On idizwadidiz by Alexandre Galmard
A new ‘demolition of the wall’ (of language) has brought itself to the Ground [zu Grunde gehen], then back as a background. Isiah Medina. Every plus is a passing through the event-horizon, a projection of the concept of concept which, driven to be unwritten and ceasing to be what it is by an unnatural reverse to natural plane, challenges concepts on another basis than the one of philosophical articulation, outlining the contours of the world of thought. There is a crossing of threads from which this work stems : philosophical concepts and artificial languages are toys, and their geometries, figuration, animation and interaction multiply their dialectics and change the way we think worlds are made.
As a foundation kit, a trans-world toolbox to share with fellow makers and thinkers, an about-face to a ground-zero, idizwadidiz's ‘textless punctuation’ is a sort of ‘concept-script’ whose ideography registers itself into an articulated rebus. More than encrypting a formal methodology for content-breaking, it rather breaks from old moulds by breaking from the molded idea of the mould itself. If we must break from the despotism of fixed grammatical rules at every point, against the idea that each composition has its own mould, one point at least must break with this idea by dealing with the most absolute form of despotic formalism.
The obverse position rendered here is subtraction for the very purpose of unconstraining thought to a position, of unconstraining the concept to a lens of truth, to an epistemological go-between which would render the world ingurgitable. The point is not so much that, if one were to show it all, artistic creativity would be compromised. Rather, the desire to see it all always already inscribes the Idea into the intimate domain of placement, whose lack of split intelligibility fortifies it into a perishable appearance. What is not-all-there is not a lack of explicit sources to retrace, but the impasse of the real from which you do not come back scot-free, from which you do not come back at-all. idizwadidiz is not a map without its legend, it is the legend itself, the codified contextual structure that functions as the compass without which it is ‘like turning round hopelessly in some obscure labyrinth’. As Grothendieck puts it (regarding mathematics), you do not read, you listen.
By reflecting upon both epistemic transactions, between abstract things and concrete ideas, and their typological axiomatization, one goes through a sort of brachylogical sabotage, the very destructive step towards a re-foundational grounding of all parameters, of the conceptual and the not-so-conceptual brought to appear in other ways than they were made or thought to exist, and doing so by unconstraining the conceptual to an effect and the understanding to an affect : from ‘having or not having’ to ‘having or being’, that which ‘presupposes the subject as always already having a generative capacity’ shifts into that which 'takes into account how the subject itself emerges through the substance’s auto-scission’. Thinking is this montage whose Idea of montage is always-already a Montage of ideas, and ‘what is already there in the process of knowledge is taken from being, and not from the idea’.
(0)
An empty screen appears. A ‘compulsion to repeat’ chops the opening shot, beginning over and over, acting as its own absolute self-reference : A is A, which, being repeatedly posited, differs from itself; a reminder that substance always-already splits itself intermittently. The original black frame is pre-ontological while the screen is the Void proper, its failure of being something other than nothing, or rather, a nothing which is counted for, just like the ground floors marked ‘0’. The black frame leaves its place for its negative correspondent, the white empty sheet.
This is closely followed by the appearance of another form of nothingness, a projection, a ‘shadowy double’, which plays the pre-roll countdown. This is at once the countdown of the beginning of the roll, and the reference that we already have begun to count. The two unaligned empty squares marks the difference of A’s voided being and A’s appointed there. The out-of-jointness from frame to screen, from picture to movie, as seen throughout, disrupts their identification with one another.
Once the logical projection meets the ‘ontological ground’, at this stopping point to the adjustment of the two, the co-incidence, the moment they superpose each other, the non-excluded middle, becomes the intersection of a union, a mark of their conflation, giving the shared part a space of its own (which will in turn burst into solid colors). This third term is at once the Two’s representative and its disordering into a blind spot, the passage from ‘there is no relationship’ to ‘there is a non-relationship’, its very own display.
