Today, on a walk in the forest, near Kandel. After a few hundred meters, the first tentative waves reach us – waves of sound, originating from something I can’t quite classify at first. I finally allocate the source to the nearby wind turbines, hidden behind the trees. The sound is a low and deep humming, an audio presence of understated magnitude. I’m not sure what I’ll do with this, but this human-generated soundscape combined with the visual experience of the forest seemed promising.
Note on the Sublime
A little addition to my last entry: I haven’t yet properly written about an important term I mentioned – that of the sublime. It only briefly came up in the first session under the heading of „Abschied vom Erhabenen (Latour)“.
Since this concept, the loss of the sublime, is taken from Latour, I should maybe introduce my thoughts on him and his philosophy first (which I, as many others, believe to offer a highly valuable perspective). But since the text we read on his modern ghosts heads into a slightly different direction, I shall limit myself to the way this idea was treated in class.
As I understood it, the reason why we have to bid farewell to the sensation of the sublime is that the concept of „Nature“ has been undermined by the ubiquitous influence of human activity. Or, to use the idea of another philosopher, one could say that the loss is due to „Climate Change“ as one of Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects which pervades our perception of what we might have priorly defined as „Nature“. The pictures used to illustrate this also suggested a connection between the sublime, nature and climate change:
That the link between nature and the sublime has been firmly established is no surprise – after all, the latter term is closely connected to German Romanticism and inevitably evokes the images of Caspar David Friedrich, especially his Wanderer über dem Wolkenmeer (1818).
Bruno Latour himself defines the concept of „das Erhabene“ as follows (taken from an interview on his Reset Modernity Exhibition):
Hondl: Was ist das eigentlich genau, das Erhabene? – das ist vielleicht gar nicht mehr jedem so bewusst.
Latour: Das Erhabene meint ein Gefühl des „reizvollen Schreckens“ gegenüber Naturgewalten, Vulkanausbrüchen zum Beispiel. Angesichts solcher Naturspektakel empfindet der außenstehende Mensch so etwas wie die Größe seiner Seele. Das Problem ist nur, dass das heute nicht mehr geht. Wenn Sie heute Naturspektakel betrachten, zum Beispiel Wirbelstürme, Klimawandel, schmelzende Gletscher in der Arktis, dann sind Sie Teil des Phänomens, das Sie anschauen. Sie fühlen nicht die Größe Ihrer Seele, sondern Sie fühlen sich verantwortlich. Und das ist interessant, denn es bedeutet ein völlig anderes Gefühl gegenüber der Natur. Wenn Sie nicht mehr außenstehend sind, empfinden Sie etwas ganz anderes als einen „reizvollen Schrecken“ wie noch bei Immanuel Kant. Sind die Besucher noch zu diesem Gefühl des Erhabenen fähig oder fühlen Sie sich eher wie der römische Kaiser Nero vor dem brennenden Rom. Was dann eher die tragische Schönheit eines unsühnbaren Verbrechens wäre, für das man verantwortlich ist. Das kann auch sein. Aber das werden wir erst von den Ausstellungsbesuchern erfahren.
I don’t know if Latour has treated this definition more extensively elsewhere, but what I noticed at this point was that it is quite narrowly circumscribed. The experience of the sublime, as it was conceptualised by Kant and taken up by the Romantics, is not necessarily limited to those encounters we make with „Nature“ with a capital N, even if they are (or used to be) the best examples for it. Sublimity in itself refers to absolute greatness. It is the transcendence of what we can possibly express, measure or imitate.
“Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt.” (Critique of Pure Reason)
With this widened definition of the sublime, I want to bring up another, highly controversial example of „the sublime“. It is a very dark one, and it is one that sees the unfathomable not outside of ourselves, in Nature, but in the evil that hides in human capacity. It is the „social sublime“ that has been argued to be present in certain unimaginable historical facts, such as the vast number of victims of the Holocaust. Of course, only the most abhorrent specimen of human would experience „pleasure“ in contemplating the sheer un-imaginability of this number, but the aspect of the unfathomable has also been brought up by those who rightfully demand respectful commemoration. The French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, for example, has criticised Spielberg’s Schindler’s List for trying to represent a suffering that cannot be represented. More specifically, he attacks Spielberg’s method of trying to reconstruct particular events in film scenes.
