Photo #5, The Fifth Day

Released in January 2009, our third data cinema work by Carlo Zanni challenges the very essence of cinema by, in fact, not being a movie clip at all but giving the impression it is. The Fifth Day is a slideshow (for lack of a more flattering comparison) heightened with an extremely cinematic soundtrack. By the latter I mean to point to the relationship between the presented photographs, their transitions and the sense of movement created by their visual aspects in conjunction with the music. The narrative suggested, as Zanni himself clarifies, is the invisible protagonist’s taxi ride across Alexandria, Egypt (Zanni, 2009b). Ten stills portray the progression across the city, with no other semblance of coherence than an overall feel of spatial cohesion and the narrative music’s bonding presence (the stills are cataloged here).

The work, however, remains exemplar of data cinema for the slideshow’s undeniable cinematic quality and, of course, its characteristic aesthetic dependence on data flux. Every still has a detail that is modified according to information gathered across the Internet. The nature of the data flux is derived, however, not only from the visitor or from an artist-installed webcam, as with The Possible Ties and My Temporary Visiting Position, but also from independent websites (such as http://apple.com/trailers, Appendix 3 Photo #9) and more elaborate processing of user data. Photo #5 is an interesting example of the latter, as the name on the shop sign changes according to the Geo IP localization of the last visitor.

The still and moving image

For the sake of an accurate description of The Fifth Day, I must admit I have prematurely taken for granted the ‘undeniable cinematic quality’ attributed to the work above. However, a look at the history of art cinema will prove the enterprise of blurring the distinction between photography and cinema has been undertaken before, and that these precedents establish a solid case for The Fifth Day’s inclusion in the cinema canon. Of notable relevance is Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), a splendid short science fiction film composed almost exclusively of stills, and therefore highly similar to Zanni’s piece (read ASN’s treatise on La Jetée here).

Photo #8, The Fifth Day

La Jetée has been met with manifold interpretations and analyses particularly concerned with the meaning of the photograph’s use in relation to cinema – a discussion that will now be transferred to The Fifth Day. As G. Uriel Onlow remarked, the stills are “profoundly cinematic” as, first of all, their very composition is inspired by cinema: the ‘bird’s eye view’ (Photo # 2, Photo #10) is alternated with ‘over the shoulder shots’ (Photo #3) and ‘optical viewpoints’ (Photo #8) (1999, p. 16).

Their combination, as Roland Barthes argues, reaches by virtue of their concatenation an overarching meaning that transcends the individual photograph (1977). The stills therefore suggest a cohesion that is not only atmospheric, but also of a narrative nature: the cinematic compositions insinuate a cameraman and a subject, a protagonist. Photos #5 and #7, for example, step out of the taxi to show its progression through the streets. The combination of ‘optical viewpoint’ shots and the documentation of the protagonist’s proceedings through his environment is a typical cinematic convention.

The soundtrack helps the creation of a spatial whole. According to a psychoanalytic reading of music, the latter lowers the threshold of disbelief due to its connection to a primordial sonic space. This space is the first emplacement of the infant, originating from even before the distinction between the self and the other. As such, due to its primary connection to the psyche, music does not alienate the audience from the image. On the contrary, if a level of simultaneity is upheld, it enhances the viewer’s immersion (Gorbman, 1998).The iThe

The image’s synchronicity with the soundtrack brings us to the second cinematic characteristic identified by Onlow. The techniques used to create a sequence imitate “filmic styles: fades and dissolves create a seamless flow out of the still images” (1999, p. 16). The transitions are made at the pace of the music, which’s increasing rhythm and crescendo suggest a progression that is proper to the narrative paradigm.

The crucial difference with cinema, however, lies in the work’s still indubitable composition of still frames – an atavistic return to the beginnings, to the very materiality, of film. As a consequence, “they expose the illusion of duration in the cinema which is achieved through a ‘false’ movement” (Onlow, 1999, p. 16). Indeed, if such a sequence of images, with a punctilious composition, clever sequential arrangement and accompanied by an engirdling score can suggest motion and narrative, what is the innovation of the true ‘motion pictures’?

