Planet of the Apes | 2007
My Vision, Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen and Zephyr-Raum für Fotografie, Mannheim, Germany, 2007
Planet of the Apes (MIRROR IMAGE) is a work in three parts consisting of a lit sign, a series of bundled mylar balloons and a poster of the ascent of man. All three are extensions of works that I have done in the past and as such continue my interest in symbolic ecologies, the distribution of the sensible, phenomenology and post-phenomenology, cultural evolution, and the cultured brain. I believe that artists using the materials, practices, histories, and spaces of aesthetic discourse and performance can investigate the realms of scientific inquiry in ways not open to scientific logics. In the case of the brain, these methods produce alternatives to those generated by the rules of scientific inquiry. Rules that are tethered to grand narratives of the history of science itself and perpetuate its own form of mythology. Art works as they are created and bound together using other rules, histories and methodologies, produce alternative streams of discourses which acknowledge multiple origins and as such are by their very nature non-narrative and experimental. In an extensive investigation called Resistance is Futile, Resistance is Fertile now published in The Body in Architecture (Deborah Hauptman, ed., 010 Press, Rotterdam), I have elucidated how Bergsonian Cultural Evolutionary paradigms produce a tumescent engorgement of knowledge waiting to be released under the circumstances of the correct contextual arrangement and alignment of culture. Cultural facts are never subtracted, as in Darwinian Paradigms, but are continually added to the growing body of knowledge causing rearrangements and new forms of cooperativity between forms of understanding. These rearrangements gradually find their way into the matter of the brain. (How this is accomplished is a lengthy argument beyond the scope of this text.) Over time these new forms of the understanding create new possibilities for the imagination and creativity and are projected from the inside towards the outside as products of aesthetic exuberance which litter the visual, auditory, haptic and kinesthetic artistic landscapes in the end mutating the conditions of culture itself. Cinema and architecture are good examples of this as the advances or the regressions in cinematic experimentation revivify architectural concepts changing the form of material and non-material tectonic motifs. What would Le Corbusier, Mies Van Der Rohe, or Frank Gehry be without Cinema? In the end architecture itself becomes the armature of cultural memory creating the walls for painting to be hung, the skin upon which film can be projected, the space for the body to move within and the social spaces through which subjectivity can be molded by sovereignty. It is cultural memory as it is instantiated ontologically and ontogenically in the buildings, urban plans, open spaces of parks and alley ways, what is left, that creates the context for what is, that produces the forms of subjectivity and multitude that are emerging today. New network conditions of the real, imaginary, virtual interface reconfigure the neural networks of the brain.
The Planet of the Apes follows another project mentioned above called Resistance is Futile/Resistance is Fertile which was a thirty-foot Neon sign on top of the Kunsthaus Graz in Graz, Austria. That work asked the question of what kind of world we want to live in today. Do we want to live in a world in which information is restricted and closed or do we instead favor one that is open to new possibilities and infinite becomings? Are we to write the history of multiple histories of difference with many origins?
So why use the movie the Planet of the Apes for this artwork? Planet of the Apes was written by Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone, in 1968, the same year as the student demonstrations in Paris and the United States. Those students demonstrated for a new beginning founded on Utopian principles. The movie tells the story of four astronauts, one whom is killed, including misanthrope Commander Timothy Taylor, played by Charleton Heston, on a mission to circle one of the planets of the Constellation Orion. The ship unexpectedly goes out of control and crash lands in a lake on an unknown planet in the future/past. Wandering around in search of other life forms they stumble upon savage human beings whom they discover are hunted as slaves by the dominant life form on the planet, intelligent apes. Captured, the rest of the story concerns their desire for freedom and their escape from masters whom in many ways remind the viewer, through a process of empathic association and cinematic suturing, of themselves. The film then becomes a space where Heimlich and Unheimlich continually convert into each other. In the meantime, however the viewer is given a course on the cultural history of these beings and the mysteries that inform their past and their future. What is hidden and culturally repressed is their human origins. The movie is then about repressed cultural memory and its uncovering. It is those truths, once revealed and exposed, that form the real meaning of the film. For the humans who formally inhabited that planet's past created a world that undermined itself leading it down the path of destruction and species annihilation. The re- or de-evolution of an intelligent ape society, made up of incidentally chimps, gorillas and orangutans is not a movement back before humans but a kind of neurobiologic remediation and building upon genomic alterations that had originally led to big brained humans with expanded forebrains who were already speaking and creating complex social organizations. Intelligent apes have become what they could not be without the preceding millions of years of evolution that produced Homo Eructus and now Homo Symbolicus.
