the physiological imprint of this light on the retina. It is a psychological process. The image is always ‘virtual’, an idea which most recently gained currency with Deleuze’s presentation of Bergson – for all that Bergson’s idea was heavily inflected in its passage through Freud and Lacan, not to mention Proust. In Bergson’s account, memory takes its force from present perception – an insight that is clearly there throughout Proust, but which also reminds me of Walter Benjamin’s notion that our access to history has nothing to do with knowing the past ‘as it really was’ but is rather a matter of the activation of a memory in a moment of crisis.

One way of understanding that moment of crisis – albeit perhaps somewhat departing from Benjamin now – is as the experience of affect, or even the apparent lack of it, in our first encounter with a place. When I first stood in the Hôtel Dieu, in Toulouse – or more precisely, when I first spent time alone there – I found myself most preoccupied with thoughts of how that now empty space was once full of hospital beds. The work I subsequently installed there was a process of the elaboration of that perception of the place together with the purely physical perception of it. My commission in Toulouse was to work in response to a particular building, the Hôtel Dieu (Hotel D). In Istanbul I was asked simply to respond to the city (A Place to Read). After several visits to Istanbul I found myself most preoccupied by the ongoing process of destruction of some of the most beautiful public aspects of the city in the pursuit of private profit. What came to metonymically represent this present process for me was the past destruction of an architecturally significant coffee house and public garden, on a beautiful site overlooking the Bosphorus, to make way for a hideous and orientalist luxury hotel. The house and garden had to be disinterred from oblivion through the agency of surviving drawings and photographs, and was resurrected as memory in the form of virtual camera movements through a computer modelled space. The completed work was then installed in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum. You refer to the affective dimension of the work: a woman at the opening was in tears – she had known the original coffee house as a child. In retrospect it is interesting to me that there was absolutely no reference in Istanbul, either in what that woman and others said to me at the time of the exhibition or in the response of the audience when I later screened the work at a conference, to the difference between the actual building and the computer simulation of it – the ‘indexicality’ of the work in this sense seemed not to be an issue, suggesting that we need to broaden the definition of indexicality beyond the tacit empiricism of the media theorists you mentioned. OPEN IN VIEWER

RB/SC: The need to think indexicality in a larger, more complex and nuanced fashion is something I think most theorists would agree with. Can you elaborate on this somewhat? One direction to consider could be the material and the technological. To that end, you suggested in your talk that the virtual camera is a projector, noting pre-digital antecedents from Plato’s extramission model of vision to the Lumières’ camera-projector apparatus. Projection is almost universally based on the geometry of the cone of vision, which you note does not distinguish the direction of travel between eye or projector and vanishing point. The chora implicit in this system presents itself as timeless. Is it the changing geometry, or the mere fact of apparent motion, that brings about a new relationship with the image? On a somewhat related point, do you distinguish between the 3D model held in the computer’s memory and the 2D visualizations which you present in your artworks?

VB: There is a distinction that may have been elided in some of those debates over photographic indexicality: the ‘index’ is not a thing in the world, it is a concept in semiotics – a useful one, but a limited one; we shouldn’t expect too much of it, any more than we should expect too much of the image itself. You invoked Renais and Marker’s film Night and Fog. There are of course those who have argued that the death camps are simply unrepresentable. Georges Didi-Huberman gives a well reasoned rejection of this argument in his book Images malgré tout. The image cannot be everything, but it does not follow from this that it is nothing. The past takes its force from present perception. The virtual image of the coffee house that I made for Istanbul was an occasion for memory for the audience there, but few of them would have known the actual historical building. My own first encounter with the building was in the form of a photograph in a book devoted to the work of its architect, Sedad Hakki Eldem. Apart from some pathologically exceptional case we might imagine, it seems unlikely that the photograph in the book would provoke tears.