Time, space, the world arrested

This essay will not attempt to answer the question, except consider the cracks it reveals in the ontology of cinema and photography, which are equally explored in works such as La Jetée and The Fifth Day. The tension of the latter lies in the friction between photographic and cinematic perceptions of temporal relations and movement. The motion picture arranges its stills in a movement that bears past, present and future – while photography is seen as capturing a past and conserving it for present proof of its existence (Onlow, 1999). The stills in The Fifth Day do both; they have a temporality proper to movement and an eternality proper to photography:

[It] strips cinema of that element which emancipated it from photography, that is of its very core: movement. By doing so it proposes a different kind of temporality which doesn’t only rely on movement and which combines the photographic this was and perhaps still is with the cinematic this is or will be. The photograph-as-cinema encompasses all times at once, an image proclaiming this was, is and will be at the same time (Onlow, 1999, p. 17).

Chris Marker's La Jetée. Also read ASN's post on the film.

Onlow argues that the consequence is an implosion of chronological time, and that, by virtue of its content, this is central to the meaning of La Jetée (Onlow, 1999). In a similar spirit, Bruce Kawin remarks that time travel, the main topic of Marker’s short film, relies on a conceptualization of time as simultaneous – free from a moral linearity: past, present and future co-exist. The reel film is a materialization of this concept, and La Jetée its embodiment (1982).

As seen in My Temporary Visiting Position, Zanni also re-conceptualizes time in his works. Yet due to its ‘data cinema’ quality, it does so in a fundamentally different way: while the settings, the overall photographs, never change and can therefore be seen as an unchanging site visited by a temporal viewer, the details influenced by data flux are ephemeral. These details are partially time-bound, but are never recorded and therefore forever lost. Unlike The Possible Ties and My Temporary Visiting Position, Zanni does not keep, to the viewer’s knowledge, an archive with the different versions of The Fifth Day.

Instead of time, however, the comparable implosion to La Jetée is that of space. Every still depicts a different segment of an otherwise cohesive space: Alexandria. Although arranged in ‘taxi-drive’ sequence, and therefore suggesting the their mere ‘passing’ nature, I suggest that their composition as a sequence of photographs allows the viewer to dwell in every site long enough to establish it as a space by its own virtue. Had it been a film, their temporal existence would have been limited to, as so nicely worded by Onlow above, an ephemeral ‘what is or will be’. All sites are now ‘what was, is, and will be’, despite the viewer-induced changes and the audience’s changing presence.

This reconfiguration of time and space perceptions results in the contemporaneity Zanni’s works rely on for their ‘social consciousness’ value. The viewer is a direct witness and a causer of a social situation abroad. While some images suggest that the social conditions are largely due to domestic demographic, economic and political situations (take Photo #7, which comments on the literacy rate or Photo #4 displays the Corruption Perceptions Index of Egypt), others depend on ‘the foreigner’.

Instead of time, however, the comparable implosion to La Jetée is that of space. Every still depicts a different segment of an otherwise cohesive space: Alexandria. Although arranged in ‘taxi-drive’ sequence, and therefore suggesting the their mere ‘passing’ nature, I suggest that their composition as a sequence of photographs allows the viewer to dwell in every site long enough to establish it as a space by its own virtue. Had it been a film, their temporal existence would have been limited to, as so nicely worded by Onlow above, an ephemeral ‘what is or will be’. All sites are now ‘what was, is, and will be’, despite the viewer-induced changes and the audience’s changing presence.

This reconfiguration of time and space perceptions results in the contemporaneity Zanni’s works rely on for their ‘social consciousness’ value. The viewer is a direct witness and a causer of a social situation abroad. While some images suggest that the social conditions are largely due to domestic demographic, economic and political situations (take Photo #7, which comments on the literacy rate or Photo #4 displays the Corruption Perceptions Index of Egypt), others depend on ‘the foreigner’.

Interestingly, they do so meaningfully. For example, Photo #5 displays the name of the last visitor’s location as a shop sign, alluding to the commerce’s gearing to external culture and the conception of foreign attributes as desirable (‘cool’). The garments in Photo #6 change color depending on the IPs of the 13 last visitors, suggesting the connection between commerce and tourism (in particular, the commercial popularity of, once more, foreign culture). Finally, the billboard in Photo #9 shows movie posters of globally distributed films, implying the spread of a mainly Western culture (supposing Hollywood to still be the main producer of these goods).

