HOPERAPERTA

9. Paralipomeni

 IV. Synthetic, Syncretic, Synesthetic: Imago as Arte-Factum

 by Maurizio Barberis

1. The empathic relationship between work and viewer brings us to the theme of the  synesthetic image-synthetic image. Synesthesia, from its origins, contains the search for harmonic relationships that make sounds and space congruent with the idea of number, the transformation of forms into numbers. Synesthesia presents itself as the soul and spirit of the analogue mutation into the digital, of the discrete into the continuous. By first translating the aesthetic into the empathic, and then the empathic into the proportional and the congruent. The number thus appears, as the final register of the possible implementation of different factors. We should remember the fact that among the initial elements that contributed to the synesthesia-number relationship, we find the Pythagorean tetractys, a dynamic symmetry that regulates the proportional relations between space and time. But synesthesia also perfects the mechanism of illusion in the image-representation through collateral performative techniques, such as the frame that establishes the start of the work, the differences between reality and illusion. The frame sets the boundaries of the representation, differentiating it from the world, and at the same time it introduces us to the theme of illusion through suspension of disbelief, a fundamental matrix of artistic representation. The frame, in effect, implies the introduction in the work of an “atopical/atypical” object, foremost among equals of the realities of the world of phenomena. The image, then, as diversified reality, which appears illusory and circumscribed, worthy of interest and attention only by virtue of being an illusion.

2. The atopical dimension of the image takes us back to the vexata quaestio of the existence or lack of a referent external to the representation. A referent that becomes available through “memory,” thanks to the access to a mental image, through “mimesis,” an iconic representation based on the relationship between resemblance and similarity, and through “synesthesia,” namely a non-iconic, abstract image-representation, based on the empathic congruence between form and matter. What conception of space, then, emerges from a social universe dominated by a totally virtualized communicative habitat? What is the position and the configuration that the image, the fundamental basis of communicative relation, has taken on as a result of the modification of the media and techniques of its own construction? The electronic icon is now, in all appearances, a determining part of our vital environment, and thanks to the introduction of notions like the network, non-linearity, the threshold, the border, also of our theoretical environment.

3. The duplication of the real through representation is replaced by a synthetic environment, which modifies our perceptive potentialities, deconstructs our space-time coordinates, as well as the systems of expectations that influence the relationship with real experiences: low tolerance for stasis, ongoing pursuit of excitement of sensory perception, expectations of perfection in performance, expectations of speed and efficacy of problem solving, superficial and limited contact with the real environment. The electronic media, in practice, alter perceptive structures and, as a result, the coordinates of interaction between subject and social reality.

4. It might be somewhat useful to introduce the notion of the eidetic or mental image, which pivots on a particular function of memory capable of retaining the image of an object for a period of time greater than the disappearance of the object from the horizon of the observer. This function is particularly vivid in childhood, where it serves to prolong in memory the cognitive function derived from exploration of the world. Eidetic memory, precisely. Mental images are thus a derivative of this childhood aptitude, which manifests itself in the ability to summon up, with the mind’s eye, figures that belong to the past. We can therefore talk about an image as a mental object, an image without image, lacking – that is – in its fundamental premise: the possibility of being communicated.

5. The sign constructed through digital synthesis defines itself as the transfer of mental environments into permanent images, breaking with the typical form of the icon which is expected to be a tool of mediation of communication between men of different cultures, and hypothesizes the image as direct transmission from one mind to another mind. This hypothetical transmission happens through the concreteness of the image-object produced by digital synthesis, where the sign becomes a concrete element and the relationship between image and reality is surpassed by the parallel reality constructed inside the world of computers. There is no longer any limit to the graphic translation of the image. Sign becomes dream, and image can have the same dreamy indeterminacy, and perhaps the same psychic value, the same ability to act on the deeper structures of the Ego.

6. So what remains of the relationship between imagination and matter, imago and conscious reality? In effect, two types of memory are intertwined, as in the possible extension of social memory with the tools of video and hypertext, as well as the greater awareness of deep memory, by way of the relative simplicity of the passage between mental image and concrete image, and the potential surpassing of reality through the fiction of the digitally processed image. Oral tradition versus writing. The current structure of the electronic image leads to a return of forms of oral expression as opposed to those of writing, of civilizations that communicated through the mediation of a system of highly conventional signs that were difficult to learn.

7. The main characteristics of oral societies are strong participation, a sense of community, and accentuation of the present as opposed to the past and the future. It can be supposed that the era of civilizations based on writing had opposite values, namely a weak sense of community, a lack of participation and an ascendency of the past and future over the present. The age of the digital image leads, instead, to what Walter Ong calls secondary orality, though this does not always have characteristics similar to the oral civilizations of the past. Participation can easily transform into aggressive behavior, the sense of community can devolve into herd instinct, and the accentuation of the present can turn into lack of historical perspective and projects for the future. The image still has a strong impact on social organization, then, although its role has lost many of the characteristics that distinguished it apart in the past. The image spreads like a modern plague, often reducing the complexity of the visible to feeble communicative cunning.