Or again, let us suppose that I had been given the budget and technical resources of a feature filmmaker, and that I had physically reconstructed the coffeehouse and its immediate surroundings, and made my virtual helicopter shot from an actual helicopter flying around my reconstruction of the site. The result would have been very different from my simulation, and I cannot believe that the affective dimension could have been at all comparable in kind. Nor should we fixate on the optical image, for all that I am obviously interested in the visual specificity of computer modelling. To return to the optical and geometrical, in response to your question about the computer image, is to come back to the fundamental issue of projection. It is convenient to refer to the image produced using a computer as ‘three-dimensional’, it describes the nature of the illusion we experience, but of course it is nothing of the sort. As you yourself note, what is at play is the geometrical projection of three-dimensional objects onto a two-dimensional plane.

What you refer to as the 3D model in computer memory is fundamentally a matter of fluctuations of electrical intensities – so the analogy with physiological memory is actually quite well based. These intensities represent lines of code – very long lines, that describe a particular virtual world event, let’s say the orbit around the coffeehouse I mentioned earlier, in terms of photogrammetrical algorithms, and others. For example, the behaviour of photons has been mathematically modelled and expressed as algorithms that may be built into 3D computer modelling programs. Here again, to make quite literally ‘the point’, the program does not model the entirety of the behaviour of the light in the scene; for any given frame it models only the light that has converged upon the geometrical position that represents the camera’s point of view, the position given to the spectator – which is to say that the program begins with that given point and extrapolates out from it to the projective geometry of the objects before it, and their appearances resulting from the light reflected from them. Appropriately, in this the most Platonic of worlds – light is in effect emitted by the eye of the spectator.

RB/SC: The point you make about the apparent 3D capacity of some virtual camera production is productive because the 3D is indeed only apparent. There are implications here for the concept ‘camera’ which you have discussed, but also for kinds of images we engage within this continuum of reproductive technologies. You seem to be indicating a distinction between two types of camera, the actual ‘lump of metal’ and the virtual camera that the notion of ‘camera’ must now include. Traditional lens-based photography (which would include digital cameras, which use more or less identical bodies to analog cameras) comes across as Euclidean, while virtual in-computer cameras can produce the illusion of a 3D space that opens onto non-Euclidean capabilities. How clear is the distinction between lens-based representation and computed simulation? And what are some of the effects on the spectator or viewing subject? Is the ‘affective screen’ of the image, where the cone of vision telescopes to the vanishing point that then opens out to perspectival engagement, any different with analog and digital? Or have the visual technologies over time merely repeated and reinscribed a tale of the viewing subject as sovereign subject?

VB: What comes to mind is a New Yorker cartoon that shows two people in medieval dress walking through an architectural environment of crazily incompatible vanishing points. One of them is saying: ‘I won’t be sorry when they have this perspective thing worked out.’ The perspective thing was worked out in the West centuries ago, and has framed our view of the world ever since. Computer simulated space does not represent a departure from perspective but rather a ‘third revolution’ in pictorial space inaugurated by the invention of perspective. In the previous revolution photography replaced perspective drawing as the principle mode of image making in everyday life – the basic means though which the West represents itself, and its others, to itself. This was consistent with the central impulse of the industrial revolution: the delegation of previously time-consuming and skilled manual tasks to the automatic operation of machines.

Where photography represents a shift from manual to mechanical execution, computer imaging effects a shift from mechanical to electronic execution. As before, the shift is both quantitative and qualitative – an increased amount of information is deployed in the interests of a higher degree of mimetic realism. However, where photography represents the object in front of the camera, the computer simulates the object itself. I do not, then, distinguish between the camera as a lump of metal and the virtual camera, but rather see them as different implementations of the same geometrical and optical knowledge. This same knowledge is brought to the design of glass lenses in metal cameras and to the specification of algorithmic lenses in virtual cameras. The difference between the real world and the virtual world here is one of degree and not of kind. In the real world I may choose an ‘off-the-shelf’ lens from the wide range available, along points on a scale specified in terms of focal length: 28 mm, 35 mm, 50 mm, and so on. I can choose between different examples of 28 mm lenses on the basis of their comparative performance in terms of barrel distortion, spherical aberration, etc. In a 3D modelling program I can similarly choose from a menu of real-world lenses familiar to any amateur photographer, but I can also type in any number between the points on the conventional real-world scale. For example, if I want a 26.6232 mm focal length lens then I can have one. Moreover, there is no reason for the virtual lens to be subject to either barrel distortion or spherical aberration.