It is hardly surprising that the attempt of linking the Holocaust to the rather positively connoted „sublime“ has been criticised, as e.g. by Zachary Braiterman. I have mentioned this controversy, however, as the positive connotation is what I find questionable (among other things). What do we really lose with this lofty concept and its referents, if we lose them at all? Moreover, it made me think about other possible arenas of the sublime and about the link between the sublime and film. Can we, for example, experience pleasure in viewing a film that ultimately fails, as its goal is the portrayal of something limitless?
And is „Leviathan“ an example of this?
First Impressions and Ideas
Welcome to Magic Matters! This blog will document my progress with a 360 degree video project, developed within the framework of Daniel Fetzner’s Medienethnografie seminar at the University of Freiburg.
In this very first entry, I’d like to talk about some of the basic assumptions and ideas I personally started the course with. With this I mainly mean the network of mental associations which the key words of the first session — magic, matter, anthropocene, the sublime — brought to the surface. (This will be continued in the next post)
Magic. Especially in connection with the notion of the “medium” as a channel between worlds — specifically between ours and that of ghosts or of the dead — this word is, for me, very closely related to a feeling of eeriness, of being spooked out. This feeling could be classified as one of the sensations of transcendence. When we believe ourselves to be in the presence of our ancestors or some other “super-natural” being, we transcend important boundaries. We take a peek over the edge of that realm we call our own, or (as „Enlightened moderns“) that of reason. We leave behind the realm where our sensuous and cognitive capacities suffice at least to some extent, where it is possible for us to draw up a certain image of the world that can be categorised, analysed and thus potentially understood. Maybe, the hair-raising, shivering feeling of eeriness, with its obvious aspect of fear and repulsion, is the more negatively connoted version of the sublime (about which I will say more at a later point).
The step my mind took from here led to — badum tssss — Freud. To Freud and his notion of the Uncanny (Das Unheimliche, 1919): the strangely familiar. Next jump — the Uncanny Valley Theory. This theory, developed by the robotics professor Masahiro Mori, exemplifies the general idea of the uncanny pretty well. It is best illustrated by the graph below.
According to Mori, the likability of teddy bears, dolls, animated cartoons, robots and other humanoid or anthropomorph objects follows a certain function that depends on their similarity to real humans. Up to a certain point, increased similarity makes these products and images more loveable, but then, suddenly, the curve plummets before going up again.
Think of Zemecki’s Polar Express (2004): was this CGI film, meant as cute, christmasy entertainment for kids, not slightly … unsettling? The cause for this is that the exaggeratedly close-to-life visual design of the characters makes them uncanny to us. They, just like some of newest developments in robotics and AI, are strange “Zwischenwesen” that we can’t quite place into our human-non-human-dichotomy. (This is, by the way, the reason why so many of our beloved cartoon characters have only three fingers!)
Now, relate this to 360 degree videos and VR: is there not some point of overlap with this aspect of the strangely familiar?
I don’t know much about how the experience of VR can be theorised, or how closely related non-immersive 360 degree videos are to VR, yet. But: if one of the effects of these media is that they transpose us directly into the goings-on, then the degree to which we perceive the images as a sort of direct reality — at least our personal reality, as they represent our experienced environment — must be heightened. Given the images are taken photographically from real life, the illusion of really being in a real place can be taken to new extremes. I wonder: does this similitude run the risk of falling into an uncanny valley? Is there a point where our excitement about the new possibilities gives way to that creepy sense that sometimes haunts our dreams, that nausea of floating between worlds, that uncanny familiarity? I think it is very possible. Something about VR had already started to seem violent to me: there are no boundaries, and I have to endure it, I am thrown into it. Under the pretext that nothing here is real and that the headset can always be taken off (or the 360 degree Facebook video scrolled past), I am plunged into scenarios that I might be deeply afraid of. Or, perhaps just as bad, into a scenario that seems safe and familiar — but not really it. Always slightly off, since it is always only virtual. Or: strangely matter-less.
Magic Matter 