So how does cinema and cinema-analysis as Gilles Deleuze has framed it provide us with the tools with which to uncover repressed memory in the return of the repressed: years later memories long secret reform themselves in our consciousness creating all kinds of problems and anxieties. We know that cultures also have mechanisms for repressing ideas and events that as a society it finds hard to deal with. Together they can form cultural symptoms that can become incorporated and mixed with personal ones leading to characteristic psychic phenomena that produce characteristic pathologic symptoms such as Hysterical Conversion Syndromes. Psychoanalysis was one method, and a quite effective one, to uncover these lost memories in the process of healing the psychic stress of diseases brought about by the trials and tribulations of the 19th century in a time when movies and films were in their early burgeoning form. But is it's methodology up to the challenges of the 20th century? Do we need new forms of diagnostic and therapeutic apparatti to perform the psychic surgery necessary to cure the illnesses characteristic of our own time and place? One dominated by new forms of cinematic time and space like collage and triple screen projections, that require challenges for the understanding limited to linear narration. One which requires instead a response to a reconfiguration of the dynamic processes that characterized mediated experience and which imprint those rhythms, beats, and pulses on and through the brain during critical periods of neuro-bodily experiential development. Cinemaanalysis is that method. This is the point. Cinema and new media have joined forces to create an alternative history of stories and facts that together form our cultural memory. As forms of media, these sometimes aesthetic and at other times institutionally derived methods, compete successfully, to use a Neural Darwinian Paradigm, with those networks of facts derived from the natural world of which man himself or herself has evolved. Sometimes these two histories of images and facts lie side by side but at others they undergo a recombination. They become intertwined and as such, the real and the fictive together form the networks of signification that we humans pay attention to. Fact and fiction are indistinguishable. Does it not make sense that we would need to use the apparatus of cinema and the techniques and devices of it to help us understand our own psychic states formed as a result of this elision? Frederico Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963) is one such inquiry as it deals with means through which this Cinemanalysis unveils the nature of Marcello Mostriani's, playing Guido Anselmo, Psychosis and at the same time leads him to the means of his own recovery. The building of the spaceship platform as stage-set-on-a-movie-set stands in for the necessary psychic apparatus needed-to-be-built for the psyche to be free of its own inimical and precarious existence. Of course one could have or could use Psychoanalysis to interpret this building of a tower as a metaphor for the recovery from the loss of ones masculinity and that the actors and actresses are stand in for his own familial relations that played some role in his own personal drama. However valuable these explanations are gaps and spaces of interpretation are still present and require a Cinematic analysis to complete the cure.
This is the story of an individual and his own fight with his own demons. Remember he is always being asked what the film is about by others whom he can never give a good answer to. He is always being confronted by other actors wanting to know their parts when the only parts of for himslef. He is the actor in his own production and the film is for and about him. They are on the outside of his existential crisis of his own identity as the creator of fantasies of which his own life is one. This is the essential point of the movie. Cinema and art create their own special networks of meaning and it is only through the use of their own set of processes and history that the psyche can be healed. Psychoanalysis is limited in the context of schizophrenia especially in a world in which "Schizophrenia is the new fashion trend."
