Syncope

The Philosophy of Rapture by Catherine Clement

Syncope is a temporary absence of self or suspension of movement, a hesitation or dissonance. Clement’s examples include fainting, the backward dip in the Tango, a weak musical beat between two strong beats, the spin of dervishes, sneezing, coughing, hiccuping, uncontrollable laughter, screaming, facial spasms and tics, squinting, tremors, heart palpitations, choking, uncontrolled excretion, cold sweats, tears, tingling, prickling, tickling, wheezing, auditory hallucinations, orgasm, visions of gods speaking, religious ecstasy, falling in love, and enjambment in poetic metrics. “Where is the lost syllable,” she writes, “the beat eaten away by the rhythm? Where does the subject go who, later comes to, ‘comes back?’ Where am I in syncope?”

William Kentridge

I am really interested in how Kentridge works with the idea of the Chorus in his moving pieces. His pentimento style animation questions the main act in his performance pieces. I love how he works with theatre along side drawing and uses both to feed off each other. He was able to remake The Magic Flute for the 21st by using drawing to create a new context for the story.

The filmed drawings, or drawn films, of William Kentridge inhabit a curious state of suspension between static to time-based, from stillness to movement. These "drawings in motion" undergo constant change and constant redefinition, while the projection of their luscious charcoal surfaces somehow retains an almost tangible tactility. Smoky grounds and rough-hewn marks morph into an incessant, though not seamless, flow of free association that evokes the fleeting hypnagogic images that precede sleep. Bodies melt into landscape; a cat turns into a typewriter, into a reel-to-reel recorder, into a bomb; full becomes void with the sweep of a sleeve. The allure of Kentridge's animations lies in their unequivocal reliance on the continuing present, in the uncanny sense of artistic creation and audience reception happening at once.

Kentridge's films owe their distinctive appearance to the artist's home-made animation technique, which he describes as "stone-age filmmaking." Each of his film-related drawings represents the last in a series of states produced by successive marks and erasures that, operating on the limits of discernibility, are permanently on the verge of metamorphosis.


"The political process is one element of the films, but for me there is often a big disjunction between what people see as the core of those films, and what I was thinking about when making them. But that is not to say that what I am thinking about when making the films is what is there when they are finished. I am thinking about what I can do with this extraordinary blue pastel that I brought from London, but that is not a question that somebody asks when they are watching it after the event. It also has to do with various sets of meaning that I have to take responsibility for. Some people give a quite narrow political reading and say this corresponds to this moment in South Africa. But I think there are other people who do say that the films are about space between the political world and the personal, and the extent to which politics does or does not find its way into the private realm."

Mixed Reality

Augmented Reality (AR) is a growing area in virtual reality research. The world environment around us provides a wealth of information that is difficult to duplicate in a computer. This is evidenced by the worlds used in virtual environments. Either these worlds are very simplistic such as the environments created for immersive entertainment and games, or the system that can create a more realistic environment has a million dollar price tag such as flight simulators. An augmented reality system generates a composite view for the user. It is a combination of the real scene viewed by the user and a virtual scene generated by the computer that augments the scene with additional information. Augmentation can take on a number of different forms. In all those applications the augmented reality presented to the user enhances that person's performance in and perception of the world. The ultimate goal is to create a system such that the user can not tell the difference between the real world and the virtual augmentation of it. To the user of this ultimate system it would appear that he is looking at a single real scene. Figure 1 shows a view that the user might see from an augmented reality system in the medical domain. It depicts the merging and correct registration of data from a pre-operative imaging study onto the patient's head. Providing this view to a surgeon in the operating theater would enhance their performance and possibly eliminate the need for any other calibration fixtures during the procedure.

