The Bigger Picture
There is a bigger picture today, a vastly bigger picture. When we discuss the spectator and the spectacle we are invariably discussing this bigger picture; even when we think we are just discussing a piece of entertainment content or our own relationship with it, we are delving into a discussion of a bigger picture.
The age of the upgrade is dominated by cyberspace and technological convenience. The modes for telling stories continue to proliferate and our participation in those modes and in the creation of our own recorded stories is a fact empowered by the digital rebirth.
In terms of gaining an understand our day-to-day existences and to continue living our day-to-day lives practically, this is a fact we ignore at own peril.
One could argue that the world wide web/cyberspace is the greatest cultural artifact the human race has produced thus far. Why? Because it is being shaped and imprinted upon by every single person who uses it!
The inhabitants of this planet are creating a depository of information - a networked-narrative - of its ways of being, from the beginning of its existence, even its theories on the beginnings of reality itself, to reflections of its current affairs and speculations of where it is going... and what I just wrote is now a part of that network-narrative.
“If memory is our means of preserving that which we consider most valuable, it is also painfully linked to our transience. When we die, our memories die with us. In a sense, the elaborate system of externalized memory [of cultural artefacts] we’ve created is a way of fending off mortality”- Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein, 2011:19
The Fictional Truth
Whether by chance or by our own design, longevity
and immortality is something we can only achieve
external to our corporeal selves via the spectacles that we leave behind.
An imprint of a person long since gone - a nuclear heat shadow in Hiroshima.
“The soul's made of stories, not atoms”
- The Doctor, Doctor Who: The Rings of Akhaten, 2013
If you have access to the internet, the chances are, you have established an online identify. The primary way of doing this is via the social media platforms and the most primary of these is currently Facebook.
My Facebook timeline: a part of the digital me.
By creating a Facebook profile you are leaving an imprint of yourself online; every time you post something on Facebook you are adding to that imprint and causing your online shadow to grow. A platform like Facebook is a daily log, it is a diary, everyday you add new snapshots to it (see 366 FRAMES 2012: My 366 Project). Your online presence is the recorded narrative and it will be the narrative of your life once you have gone.
On its own, cyberspace is a cold realm of code, but our participation in its shaping gives it meaning, we are the footprints in the snow.
And the same is true of the entirety of your online presence. Every single thing you attribute to yourself online will go on to become a part of who you were; all those media empowered elements will become a part of your narrative, your spectacle, your imprint.
“Adults and children sometimes have boards in their bedrooms or living-rooms on which they pin pieces of paper: letters, snapshots, reproductions of paintings, newspaper cuttings, original drawings, postcards… they have been chosen in a highly personal way to match and express the experiences of the room’s inhabitant. Logically, these boards should replace museums.”- John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1972:23
Forty years on, in addition to our bedroom walls, we now also have Facebook walls. Whether it be a poster, a status update, or a YouTube video, It is crucial to understand our want to pin and post pre-established media contruct material on these walls, because understanding it will explain our want to engage, absorb and promote the media in all its varied forms.
Fundamentally, it all
boils down to narratives and why we take reality and remold it into narrative forms. We have told and engaged in stories from the year dot. From the first time we left an imprint on our cave wall and probably quite a while before...
41,000 years later, the imprints of a person still remains.
"Cave paintings demonstrate that cavemen understood visual representations as being about more than the process of looking. Perhaps even more so, cavemen understood that visual presentations were also absorptions into something bigger."- Ways of Being: The Spectator and the Spectacle, 2013:99.
The Bigger Narrative
The sustainability of our day-to-day psychologies depend on being a part of a bigger narrative. Everyday we experience stories, we engage in stories, we exchange stories and we tell
ourselves stories inside our heads.
"Narratives are intimately linked to the human intellect, because they offer us explanations of a world that does not make sense."
- Ways of Being: The Spectator and the Spectacle, 2013:99
Stories enable us to grow, they console and make us whole - it is through them that we are able to come to terms with death and are able to achieve transcendence.
Through a process of interfacing, the two databases of the spectator and the spectacle speak a fundamentally ancient language - the language of narratives.
And, ultimately, through the process of exchanging that dialogue, they are able to grow bigger. Narratives, as told in any medium, enable our intellects to grow from one form into another, story-after-story, experience-after-experience:
"What is it about stories, anyway? Anthropologists tell us that storytelling is central to human existence. That it’s common to every known culture. That it involves a symbiotic exchange between teller and listener — an exchange we learn to negotiate in infancy. Just as the brain detects patterns in the visual forms of nature — a face, a figure, a flower — and in sound, so too it detects patterns in information. Stories are recognizable patterns, and in those patterns we find meaning. We use stories to make sense of our world and to share that understanding with others. They are the signal within the noise. So powerful is our impulse to detect story patterns that we see them even when they’re not there."
As I have already commented to several people who have confused my aims for this project as being concerned with films alone (which is understandable considering my love of the medium), I have said this:
In this project (and in Ways of Being), I am not just talking about films, or even about media as whole, what I am discussing is our ways of being and how, through our interfacing ways of being spectators and spectacles, narratives are central to and expressions of our universal ways of being.
This is a much more fundamental endeavour: I am talking about how films, media, storytelling, cyberspace, our perception of reality, etc. and how we interface with all of these inventions play into our ways of being and how they can explain our ways of being.
Ways 2 Interface is about how we interface with the bigger picture, the bigger narrative - the network-narrative, technological and neurological.
Read part 7 (the final part) of the introduction - Something #todowithfilm: Me, My Path and My Research Web
