<nettime> trigger

[Jordan Crandall <crandall@blast.org>]

I've been battling with a script about virtual machines that drive the
representation of movement.  So far, it reads as below.

EXTERIOR-OPEN FIELD-DAY

ZOOM IN to an eye framed by a viewfinder.  PAN DOWN to a finger resting
uneasily on the trigger of a rifle.  Pulsing with tension, flesh pressed
against metal, the routings of the combat device course through the body
as the film courses through the projector.  Careful breaths, quickening
heartbeats, and the small vibrations of the finger mix with the staccato
of the gear-driven celluloid.  An eye locked on a viewfinder, a body held
immobile, an image-target moving across the field of vision.  What moves,
how does it move, how can that movement be tracked, intercepted, recorded,
re-presented?  All of the moving elements synchronized in the explosive
moment of "getting the shot."  A target-object to be seen, saved,
eliminated in a process of division:  I/you, us/them, here/there.  Body
and machine meeting in a trigger device, awaiting the explosive act of
engagement.  Seeing-naming-firing.  Perception orchestrated, positions and
borders drawn, movements and forms contoured.  A victim-picture captured
in the routings between perception, technology, and the pacings of the
body.

INTERIOR-CONTROLROOM-DAY

CUT TO a database, glistening with calculations, a slight contour of
bodily movement coalescing across the grids.  ZOOM IN toward the
characteristics of a target.  Coordination points adhere toward the
recognition of a pattern.  A knot of presence, subject to a network
seeing.  SOUND OF A "CLICK".  Target grid and object align, body and
representation fuse, clicked into place as in the clicking of a
mouse-trigger.  Speech halts, replaced by the sounds of a statistical
array.  An image captioned as in an old silent film.  A figure made silent
in order to instill a new kind of voice.  A figure immobilized in order to
instill a new kind of movement.  A process of sensitization across the
conduits of the network.

--

Here the gears grind to a halt, for I am not sure how to represent the
action.  Which machine takes precedence?  On the one hand, there is an
eye-viewfinder-trigger apparatus, in which the eyes of the director, the
actor, and the audience are caught.  On the other hand, there is the
agent-database-coupler apparatus, which positions us as subjects in
another act of seeing.  Can one, in fact, construct a film based upon this
circuitry of vision and representation?




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