Chris I have got an old brownie box camera upstairs -I sometimes hold it
nostalgically
Cheers P the oldy with Classical logic of the law of the excluded middle is
also broken in his feedback circuit
-----Original Message-----
From: Poetryetc: poetry and poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Chris Jones
Sent: 12 August 2009 09:54
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Photography, affects and cybernetics
I can make an attempted summary of this cybernetic aesthetic ...?
First, a monorail view camera allows the film plane and focal planes to
be tilted and so the focal plane and film plane are not parallel in most
situations and also are often off centre, which is say are not centred
along a perpendicular focal axis. It is through the use of these
movements of raise, fall, swing and tilts that images are composed on a
ground glass viewing screen with a monorail camera. The Zone System then
considers exposure in this circuit as an essential component.
According to both Ansel Adams and Minor White this compositional
procedure allows the body of the photographer to be placed in a feedback
circuit with the subject being composed and the various settings on the
camera and which are also indexed to exposure zones of grey on a light
meter (in my first edition of Adam's, The Negative, this is a Weston
meter.) So, in this situation, it is not the conscious subjective
decision of the photographer that is decisive in making the image but
rather the photographer's body acts according to feedback and as such
also produces feedback that is a part of the feedback circuit. The
photographer's body then becomes a machinic component of the photography
machine. It is this technical procedure, in which what is being made is
also an aesthetics of accident and chance, that is the Modernist
aesthetic of art photography where the technical and aesthetic merge.
Here is located also a break with Kant's aesthetics and Romanticism.
More specifically and importantly, there is not an a-priori in these
feedback circuits since this would require a finite straight line which
would remove the photographer from the process, hence it also makes a
decisive break with Aristotle and this break is not dependent on the
artist's conscious subjective decisional ability which is metaphysically
outside and as such outside a conscious subjective decision made by an
individual artist's intended visual statement. (The outside is always
outside and never internal to another outside with which it is included.
Hegel short circuits this in his aesthetic.)
Minor White perhaps goes further then Ansel Adams in explicating this
aesthetic of accident in which the decision of the photographer has
already been chosen thus breaking the short circuit which a Romantic
notion would claim for the photographer's subjectivity as the deciding
moment. Further, it is the merger of aesthetic and technical which would
be crucial in understanding this Modernist aesthetic. I would need to
check but this appears also as an illegitimate use of the Faculties, for
Kant. Maybe, here is also a way into understanding the dispute as to if
photography can or cannot be art in aesthetics, given that Kant
basically invented aesthetics.
Phew... this is hard work... Classical logic of the law of the excluded
middle is also broken in this feedback circuit.... best Chris Jones.
On Tue, 2009-08-11 at 03:10 -0700, Stephen Vincent wrote:
> Good luck, Chris, on getting those machines!
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