But what about when this individual predicament becomes a cultural one? When memory shifts from a intra psychic phenomena to an interpsychic one. When memory is shared by and defines a multitude: a population of singularities that feed off each other's extrasensory perceptions? Not the singularity operating in the distribution of the sensible in which there is one beginning and one ending. But in the context in which there is collage and superimposition of many distributions of the sensible, simultaneously and sequentially evoked, which can be and are sampled differentially. Jacques Rancier in The Politics of Aesthetics, defines the distribution of the sensible as the "implicit law governing the sensible order that parcels out places and forms of participation in a common world by first establishing the modes of perception within which these are inscribed. The distribution of the sensible thus produces a system of self-evident facts of perception based on the set horizons and modalities of what is visible and audible as well as what can be said, thought, made and done. Strictly speaking, a distribution therefore refers both to forms of inclusion and to forms of exclusion. But when the singularity of Guido is now the multitude there becomes a social space where multiple distributions can exist side by side, or one on top of the other. How they form together in networks is the work of the cultural subject living in a world of multiple cultural dialogues through which the global subject develops in as the glocal (global and local combined).
Guido's predicament is the predicament of the transitional being emerging in a cinematic universe: one in which the movement image gives way to the time image as the dominant form of mediation. The movement image discussed by Henri Bergson and later discussed by Gilles Deleuze is where perception and action ineluctably bound together reinvigorate the story of the origin over and over again in one endless repetition of narrative. The photographs of Etiene Jules Marey are inspired by the body limited by ones neuromuscular becoming which binds fragments of images using linear machinic assemblages. In the time image the body without organs is able to create its own existence through linking together its virtuality with a series of possible beginnings and becomings. The perception-action cycle is broken and perception become a million and one fragments free floating in the hynagogic state of the bodiless being. Where the distribution of the sensible erupts into new forms of actualities that allow for new ways of looking at ones own beginning and becomings. Where the virtuality is released in a new fashion and erupts to bring about a new culture but one all the same that cannot escape its biology. Planet of the Apes is a story of those other origins and other becomings.
Warren Nedich, "Planet of the Apes," My Vision – Ideen für die Welt von morgen, exhibition catalogue, 2007.
My Vision, Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen and Zephyr-Raum für Fotografie, Mannheim, Germany, 2007
Planet of the Apes (MIRROR IMAGE) is a work in three parts consisting of a lit sign, a series of bundled mylar balloons and a poster of the ascent of man. All three are extensions of works that I have done in the past and as such continue my interest in symbolic ecologies, the distribution of the sensible, phenomenology and post-phenomenology, cultural evolution, and the cultured brain. I believe that artists using the materials, practices, histories, and spaces of aesthetic discourse and performance can investigate the realms of scientific inquiry in ways not open to scientific logics. In the case of the brain, these methods produce alternatives to those generated by the rules of scientific inquiry. Rules that are tethered to grand narratives of the history of science itself and perpetuate its own form of mythology. Art works as they are created and bound together using other rules, histories and methodologies, produce alternative streams of discourses which acknowledge multiple origins and as such are by their very nature non-narrative and experimental. In an extensive investigation called Resistance is Futile, Resistance is Fertile now published in The Body in Architecture (Deborah Hauptman, ed., 010 Press, Rotterdam), I have elucidated how Bergsonian Cultural Evolutionary paradigms produce a tumescent engorgement of knowledge waiting to be released under the circumstances of the correct contextual arrangement and alignment of culture. Cultural facts are never subtracted, as in Darwinian Paradigms, but are continually added to the growing body of knowledge causing rearrangements and new forms of cooperativity between forms of understanding. These rearrangements gradually find their way into the matter of the brain. (How this is accomplished is a lengthy argument beyond the scope of this text.) Over time these new forms of the understanding create new possibilities for the imagination and creativity and are projected from the inside towards the outside as products of aesthetic exuberance which litter the visual, auditory, haptic and kinesthetic artistic landscapes in the end mutating the conditions of culture itself. Cinema and architecture are good examples of this as the advances or the regressions in cinematic experimentation revivify architectural concepts changing the form of material and non-material tectonic motifs. What would Le Corbusier, Mies Van Der Rohe, or Frank Gehry be without Cinema? In the end architecture itself becomes the armature of cultural memory creating the walls for painting to be hung, the skin upon which film can be projected, the space for the body to move within and the social spaces through which subjectivity can be molded by sovereignty. It is cultural memory as it is instantiated ontologically and ontogenically in the buildings, urban plans, open spaces of parks and alley ways, what is left, that creates the context for what is, that produces the forms of subjectivity and multitude that are emerging today. New network conditions of the real, imaginary, virtual interface reconfigure the neural networks of the brain.
