New Ways of Thinking About Film

by Freddy Paul Grunert and Cristina Fiordimela

a presentation at
"The Real of Reality"
the 2016 International Conference on Philosophy and Film
Karlsruhe, Germany
November, 2016

Freddy Paul Grunert is an artist and associate curator at ZKM, the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, a research centre and museum that specialises in the study of information technology and its social and cultural repercussions. ETCAEH Nova Gorica and TU Technischen Universität Berlin are two of his most recent lecturing posts. Starting from the mid-1980's, he has contributed as an artist and curator to film, art, and new media festivals, including the Venice Bienniales, where his work "Xenografia" launched a series of research efforts into new media art and communication physics. He has been recognized by the United Nations for his contributions to Sustainable Development.

Cristina Fiordimela is visiting professor of Interior and Exhibition Design at the Architecture University of the Politecnico di Milano, she is a member of ICOM (International Council of Museum) and Ordine degli architetti di Milano (professional architecture order). Holding a degree and a master in architecture, in 2008 she earned a Ph.D. in Interior architecture and Exhibition design from the Politecnico di Milano with a research grant at Le Corbusier Fondation. She has been a regular contributor to the Domus, Abitare, Babylon City of dreams and Il giornale dell'Architettura since 2005. Among her most important publications are the books, The concept of relational museum from Andrea Emiliani (2016) and Interiors of Monasteries (2013).

Editor's Note: The language in this article is highly technical, as are the many references to the ideas of various art and film theorists. Thus, in the main, this article is intended for the student of art theory, not the general reader.

Even so — the reason we reprinted this article on the Adi Da Up Close site was because of the significance of two leading art theory scholars proposing to completely reconceive how we think about film and filmmaking, based on Adi Da's ideas about (and illustrations of) the digital image. The final two paragraphs of this proposal make that clear in a way that every reader can understand.

We Propose to Regard Films as Representations for How Apparatus-Based Images of Reality and Reality Itself Correlate

A prior state of unity, or the collapse of the time-space dimension of the motion picture, the suspension of egoity, realized in the immanence of the a-perspective image. A-perspective, or beyond perception time, beyond the optical representation of space. The image-art of Adi Da Samraj shows a reading of the relationship of the "real of reality" that exceeds the dichotomy between what’s real and the reproduction of reality, in “the Transcendental Condition of Reality, always, inherently, and totally beyond and prior to any ‘point of view’”. The image is concurrently departure, arrival and action, operating within a medium where the process of the event generates new processes. The a-perspective elaborated by Adi Da interrelates cognitive processes and participation with the idea of space as a transcendental attitude, as a connection between inter-subjective and perceptual environments, revealed through the metamorphosis produced by light over the surface.

The temporal dimension is included in the spatial one in a combined view, where transition and movement are sublimated in the composition of a fixed image. From photography, to the synthesis of the sign as trace of motion, to the abstract suite narratives, the surfaces elaborated by Adi Da with the environment in which he is steeped as a whole, transcend the "chrono-cinematographic narrativity", to settle in the a-dimension, where the action area, the surface, acts as a cognitive active threshold. The geometries broken down by the implicit thrusts of the instinctive gesture pry open the performance to bring out the form, which becomes the channel for an unpredictable process that in turn generates further processes.

The images as a whole convey the experience of an ecstatic essence that interprets the form as a dynamic relationship between the things being touched by the breaths of light, as a synaesthetic passage from mind to matter. The surface of the image is a media leaf, a screen, its thickness near to zero, a membrane-like device for getting closer, to almost touch the sign’s a-dimensionality, making the transition from flat screen representation to consciousness-activating flat screen. Adi Da contrasts this process of identification that turns art into a knowledge device. Adi Da activates consciousness, as a participated cognitive act, "sibling-correlation between emotional and intellectual intelligence". The screen-image, the free intersection trespassing beyond the shape and abstraction pair, evocate Paul Klee’s compositions and his contribution on the subject of non-separateness between context and action, between nature and subject, taking us to the “de-localized subject” of the "L’œil et l’esprit" (Merleau-Ponty) "which inhabits space and time". The a-perspective of Adi Da and its fixing and opening in the screen, that joins analysis and synthesis, opens out as a sort of common thread among the folds of interstitial research and inter-disciplinary inaction, where the perspective — as time and space perception — is recanted since, besides underlying a linear conception of the world, it effects a swerve between theory and practice.