Figure 1 - Simulated augmented reality medical image

Augmented Reality vs. Virtual Reality

Virtual reality is a technology that encompasses a broad spectrum of ideas. It defines an umbrella under which many researchers and companies express their work. The phrase was originated by Jaron Lanier the founder of VPL Research one of the original companies selling virtual reality systems. The term was defined as "a computer generated, interactive, three-dimensional environment in which a person is immersed." (Aukstakalnis and Blatner 1992) There are three key points in this definition. First, this virtual environment is a computer generated three-dimensional scene which requires high performance computer graphics to provide an adequate level of realism. The second point is that the virtual world is interactive. A user requires real-time response from the system to be able to interact with it in an effective manner. The last point is that the user is immersed in this virtual environment. One of the identifying marks of a virtual reality system is the head mounted display worn by users. These displays block out all the external world and present to the wearer a view that is under the complete control of the computer. The user is completely immersed in an artificial world and becomes divorced from the real environment. For this immersion to appear realistic the virtual reality system must accurately sense how the user is moving and determine what effect that will have on the scene being rendered in the head mounted display.

The discussion above highlights the similarities and differences between virtual reality and augmented reality systems. A very visible difference between these two types of systems is the immersiveness of the system. Virtual reality strives for a totally immersive environment. The visual, and in some systems aural and proprioceptive, senses are under control of the system. In contrast, an augmented reality system is augmenting the real world scene necessitating that the user maintains a sense of presence in that world. The virtual images are merged with the real view to create the augmented display. There must be a mechanism to combine the real and virtual that is not present in other virtual reality work.

The computer generated virtual objects must be accurately registered with the real world in all dimensions. Errors in this registration will prevent the user from seeing the real and virtual images as fused. The correct registration must also be maintained while the user moves about within the real environment. Discrepancies or changes in the apparent registration will range from distracting which makes working with the augmented view more difficult, to physically disturbing for the user making the system completely unusable. An immersive virtual reality system must maintain registration so that changes in the rendered scene match with the perceptions of the user. Any errors here are conflicts between the visual system and the kinesthetic or proprioceptive systems. The phenomenon of visual capture gives the vision system a stronger influence in our perception (Welch 1978). This will allow a user to accept or adjust to a visual stimulus overriding the discrepancies with input from sensory systems. In contrast, errors of misregistration in an augmented reality system are between two visual stimuli which we are trying to fuse to see as one scene. We are more sensitive to these errors (Azuma 1993; Azuma 1995).

Milgram (Milgram and Kishino 1994; Milgram, Takemura et al. 1994) describes a taxonomy that identifies how augmented reality and virtual reality work are related. He defines the Reality-Virtuality continuum shown as Figure 2.

Figure 2 - Milgram's Reality-Virtuality Continuum

The real world and a totally virtual environment are at the two ends of this continuum with the middle region called Mixed Reality. Augmented reality lies near the real world end of the line with the predominate perception being the real world augmented by computer generated data. Augmented virtuality is a term created by Milgram to identify systems which are mostly synthetic with some real world imagery added such as texture mapping video onto virtual objects. This is a distinction that will fade as the technology improves and the virtual elements in the scene become less distinguishable from the real ones.

Milgram further defines a taxonomy for the Mixed Reality displays. The three axes he suggests for categorizing these systems are: Reproduction Fidelity, Extent of Presence Metaphor and Extent of World Knowledge. Reproduction Fidelity relates to the quality of the computer generated imagery ranging from simple wireframe approximations to complete photorealistic renderings. The real-time constraint on augmented reality systems forces them to be toward the low end on the Reproduction Fidelity spectrum. The current graphics hardware capabilities can not produce real-time photorealistic renderings of the virtual scene. Milgram also places augmented reality systems on the low end of the Extent of Presence Metaphor. This axis measures the level of immersion of the user within the displayed scene. This categorization is closely related to the display technology used by the system. There are several classes of displays used in augmented reality systems, each of these gives a different sense of immersion in the display. In an augmented reality system, this can be misleading because with some display technologies part of the "display" is the user's direct view of the real world. Immersion in that display comes from simply having your eyes open. It is contrasted to systems where the merged view is presented to the user on a separate monitor for what is sometimes called a "Window on the World" view.

The third, and final, dimension that Milgram uses to categorize Mixed Reality displays is Extent of World Knowledge. Augmented reality does not simply mean the superimposition of a graphic object over a real world scene. This is technically an easy task. One difficulty in augmenting reality, as defined here, is the need to maintain accurate registration of the virtual objects with the real world image.