The Planet of the Apes follows another project mentioned above called Resistance is Futile/Resistance is Fertile which was a thirty-foot Neon sign on top of the Kunsthaus Graz in Graz, Austria. That work asked the question of what kind of world we want to live in today. Do we want to live in a world in which information is restricted and closed or do we instead favor one that is open to new possibilities and infinite becomings? Are we to write the history of multiple histories of difference with many origins?
So why use the movie the Planet of the Apes for this artwork? Planet of the Apes was written by Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone, in 1968, the same year as the student demonstrations in Paris and the United States. Those students demonstrated for a new beginning founded on Utopian principles. The movie tells the story of four astronauts, one whom is killed, including misanthrope Commander Timothy Taylor, played by Charleton Heston, on a mission to circle one of the planets of the Constellation Orion. The ship unexpectedly goes out of control and crash lands in a lake on an unknown planet in the future/past. Wandering around in search of other life forms they stumble upon savage human beings whom they discover are hunted as slaves by the dominant life form on the planet, intelligent apes. Captured, the rest of the story concerns their desire for freedom and their escape from masters whom in many ways remind the viewer, through a process of empathic association and cinematic suturing, of themselves. The film then becomes a space where Heimlich and Unheimlich continually convert into each other. In the meantime, however the viewer is given a course on the cultural history of these beings and the mysteries that inform their past and their future. What is hidden and culturally repressed is their human origins. The movie is then about repressed cultural memory and its uncovering. It is those truths, once revealed and exposed, that form the real meaning of the film. For the humans who formally inhabited that planet's past created a world that undermined itself leading it down the path of destruction and species annihilation. The re- or de-evolution of an intelligent ape society, made up of incidentally chimps, gorillas and orangutans is not a movement back before humans but a kind of neurobiologic remediation and building upon genomic alterations that had originally led to big brained humans with expanded forebrains who were already speaking and creating complex social organizations. Intelligent apes have become what they could not be without the preceding millions of years of evolution that produced Homo Eructus and now Homo Symbolicus.
So how does cinema and cinema-analysis as Gilles Deleuze has framed it provide us with the tools with which to uncover repressed memory in the return of the repressed: years later memories long secret reform themselves in our consciousness creating all kinds of problems and anxieties. We know that cultures also have mechanisms for repressing ideas and events that as a society it finds hard to deal with. Together they can form cultural symptoms that can become incorporated and mixed with personal ones leading to characteristic psychic phenomena that produce characteristic pathologic symptoms such as Hysterical Conversion Syndromes. Psychoanalysis was one method, and a quite effective one, to uncover these lost memories in the process of healing the psychic stress of diseases brought about by the trials and tribulations of the 19th century in a time when movies and films were in their early burgeoning form. But is it's methodology up to the challenges of the 20th century? Do we need new forms of diagnostic and therapeutic apparatti to perform the psychic surgery necessary to cure the illnesses characteristic of our own time and place? One dominated by new forms of cinematic time and space like collage and triple screen projections, that require challenges for the understanding limited to linear narration. One which requires instead a response to a reconfiguration of the dynamic processes that characterized mediated experience and which imprint those rhythms, beats, and pulses on and through the brain during critical periods of neuro-bodily experiential development. Cinemaanalysis is that method. This is the point. Cinema and new media have joined forces to create an alternative history of stories and facts that together form our cultural memory. As forms of media, these sometimes aesthetic and at other times institutionally derived methods, compete successfully, to use a Neural Darwinian Paradigm, with those networks of facts derived from the natural world of which man himself or herself has evolved. Sometimes these two histories of images and facts lie side by side but at others they undergo a recombination. They become intertwined and as such, the real and the fictive together form the networks of signification that