Significantly, however, an enormous amount of expertise is devoted to writing computer programmes that may not only model a scene as it appears to a virtual lens, but which may also simulate the results of the various imperfections of glass lenses. Where film cameras are involved – with the rider that there is strictly no difference between film and still cameras in the virtual world – then additional considerations are taken into account; for example, if a real camera movement is made using a physical ‘rig’ – as in a crane shot, or whatever – there will be an unavoidable degree of camera shake at the beginning and end of the movement. Software has been written to simulate that shake, which moreover allows the user to specify which particular film camera, and which type of commercially available rig, is being used. The prevailing standard of realism in computer modelling is not the world as such, it is rather the world as it appears to the camera. I believe that this is an ideological artefact of a period of historical transition, and will pass. In time we will forget how physical cameras showed the world, and we will adapt our supposedly ‘natural’ vision to the new standards. I have had intimations of this mutation in perception in the course of my own experience of working with 3D modelling programs. For example, I have had the experience of finding myself dissatisfied with the ‘unrealistic’ appearance of a simulated wall on my screen, or the bark on a tree, and then going out for a walk and finding that walls and bark actually do look like that. I occasionally visit internet 3D modelling forums looking for solutions to technical problems. Most of the contributors append ‘signature’ adages of one kind or another to their posts. One I remember, apposite here, exhorted: ‘Go outside, the graphics are amazing!’ OPEN IN VIEWER

RB/SC: Is it possible that the topological turn of the virtual camera, the drifting ‘cinematic heterotopia’ it enables, including the ‘trend to externalize mental life’ that Manovich and others allude to, does not liberate the unconscious but opens it up to new organizations of power and exploitation? That, in effect, replacing perspective with a different system is no more positive than the introduction of cartographic space or the transition from the temporal organization of double-entry bookkeeping to the spatial organization of spreadsheets?

VB: I see no different system here but rather an evolution, perhaps mutation, of the existing system. In my talk I spoke of a number of recent technologies based on ‘photogrammetry’ – the derivation of metrical attributes of three-dimensional objects from photographs. Photogrammetry is as old as photography itself, but computer technology has vastly expanded its applications. The most revolutionary event in the recent history of photography was not the arrival of digital cameras as such but rather the broadband connection of these cameras to the internet. Such photogrammetrical applications can compile coherent and navigable 3D spaces from the countless numbers of photographs available on the web. I gave the example of the city of Dubrovnik – modelled in its entirety as a ‘point cloud’ from photographs on the internet taken mainly by tourists. If we extrapolate from these present incipient technologies to their likely future implementation then it is easy to foresee the time when a navigable computer model of the entire planet will be available on a mobile device.

There are other technologies already capable of integrating the simulated and real worlds by punching holes in the wall between the two – for example, by turning the screen of a mobile device into a window through which the user may see a previous state of what is actually present. We should remember that it is not the image that is non-Euclidean, it is the space-time of navigation. Navigation in the simulated world may take place both in Euclidean space and in a non-Euclidean space for which there is no counterpart in reality. Some architects have in effect already attempted to represent this possibility. I think, for example, of some of the ‘visionary’ pencil drawings of the French ‘brutalist’ architect Claude Parent. Or again, in 1993, the Dutch architect Ben van Berkel designed a house inspired by a Möbius strip – a surface with only one side and one boundary. The house has since become famous as the ‘Möbius House’ but it remains of necessity within the confines of traditional habitable space. One can easily make a Möbius strip in Euclidean space by giving a strip of paper a half twist and then joining the ends together to form a loop. A line drawn down the centre of the strip now appears on both of what were previously separate sides, but which now form a single surface. A fly could walk this line without difficulty, but gravity prevents a human being from living in a building with a truly Möbius strip topology. There is no gravity in computer simulated space – unless the programmer decides to simulate it – so the ‘built space’ of this coming parallel virtual world may be navigated as if it seamlessly combined Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries – giving a whole new twist to urban flânerie.