Inter-reality

The History of Inter reality
The concept of relating realities is presented by Plato in his ‘The Republic’ dialogs. Before Thomas More created his Utopia in 1516, Plato had discussed in detail the formation of a perfect nation state: Utopia. And while More's utopia meant an imaginary world, Plato's was essentially a potential reality.
In 1619 Robert Fludd presented "Oculus imaginationis" (The Eye of the Imagination) in his book 'Utriusque Cosmi . . . historia (The History . . . of this World and the Other). The inner eye projects fantasy images onto a screen that lies beyond the back of the head.
Samuel Hibbert published in 1824 a book about visions and identities, which included an elaborate foldout chart about dream states, on which he set out a ‘Formula of the various comparative Degrees of Faintness, Vividness, or Intensity, supposed to subsist between Sensations and Ideas’. He tabulated eight transitions in his full cycle, ranging from ‘perfect sleep’ to ‘extreme mental excitement,’ and graded fifteen different phases in each of them. They start from ‘degree of vividness at which consciousness begins,’ where it is still possible to impose the will on vision, to ‘Intense excitements of the mind necessary for the production of spectres’. As Frederic Passy said when he founded the Inter-Parliamentary Union in 1889, ‘The world is made of achieved utopias. Today’s Utopia is tomorrow’s reality.’ Thomas More might have chosen the literary device of describing an ideal, imaginary island nation with an open political system primarily as a vehicle for discussing controversial political matters freely. Three centuries later, George Orwell did the same in his novel ‘1984’ which discusses privacy and state-security issues from the view of a dystopia.
Hervieu Léger points out that the hypothesis that this ever increasing – in view of the constant speeding up of knowledge and technology – Utopian space becomes the space within which religious representati-ons are constantly reorganised. Nevertheless such religious represent-tations are subject to an equally permanent destruction by the forces of rationalism. This tradition evokes a community as a concrete social group or by an imaginary genealogy. The chain which binds the believer to the community and the tradition legitimating this religious belief is what Hervieu Léger considers as the essential point for imagination.

Janet Cardiff

Cardiff works with a fusion of fiction and reality, deliberately blurring the boundaries of past and present, of narrative and the everyday, and of sound and space, challenging viewers to re-examine how we perceive the world. “In the pieces we rely on architecture to set up a certain expectation,” Cardiff explains. “As a viewer you know the space – you’re sitting in theatre seats or you’re looking into a little theatre box and see the stage and understand that there will be content coming off the screen. As artists, we play on those expectations and then pull the rug out from under people – the screen goes black and there is just sound around, or the film burns up and then there’s a gun shot… It makes you think about space and it makes you think about the environment around you as you are sucked into and then pushed out of the film.”

Cardiff’s art also calls attention to how the senses can sometimes be deceptive when we have a certain expectation about what reality is. “During the Renaissance when they first invented perspective, there was a whole rhetoric around reality and how the drawings seemed real, and then when photographs were first invented people were freaked out because they thought the photographs were real. When you follow the rhetoric about reality right up to the present, the dialogue hasn’t really changed that much – and now we have reality TV. What has happened over the generations is that people’s consciousness has changed and so has our ability to understand reality in different levels. But where is it going to lead? We are all trying to push each other to a new understanding of reality – a much more spiritual level, maybe…”

Janet Cardiff first became known by her attempts to facilitate altered perceptions through “sound walks.” These site-specific audio and video tours are now available in cities all over the world. Layering sound onto urban landscapes, she invites participants into a dream world by bringing in the history, mystery and veracity of a location – where “reality is siphoned” into her amorphous narrative. Once you are equipped with headphones and, depending on the piece, a hand-held video screen, Cardiff’s voice leads you on a forty- to fifty-minute journey. The surroundings on the predetermined route are intertwined with a story the viewer is now partially responsible for. It is the participant that brings life to the work.

Project Brief

This project is based around our explorations and applications of notions of space. This project has a lot of interest for me because it is the perfect way to develop ideas I have been researching recently.
My main objective is to create a scene through sound and projection which makes the audience consider their perceptions of reality in some way.
I have recently been looking at the work of Janet Cardiff and am really interested in the way she uses sound and space to draw the audience into an alternate reality.