vilma

EN LT

2004-05-10

Valentinas : input

source_1
Jalal Toufic , “(Vampires) An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film”, p. 280 – 281. The Post - Apollo Press, California, 2003

source_2
Interview with Peter Wippermann, “Tomorrow’s consumer – techno nomads”. From:magazine Icons. Localizer 1.3, edited by B.Richard, R.Klanten, S.Heidenreich , Berlin: Die Gestalten Verlag, p.117. 1998

source_3
From parallel text in footnotes:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

source_1
Jalal Toufic , “(Vampires) An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film”, p. 280 – 281. The Post - Apollo Press, California, 2003

One Cannot Go Back to the Other Side of the Point of No Return Even in Memory:
Those who encounter the undead most often become amnesiac: one cannot go back to the other side of the point of no return even in memory.
The amnesiac's diary as his letters to himself.
Someone who has no mirror image either has no memory or else can also remember the past of others.
Were someone who had already seen India Song to watch Her Venetian Name in Deserted Calcutta, which has the same sound track but a different image track, and thus is a sort of double of the previous film, his or her resultant memory of India Song would be haunted by amnesia, rather than, as in Hiroshima mon amour, doomed to forgetful-ness.
Amnesia produces a discontinuous forgetfulness. Amnesia is a lapse in both memory and forgetfulness.
There is an element, a presentiment of amnesia whenever a surprise happens.
The following structure recurs in some of my unpublished short stories and unfinished videos: an episode is narrated, in the short story, or shown, in the video, with a minimum number of cuts or ellipses, then the protagonist, either while remembering the episode or while narrating it to another person, mentions an event that was not narrated or shown. Is it a delusion/confabulation, or did it actually happen? Really memorable events and people can exist only as a memory. Concerning them, and in a reverse manner to having a deja vu feeling, where an event is experienced as having already happened in the past, one feels that one is remembering an event that never occurred. True, sometimes when dealing with such memories one has felt that they did occur an original time, but always simultaneously feeling that one is having a deja vu experience. Do not misunderstand me when I write: 1 will be remembered.

Many Lebanese intellectuals and artists and writers decry the postwar amnesia. Should we view this as a reaction only to their compatriots' oblivion of the war years, or should we extend it to cover an apprehension that they are being forgotten by the ghosts since they are not being haunted? Is it the Lebanese who have forgotten their dead, or is it their dead who have forgotten them by not becoming revenants, ghosts? Is it both conjointly, a reciprocal forgetting? Where there is a definitive absence of an intensely loved person, a death, the affect can be melancholia; what is the affect when there is an absence of revenants?

In Tarkovsky's Solaris, one of the cosmonauts records his testimony on a videotape to inform the future viewer, specifically his friend and colleague Kris, whose imminent arrival is expected at the station, of some urgent matter. Let us imagine someone destroying the tape. What will happen then? Will the unfinished business be forgotten? Not necessarily: it is probable that the dead cosmonaut will now haunt in the form of a revenant. The ghost does not have a memory; he is rather the spectral embodiment of a memory, that of his unjust, untimely death and the consequent need to redress it and settle some unfinished business: he is really like an audiovisual record that each time plays back the same message. Were I to do a second adaptation of Hamlet, after my Gertrude, or Love Dies (in Forthcoming), then I would have King Hamlet, as he began feeling the nefarious effect of the poison placed in his ear by his treacherous brother, trudge toward a paper and a quill and write a summary incrimination of his brother, Claudius. It is only once King Claudius discovers accidentally the incriminating piece of paper and destroys it that the ghost of King Hamlet begins to haunt Elsinore as in Shakespeare's play.

Unfinished Business:
There was and continues to be a prohibition against someone dying with unfinished business, be living this outstanding business. (…)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

source_2
Interview with Peter Wippermann, “Tomorrow’s consumer – techno nomads”. From:magazine Icons. Localizer 1.3, edited by B.Richard, R.Klanten, S.Heidenreich , Berlin: Die Gestalten Verlag, p.117. 1998

(…)
Q: Do computers and new media really influence the world of youth as much as is often described?

Wippermann: The astonishing thing is that 80 per cent of our consciousness is fixed for ever by the time we are four. In these few years it is determined how we deal with information. If we now consider that most of us adults grew up with children's books and radio, then we can judge to what extent the concept of the world has changed for children of today. The so-called "screenagers" do not know a world without television and computers. Prototypes, for example, are MTV - a broadcasting station which has raised zapping to a programmatical element, or interactive computer games such as Nintendo's Gameboys. What we regard as being reality and a social consensus is not the standard applied by these young people. Aesthetics and speed are replacing meaning and goals.

Q: How, then, does the reality of the "Techno-nomads" differ
from ours?

Wippermann: The youngest generation is accustomed to accepting a constructed, and thus simulated world. The computer kids regard everything as realistic if they can imagine it and if it can be represented on screen. Visual probability replaces experiential reality. One of the central concepts of today is "morphing". It simply means changing one image into the next without any image being an original. Mobility here becomes a conceptual and visual principle. Hollywood films such as "Robocop" and computer games such as "Mario and Sonic" have made this principle into the secret of their success. Therefore, the infotainment industry of today already works more with pictures than with language. The goal is to design emotions by means of visual effects.

Q: Does that mean that the Techno scene is more than playful in its treatment of modern technology and concepts such as interactivity and virtual reality?

Wippermann: The increasing complexity of our world requires us to apply in everyday life what we have learned with the television remote control and with the joystick in computer games. We make up our own complex program rather than following a linear program structure. Everyone is their own programme director and computer programmer. We will be able to experience the idea of the interactive more quickly than we can imagine at present. The major sectors of the communication industry which at present act separately - such as computer, telephone and network services and the information and entertainment industry of the media - will be increasingly networked. That permits a combination of strategic alliances which pursue and advance different goals and different areas of emphasis-such as personal, interactive and mobile image and data communication, three - dimensional computer image representation or interactive television. The digital networks which will arise with the differing input devices have one major advantage: they can make up what each consumer demands, 'a personal media product, a personal form of address, prospects of personal products.

Q: You speak of personal information. But critics see the cable network as a further step towards the impersonal mass society.

Wippermann: Networks and computer technology are often presented negatively in Germany. Of course, the new technology defines the term "private" in a new way, just as computer networks in general are creating a second reality. But I think that they have an emancipatory quality in themselves. The Internet, which has been released from the concepts of secrecy and military omnipotence of the Cold War into the reality of our society, has in the last resort developed into a democratic, almost anarchist system. Everyone who is able to operate a computer will be able to use the network for themselves. This, however, is subject to the condition that they have the economic means, that they can spend money for these information services. This will of course lead to new social tensions. Those who have access to and control of the media of the future will be regarded as wealthy. By the way, it is astonishing how creatively people publish their own personal news in the network, such as the "Home pages" of the World-Wide Web, a visual section of the Internet. I also find it exciting that even very intimate news can be found in the WWW. The best example is a private photo album telling the story of a birth. (…)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

source_3
From parallel text in footnotes:

…advertising lie? Advertising has learned deception from art. Duchamp signed chamber pots, Dali blank pages, Warhol dully reproduced tomato tins and Beuys slapped butter on the wall. All genuine, great artists. It is certainly difficult to explain this to the many small lights without great purpose in their life, but with the firm intention of enjoying themselves. The masses have turned the tables. They declare that their consumer behaviour is art, or if they cannot manage it, subculture. Art and (…).

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------