(1)
The game of apprehending and comprehending the ‘completely identical and the completely different’, between both animation and inanimation, relies on playing their very own identities and differences with and against each other in order to conceivably and inconceivably register their transitions. If you take 'Envers' in F is a •reverse• in E, some fundamental laws of thought are written down, then reversed in correspondence with the axioms prescribed. The dynamic range is used to picture the cancelling out of the maximal and the minimal with no other way, fading to black or manually pushing and pulling the exposure, cancelling out the background formed of water and skyscrapers. To rely on such grounds, discernment must be the basis by which one perceives a space for neither full white nor full black, since both flattens out, evens out. Complementarity of logic and geometry is the opening of the movie – the union drawing – and its ending – an extended logical square diagram shown on top of a computer screen as a continuation of paint.
This is expanded in idizwadidiz : invariants transacting between similarity and dissimilarity unfold in accordance to how they are cut together and with which predicaments, drawing positional and oppositional relations out of strength. We thus depart from the ontological grounding of the count to a full scale dynamical geometry, that is, of the discernment, in the presentation, of the continuous and discontinuous orchestration of the interpenetrability of the same and the other (from 16mm green water to video of green synthetic grass, for example). Forms shift within a precise palette between shapes and dimensions, flatness and depth (circle, square / sphere, cube), from its support (film, video / drawing, CGI) up to its editing structures, the cutting (normative / transgressive – with a singular cut-to, with shot/counter-shot, with its acceleration into flicker, with a superposition, etc.). The body of idizwadidiz works through its web : after having backed up from nothing, the move between opposition and ‘n-opposition’ is the one between the very distinctions it posits – flatness and depth, interior and exterior, inward and outward, implicit and explicit, symmetrical and asymmetrical, real and artificial, between the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ –, binding the count point by point via raccords of site and sight, between conceptual mappings and points of representation.
(2)
In the diagram drawn, a chain bites its tail, the head, colored in orange, is the One, while the tail, colored in blue, is the Multiple. The One/Orange is the world-view, the representation of a set which collects all into a singular intensity.
This element is presented both as ‘CGI-earth’ and ‘16mm-globe’, both extending from the flat surface of the diagram into a three-dimensional object from which one may circle around, from which many perspectives are available, allowing to be counted in what is being worked through, the out-of-experience body. The world as logo is the rationality which extirpates itself from the icons of ratiocination, from the circumvention of ‘what there is’ to the articulated making of a renewed representative accuracy, the universality of new forms of accuracy.
The Multiple/Blue presents the expansion of the particular, the unifying continuous scanning of its ground, as the very immersion within the element that was lost by looking at the world from a global focal point. The solid blue from the iMessage screen, the empty space for text to the homogeneous set of the ocean can be read as this singularity which stands out of the totality, the exception of the ocean being the drop of water that is drinkable rather than a singular addressless message drowned in the indefinite depth of communication.
This game of univalences and multivalences is finally formalized in the very shape of the frame, in its convex or concave bend. Each stretch forging an object whose framework is being framed and systematically worked through via the spacing out of the cut.
The transgression of some pre-patterned and programmed transitions requires in fact that the transitions be fully rendered, then re-injected into the project. Collections turn into sets when multiple timelines, bound with the use of various presets, are rendered-as-one : modifications are glued in, frozen, and can be reprogrammed as being-cut. This is the ‘how’ of the recoil of the frame, not only turning it into a floating flat-screen, using cubic transitions and other pre-sets, but mostly by cutting and superposing them, playing them against each other, transitioning between a variety of increments in order to obtain dynamisms impossible within the same base, reconfigurating the preconfigured modes of configuration.
(3)
The decapitated couple (the bathroom divide), already painted as being torn from their respective bodies, being representative of their own inherent disjunction, are paired by being parred. The rime is simple, we all do not fit our bodies. A ‘bi-sexed body’ always-already splits itself in the working through of the impossibility to cope with its own predisposition. This left/right exchangability of the body turns to one-sided heads, two flat green circles that are subliminally pictured as the same, flashing away, tied by the bokeh which focuses back into its real form, the common ‘separated interior’ which ends up being a buoy, a systematic and ‘underlying oppositional backbone’ made so that our ships don’t get lost or worse, sink.