Combine this potential with the prosthetic associative procedures previously mentioned – or the possibility of winding back one’s field of vision to past states, and so on – and we may foresee a future in which the dominant visual representational space in the West, the natural descendent of perspective, will have modelled – externalized – the hybrid perceptual-psychical space that Bergson, Freud, Proust, et al., have evoked so well in words. This is an inchoate intuition, and I do not know whether it would be best worked out in theory or science-fiction, but I do think it relevant to the consideration of ‘new organizations of power and exploitation’ – not least because the more we ‘farm out’ our psychical processes to technology, the more easily they may be hacked into, further facilitating what Félix Guattari, prior to the arrival of this technology, had already foreseen as a ‘colonization of the unconscious’.

RB/SC: In your visual works, you make a special point of working at the intersection of text and image, criticizing the subordination of text as caption and image as illustration. This seemed to produce on the one hand an effect of equality – perhaps analogous to the desired equality of the notes in Schoenberg’s 12-tone compositions – but on the other to risk making image and text supplementary to one another. Is it possible to destabilize the typical dominance of one over the other, without making their relation, and therefore their affective or semantic potency, indeterminate and ineffective? Another way of thinking about this would be: how does one combine text and image (regardless of source or duration) without allowing it to become a kind of Romantic gesamtkunstwerk? We know you are thinking about and working on a Wagner piece now, so how does the whole cease to be a whole, or does it?

VB: I am working on a Wagner piece because 2013 is the two-hundredth anniversary of Wagner’s birth, and a work has been commissioned from me for the occasion. I doubt that I would have thought of the project without prompting, but it has been very interesting doing the research. To begin with ‘text-image’… The optical images in my work are interleaved with mental images suggested by the text. I would emphasize here the error in the otherwise convenient formulation: ‘the text that accompanies the images’ – because this form of description, albeit literally applicable to the situation in the gallery, implicitly endorses the hierarchical separation of text and image conventional to art world doxa. There are the ‘images’ and there are the words, and there is an empty space between them. For me, this space is the space in which I work, in anticipation of the work of the viewer-reader in this same space. In the Japanese tradition the space between things – ‘ma’ – is charged with sense. It is, if you like, a semiotic and affective substance. This is the substance of the ‘image’ as I understand the term, the plastic substance I think of myself as working with – differently ‘material’ from paint or clay, but with its own psychical materiality.

The culture of the ‘developed’ West is a text-image culture, from advertising and the popular press to cinema and live theatre, and beyond. Questions of ideology and political hegemony are inseparable from considerations of the scripto-visual regimes in which individual consciousnesses are formed. My theoretical work on photography has always been premised on this basic fact of Western society, just as my artworks have always been produced out of what I might call a ‘demotic attitude’ – which differs from aesthetic populism in that its focus is not on actual mass cultural forms and contents but rather on virtual possibilities, alternative configurations and outcomes, inherent in contemporary technologies and extant languages. Wagner derived his model of an ideal work of art not from conditions extant in his own time but from classical antiquity. In classical Greek drama – as it evolved in the city state of Athens between the 5th and 2nd centuries BC – poetry, narration, acting, instrumental music, singing, dancing, mask and costume design, props and painted scenery, combined within a unifying architecture to produce a form of artistic expression more powerful than could be achieved by any of the contributory arts in isolation. The Athenian drama staged everything that touched the lives of the demos, the people, and provided the occasion for reflection and debate on every issue of the day.

Wagner despised what the opera had become in his time – a commercially profitable, trivially spectacular, entertainment and social occasion for the more affluent members of society. He dreamed of a transformed opera – he called it ‘music drama’ – that would be to a future egalitarian republican Germany what the classical Greek drama had been to ancient Athens: a mirror to society and a form of spiritual, intellectual and emotional bonding of individuals in a sense of community. The failure of the 1849 Dresden insurrection, during which Wagner fought on the barricades with his friend Mikhail Bakunin, put an end to Wagner’s belief in the possibility of revolution but did not change his ambition for music drama – he merely shifts from Feurbachian idealism to Schopenhauerian pessimism. In 1849 Wagner was at work on what would eventually become the Ring Cycle, a work he had begun as a Feurbachian parable in which an order of Gods ruled by greed and power self-destructs to make way for a human world based on love. After the failure of the revolution he interrupted his work on the Ring to write Tristan und Isolde, which culminates in the famous ‘Liebestod’, which with Freudian hindsight may appear as the very hymn of the death drive. It is Tristan that revolutionizes Western music and prepares the way for Schoenberg, Webern, Berg and others – albeit Tristan remains Romantic in sensibility, imbued with what Schoenberg condemned as ‘psychologism’. OPEN IN VIEWER