8. There is talk of this epochal passage from image-communication, based on criteria of representation, to image-contamination, image-virus that deconstructs the sense of identity through the obscenity of the image itself, which sees all, represents all, bringing the internal, the hidden and the invisible to the surface. All this presents itself as a parody of the psychic image, of the mind’s gaze as a penetrating one that brings to light even that which should not be seen, upon risk of the definitive disappearance of the values brought out by the endoscopy. The result is a catastrophic and negative vision, a return to the social forms of orality, of the lack of distance between what is represented and the representation. The hyper-vision and hyper-image generated by multimedia forms are viewed and experienced as the paradigm of the obscene. From the utopia of the representation of a perfect society to the dystopia of the absence of any representation. The perversion consists simply in this hyperbolic substitution of reality with a mental image, and in the delirious sense of power that comes with the use of info-images as a mental construct in itself, without mediation, as an infinite possibility within the grasp of anyone and everyone.

9. The digital image, vice versa, presents certain structural characteristics that ought to be kept in mind: it is a highly manipulatable image, and in real time, which assumes this condition as specific support for its own semantic values. Furthermore, it implies the end of the narrative model, with a clear passage from an image-story, iconic, temporal, sequential, to an a-narrative image, indifferent to the icon, lacking in temporal references, and non-sequential. It also implies the fragmentation of the relationship among subject, perception and configuration, since these three roles present themselves as independent of one another. As in the case, for example, of an image that is the result of the manipulation of multiple persons. Finally, it has a forceful effect of perception training on the spectator: in other words, it is self-formative. The most interesting aspect, for our purposes, has to do with the possible manipulations the digital image can undergo, such as an increase or decrease of definition, division of the surface into parts, zooming in, changes of color intensity, inversion of the direction of time. All this modifies the idea we have built for ourselves regarding the relationship between representation and perception, and it increases the sensation that the image does not convey reality, but is reality itself, a parallel reality exactly as in the case of anamorphosis, a deformation of perception of the Baroque field of perspective, which becomes an tool running parallel to perspective itself.

10. The info-image is self-representative since it “signals itself as image,” has no need of a frame, and actually constitutes an extension of our mental space. Likewise, manipulation generates linguistic emphasis on time, because the sequence generated by the speed of the image can be infinitely broken down, having no minimum unit as in the case of the film frame, and more closely resembles the incessant flow of visual perception. The ‘vitesse,’ the dromospheric space, indicates a reflection on the movement of movement, on movement as an integral and intrinsic quality of the video image, since it is lacking the film frame. Thus, through manipulation of the image-movement we can determine an additional artificial quality, because whatever speed we establish will in any case be different from the natural movement of the referent. The reference, unlike the image used by art, can no longer be led back to any type of self-referentiality. We might speak instead of referential density, of accumulation of referents that produce themselves through the possibilities of manipulation of the image. While in the imagery of the avant-gardes of the 20th century the necessity, determined by the epochal passage from the icon as narrative fragment to icon without narration, was to establish a referent inside the image itself, in the digital image this necessity has been overcome, so to speak, by the referential density of the info-image.

11. All this is accompanied by the fall of the traditional narrative model and the imposition of a new form of narration. A new type of ‘reality effect’ that fragments behaviors and permits portrayals to re-present themselves in the span of a few instants, also in very different temporal contexts, conveying the impression of a narrate extension of these images to reality, of an extroflection that cannot be explained or understood without starting from the epic fiction underlying the figuration. It is the fiction that explains/unfolds reality, not vice versa, namely reality that explains/unfolds the fiction. We are looking at a true “reality of abstract ideas,” which can be extended to the aesthetic forms that shape the portrayals, such as colors, textures and so on. The resulting fragmentation of perception counters the idea of continuity of the percept, counters its pregnancy of meaning, constructed by the set of visual consistencies that regulate our relations with the ‘real’ world, permitting us to conserve a relative constant image of the forms that constitute the whole of the visual field. The pathway of interpretation of the image thus becomes unpredictable, and its realism is based not on the relationship between image and viewer, but in the ability to foreshadow mental images, to make what we watch appearing on the screen correspond to an inner thought.

12. What, then, are the conditions of the subject faced by a digital image, by is centrifugal character, the way it always shifts the focus towards something that exists elsewhere? In this case, the image derived from written language and the image determined by thought coincide perfectly. The info-image, finally, matches the aesthetic of the sublime against the aesthetic of beauty: it draws on an idea of complex, incommunicable form, whose emotional impact is conveyed by the perception of our limitation, by our inability to grasp its ultimate reasoning, as opposed to an idea of form designable only through the generalization of aesthetic judgment. Romanticism versus neoclassicism: the electronic image presents itself as a catastrophe of sensation, experienced as imperfect infinity, as an unfathomable abyss of the completeness of experience.