Pavel Florenskij (1919), mathematician and art scholar, defines the icon’s painted surface a "focalization screen between artwork (author) and end-user", a space which is neither limited nor closed, but without perspective, lacking the depth that carries linear time perception. Bi-dimensional space of n-dimensions, as unlimited dimensional expansion of space. Getting back to Adi Da’s work we wish to recall Florenskij once again, when he lingers on the non-scission between real plane and imaginary plane, by defining the screen-icon as “plane/wrap or real plane”, where the distinction between "the real" and "the imaginary doesn’t make sense because they coincide in the unity of the plane-screen-image. “The vitality of Floresnkij’s specific-art depends on the degree of cohesion of the sensations of the content and of the means of expression of the content”. And such coincidence also provides the key for interpreting the image as an active source of knowledge, which Adi Da develops in other terms. Florenskij speaks of the "artistic object" as the relationship’s source and motor, when he explains that “the artistic object is not a thing but must be intended as the source of the creation that flows eternally and never runs out, as living, pulsating activity”. Which is why "the work of art lives only in the fullness of the necessary conditions for its existence, according to and within which it was conceived."

Adi Da moves within the plane like a possible simultaneity between knowledge and participation, as a-dimension where the experience is realized and extends beyond the plane itself. The plane is a form of adherence between the motions that generate signs, images, suites, and the motions that cause their emanation. The flat-screen-image of Adi Da acts as interstice of a reality a priori. Interstice as topological surface of source-derivation of the form itself. Interstice as sediment of the relationship which, getting back to Nicolas Bourriaud (1988) causes "the increase in social exchanges, greater individual mobility, gradual opening up of the isolated places, new media and digitalization, which went hand in hand with the opening of minds."

Apparatus-based images of Reality and Reality Itself as correlate is the immanence of light as radiant life, or as revelation if the action. Action-event that is realized in the inter-relationship of bodies, without solution of continuity. Adi Da Samraj sublimates the film time in a unique automatic shutter release of the event, as a sort of "apocatastasis" of an eternal restart that follows an eternal comeback. The perception occurs in the image itself, in the screening as condition of reality, made of infinite planes of light with their intrinsic memory from space, "illumination of matter in its intrinsic profound quality" (Yves Klein/Robert Savage).

Adi Da’s work opens new attitudes towards cinematography by operating precisely within the interstice, intended in the vein of Bourriaud, between apparatus-based images of Reality and Reality Itself "as correlated". In his photographic compositions, Adi Da builds the frames like dynamic image-attractors. Dynamic attractors and basins (Ueda and Lorenz) which in Adi Da’s research are photograms shot in motion, discarding the fixity of the photographic perspective. Frames that trace trajectories of dynamic images. Frames like fundamental devices that in the dynamic pluralism of the trajectories transcend and at the same time tend to include and describe a systemic reality. Photography is systemic in itself, because its many shapes are made by prior photograms, as in the Koch snowflake (Mandelbrot):

Through his apparatus-based images of reality, Adi Da develops a qualitative analysis of each image, based on the space-time of the two-dimensional image, rather than the quantitative description of the chrono-cinematography time-space. In his photographic compositions, the geometric shapes in nature show a self-resemblance (Poincaré, Smale), sensitive to the fractal plurality of many points of view, that oscillate from the natural to the constructed-complex one.

* * *

In the wake of Adi Da and the prior attractor dynamic photogram, the digital image, which Adi Da develops together with the photographic one, could become a new paradigm for cinematography.

Adi Da has a place in a story of the image that includes Antonioni, Francesco Lo Savio, Emilio Trini, Ettore Sottsass, Lars Von Trier, and Alberto Grifi — artists who work on future-cinema, and who collect experiences originating from the shamanic dimension of the world.