RB/SC: Considering the etymology of the word ‘animation’, when you animate a suit of still images, what is the mode of temporality involved? Is it a resurrection and reanimation of ancestral time – in the mode of memory and nostalgia? Are they simply rendered more fully present by including motion? Or do ‘moving stills’ open onto some form of futurity?

VB: My works are designed to be shown in museums and art galleries. The setting of the gallery is different from either the theatrical setting of cinema or the domestic setting of television, and to take this specificity of setting into account is to arrive at what I have elsewhere called the uncinematic. In the gallery a projection work typically occupies a more or less darkened space, usually empty of furniture, where viewers generally enter and leave at indeterminable intervals. Audiovisual time in a gallery setting is therefore dual. Although it is possible to enter a movie theatre after the film has begun and leave before it ends, it is normally assumed that the duration of the film will coincide with the duration of the spectator’s viewing of it. In the gallery it is normally assumed that these two times will not coincide. Most works made for the gallery are therefore designed to loop, with a seamless transition between the first and last frames of the material. The non-coincidence of the duration of the material and the time of viewing suggests that the elements that comprise the work should be equally weighted and autonomously significant.

For example, the opening sentence of the voice-over script to a work I made for a gallery in Cologne reads: ‘The major museums are all close to the station, which is by the cathedral so I cannot get lost.’ This sentence establishes that the speaker is a stranger to Cologne, there to visit the museums, and it also states a material fact about the city plan. So far, I might be writing a short story. However, although this is the ‘opening sentence’ of my script it is not necessarily the opening sentence for the visitor to my installation, who may come and go at any time. A specific requirement of the voice-over text therefore is that it be written so that any sentence may occupy the position of ‘first’ sentence, just as any image may be the first image. Characterized by repetition, recursivity, temporal indeterminacy and the attenuation of hierarchy between elements, the spatio-temporal structure of a projection work specific to a gallery setting is closer to that of a psychoanalytic session than a narrative film. No part or detail of the material produced in an analysis is considered a priori more significant than any other, all elements equally are potential points of departure for chains of associations.

Temporality in psychoanalysis is also characterized by reiteration, for example in the symptomatic phenomenon of the ‘compulsion to repeat’, and the therapeutic principle of – in the title of one of Freud’s essays – ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through’. What in musical terms one might call the ritornello structure in audiovisual works has its analogies in such psychical mechanisms as deferred action, in which a previously anodyne event may become traumatic when recalled in different circumstances, or in the unconscious determinations of the sense of déja vu and the uncanny. The spacing of isolated semi-autonomous elements in a gallery work allows the possibility that viewers may see what is present to perception not only through the recollection of previous elements of the work but also through their own personal memories and fantasies. The psychoanalysts Jean Laplanche and Serge Leclaire characterize the reiterative fractional chains that form fantasies and daydreams as ‘short sequences, most often fragmentary, circular and repetitive’. Projection works composed for the specificity of the gallery setting typically take the form of ‘fragmentary, circular and repetitive’ short sequences. In response to your question about ‘moving stills’ and the future, it is interesting to me that the philosopher and film theorist David Rodowick had much the same intuition. In a talk he gave prompted by a work of mine he saw in a Berlin gallery he spoke of what he calls a ‘crisis of naming’ in respect of such works, and he sees a ‘future memory of cinema’ in these forms that may anticipate not only what the image has been but also what it is becoming in the mutating environment of digital media. I would add that this is not to attribute the status of prophecy to the work, but rather to view the ‘still moving’ form of the work as a symptom of our times. OPEN IN VIEWER