First, the impossibility of each sides to appear without what stands them apart, the vue d'ensemble which includes the gender divide, is resolved by a subtractive priming. Second, the fast flickering signals, through the accelerated shot/counter-shot, the inability for each sides to properly overlay (at least materially). And third, each dot, being the punctuation of their own inherent gap, can only meet outside of sides, that is, in the mark of their identity being ‘out there’ (like the undetermined ‘objet u’ of love) : from ‘bokeh’ to its focus on ‘buoy’.
From the impossibility of a One to emerge from difference (the flicker with the inverted positions), to the impossibility to have a One for the parts that are the same (the flicker with the two heads), we move to the signaling of the buoy. From the ‘finitude of desire’ to the ‘eternity of drive’, from the excluded middle, the ‘parallax gap’ between the two from which no synthesis is possible, we move to the permanently revisable formula : Spirit is a buoy.
A mapping with the light characteristics chart (the navigational maritime signalization system) forms subtle shifts between the normative function of editing patterns and their dynamical rhythmic compositional tour-de-force.
In the buoy sequence, the steady navigational signaling breaks from the irregularities and twitches of the flicker. The formal synchronization of the cut with a separated entity regularizes the irrational cut-flow between positions, breaks out of the repetitive cuts between the law (the gendered separation of bathrooms) and its transgression (the stroboscopic flickering). Similarly, in the scene where the vignette flashes at every marking of dots of water, it is the marking on the cement which, as the law of cut, controls the vignetting of the frame, so when the marker gets included in its own count, pointing the act of pointing, a new dimension beyond the law opens up as the axis shifts. The proliferation of dialectics through their particular continuities (ideas, to copies, to models, to representations, to forms) is compelled by the cut to rupture, from itself and by itself, by disjoining ‘the place of the Other from any insistence of same-others’.
Finally, the cut is torn between flickers of void and intervals of infinities. The dynamic condensation of this shot/counter-shot generates the stereoscopic vision, just like the thaumatrope (or trauma-trope) : two stasis traverses the same motion and opens thus a new synthesized image of stasis whose ‘simulated simultaneity’ is something like an afterimage, an ‘afternature’. The totality of the ramified network of oppositions, contracted in the shift of this eternity-coin does not rely on the inception’s ever-spinning totem, where at every take the stakes are the same. Rather, the untenable invariant whose purpose takes form by playing forms and nonforms against each other, makes us ‘traverse the fantasy’ whose trajectory is rationally constructed by montage.
So what may finally lie beyond phenomenological description and conceptual prescription? By replacing ‘the object and its identity by the system of its perspectives, the functor’, IM registers a ‘dialectics of formalization’ whose impulse, challenging the classical thinking of the image by tearing down the ‘classical image of thought’, expands from contextual strings of pro-grammatical operations within an enrolment of body-volumes by subverting the motion study into the study of thought's very own motion, a motion ‘without arrows or bodies’, a ‘(meta)stasis of the conditions of a motion study itself’, a ‘metalogic of one's logic of theorization’.
This has only been a highly volatile and non-exhaustible investigation into idizwadidiz, I wish for and know that the best of many more dots are to be connected and entertained. Less than its ‘subjective glorification’, like the ones of the last century; a passion for the indexation of its consequences. If there is only one oeuvre for the next hundred years, it is it.
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Bibliography :
- Alain Badiou. Being and Event serie (1988, 2006, 2018)
- Ray Brassier, Transcendental Logic and True Representings (2016)
- Olivia Lucca Fraser. L'éclat de la dialectique dans les courts-circuits de la syntaxe: Hegel, Petersen, Girard (2012)
- Isiah Medina. On 'Demolition of a Wall' & Summertime Reflections on Cinema (2017)
- Alessio Moretti. The Geometry of Logical Oppositions (2009)
- Reza Negarestani. Intelligence and Spirit (2018)
- Fernando Zalamea. Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics (2012)
- Slavoj Zizek. Absolute Recoil: Towards A New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism (2006)