camera obscura camera lucida

Owl wearing prisms

There was a discussion on borges in class again. He had an opinion on everything. Today it was the camera lucida - instead of the notion that a photograph is an obscure/inferior representation of the world we live in Borges suggests it is a lucid link to another world, the world of photography and art in which time and space differs to the world we live in. Like looking at something through a prism. A photograph exists in the present but is showing us the past but if we believe that a photograph is not just the past captured on paper then what the photograph is really showing is a completely separate time and place that belongs neither to the past nor the present because in our space time structure how can the past exist in the present?



This is also reminiscent of the platonic view of the inferior world of nature and th superior world of the imagination. Photographs capture the imagination in ways in which words fail. Ideas can be captured on film whilst they must be translated and transposed and limited by grammar when put into words. Ideas on film are limited perhaps by technology. One reel of film can contain one idea. Two projected simultaneous can contain two which when considered together produce other permutations of these ideas when combined in different ways. Now even more ideas, images and conversation can be displayed at once and have become interactive such that the viewers input effects what is seen. The limitations of film as a portal to the world of the imagination are lessening and the real time input of viewers allows us access to this alternate time and space. We have input but we cannot control it because to control it would be to bring it back down to our world and reduce it to an imitation.
I wish i had of remembered this in class.

what does this have to do with me?
I dont know. i think in a way i like my written words perhaps over movies although i have never created one with prior intentions of greatness or even mediocrity as opposed to writing things. Words in their solidity are easier to analyse but do they exist if no one reads them? In recording history are pictures better than words? In psychology the theory is that we can recognise faces using three different methods. We have a visual store of the feature unique to the persons, we have the name of the person and then we have a store of information, personal history of the person. The visual and semantic stores have shown to be dissociable in some ways meaning we can remember names but not faces, faces but not names but both can trigger the biographical information. This suggests that for people a face and a name triggers the same information or at least activates similar parts of the brain. Perhaps then the space and time of the imagination is not interfered with too much by having to write or film them because ultimately they are processed in similar parts of the human mind from which they came and belong to the same realm in which time and space is altered.

'the owls are not what they seem'

"Twin Peaks is about entering a world, falling in love with it, working within it, and letting it talk to you. To me, if it doesn't have honesty, and you don't obey those rules, then it won't work, it won't feel good, and the audience won't stay with it. That's also true of painting, or any movie."

David Lynch

taken from the city of absurdity