we humans pay attention to. Fact and fiction are indistinguishable. Does it not make sense that we would need to use the apparatus of cinema and the techniques and devices of it to help us understand our own psychic states formed as a result of this elision? Frederico Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963) is one such inquiry as it deals with means through which this Cinemanalysis unveils the nature of Marcello Mostriani's, playing Guido Anselmo, Psychosis and at the same time leads him to the means of his own recovery. The building of the spaceship platform as stage-set-on-a-movie-set stands in for the necessary psychic apparatus needed-to-be-built for the psyche to be free of its own inimical and precarious existence. Of course one could have or could use Psychoanalysis to interpret this building of a tower as a metaphor for the recovery from the loss of ones masculinity and that the actors and actresses are stand in for his own familial relations that played some role in his own personal drama. However valuable these explanations are gaps and spaces of interpretation are still present and require a Cinematic analysis to complete the cure.
This is the story of an individual and his own fight with his own demons. Remember he is always being asked what the film is about by others whom he can never give a good answer to. He is always being confronted by other actors wanting to know their parts when the only parts of for himslef. He is the actor in his own production and the film is for and about him. They are on the outside of his existential crisis of his own identity as the creator of fantasies of which his own life is one. This is the essential point of the movie. Cinema and art create their own special networks of meaning and it is only through the use of their own set of processes and history that the psyche can be healed. Psychoanalysis is limited in the context of schizophrenia especially in a world in which "Schizophrenia is the new fashion trend."
But what about when this individual predicament becomes a cultural one? When memory shifts from a intra psychic phenomena to an interpsychic one. When memory is shared by and defines a multitude: a population of singularities that feed off each other's extrasensory perceptions? Not the singularity operating in the distribution of the sensible in which there is one beginning and one ending. But in the context in which there is collage and superimposition of many distributions of the sensible, simultaneously and sequentially evoked, which can be and are sampled differentially. Jacques Rancier in The Politics of Aesthetics, defines the distribution of the sensible as the "implicit law governing the sensible order that parcels out places and forms of participation in a common world by first establishing the modes of perception within which these are inscribed. The distribution of the sensible thus produces a system of self-evident facts of perception based on the set horizons and modalities of what is visible and audible as well as what can be said, thought, made and done. Strictly speaking, a distribution therefore refers both to forms of inclusion and to forms of exclusion. But when the singularity of Guido is now the multitude there becomes a social space where multiple distributions can exist side by side, or one on top of the other. How they form together in networks is the work of the cultural subject living in a world of multiple cultural dialogues through which the global subject develops in as the glocal (global and local combined).
Guido's predicament is the predicament of the transitional being emerging in a cinematic universe: one in which the movement image gives way to the time image as the dominant form of mediation. The movement image discussed by Henri Bergson and later discussed by Gilles Deleuze is where perception and action ineluctably bound together reinvigorate the story of the origin over and over again in one endless repetition of narrative. The photographs of Etiene Jules Marey are inspired by the body limited by ones neuromuscular becoming which binds fragments of images using linear machinic assemblages. In the time image the body without organs is able to create its own existence through linking together its virtuality with a series of possible beginnings and becomings. The perception-action cycle is broken and perception become a million and one fragments free floating in the hynagogic state of the bodiless being. Where the distribution of the sensible erupts into new forms of actualities that allow for new ways of looking at ones own beginning and becomings. Where the virtuality is released in a new fashion and erupts to bring about a new culture but one all the same that cannot escape its biology. Planet of the Apes is a story of those other origins and other becomings.
Warren Nedich, "Planet of the Apes," My Vision – Ideen für die Welt von morgen, exhibition catalogue, 2007.