The interconnectedness of Egypt’s topography and foreign culture is therefore underlined by Zanni in order to “investigate topical subjects for the so called “Middle East” aiming for a comparison with the audience’s birth/living country” (Zanni, 2009b, “Synopsis”). The work is a hint towards the far reach of globalization, and the ‘butterfly effect’ so likely to arise in the chaos-like complexity of global networks.[1]

Formally, however, The Fifth Day seems also to comment, and perhaps searches to redress, the ‘fragmented’ nature of our worldviews. Neil Postman offers us his view on the television’s effect on human culture and structures of thoughts in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public discourse in the age of show business. To summarize his interesting argument, he sees a saturation of our capacity to concentrate, delve into and actively engage with socially relevant topics due to the fragmented worldview transmitted to us by the media (2005 [1985]). By insisting on the retention of the image for a longer time than usually allocated by news-giving media, Zanni forces the viewer to engage with the image in an intense fashion.

Conclusions on the Zanni analyses: the ‘social consciousness experiences’

I began these series with the intention of showing Zanni’s innovative heightening of conventional media was wielded with the intent of creating a contemporaneity of the viewer with the artwork’s subject and thus creating the ‘social consciousness experiences’ he wills his audience to undergo. In The Possible Ties, Zanni ponders on the ephemerality of a media world and gives it an anxiety-ridden existential twist. In My Temporary Visiting Position, Zanni comments on the emotional duality of being away from home: the constant melancholy versus the advantages of being abroad; the connectedness that is retained thanks to media such as the Internet; and the collapse of time and space, which questions the exact position of the human being and conceptions of the self. Finally, The Fifth Day is a comment on the global nature of globalization, the usually cursory nature of media news and again a reconsideration of time and space.

With this knowledge, the ambiguities of interactivity, immersion and engagement that riddle the discussion of contemporary digital art are effaced in front of the concept of a global mediation – a concept that does not allow for a neatly cut distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’ world. Rather, it expands the one onto the other, to create an entity that connects the individual’s physical space (which consists of only limited interaction with society) to a shared meta-universe of ideas (cyberspace) that find their grounding in the individual worlds of many (and thus is rather omniscient in nature and allows for many alternative entrances to society). The traditional keywords for media art are then exposed in their incapability to truly capture the essence of data cinema: interaction is found on the level of ideas instead of technology or user experience; engagement relies on a sufficient amount of immersion (its supposed antipode) to create a significant space for the spectator. Current definitions and applications of these terms rely too forcibly on the relationship between the individual and the artwork as a fundamentally private exchange between idiosyncratic worldviews. Only the global mediation achieves a helpful description of Zanni’s art, in which the world of the artwork is one that is public and social, while the individual’s is private yet open to socialization.

In other words, a virtual landscape comes into being in all three works, informed by specific data but which’s gist lies in the idea that gathered the data in the first place. Mediating between existence and non-existence, whether it is threatened by a fragmentation of the self through a mosaic world-view, the overflow of information or the instabilities of physical displacement, these landscapes form the loci of one’s mind’s encounter with the awareness of many others. As such, through his artworks, Zanni “expands an individual psychosis into a societal and image-political horizon” (Grau, 2007, p. 141).

The movement from an individualistic worldview towards a ‘societal horizon’ falls in line with Zanni aim to produce ‘social consciousness experiences’. The re-conceptualization of a network-entrenched human being lies, at least in Zanni’s works, in the creation of a virtual landscape that permits the connection, the empathy, with other world-inhabitants through the overlap of familiar with foreign elements. In other words, we see the acting out of Kluitenberg’s global mediation, albeit differing from piece to piece. In conclusion, Zanni’s motto “Information is the new color” really does summarize his works and his intentions – information (data) shapes the artwork (and subsequent worldviews) as never before.

There are many questions that remain unanswered, and in these analyses unexplored. I have focused on the aesthetic qualities and devices used to convey a particular message and entice the global mediation as described above. However, how can we conceptualize Zanni’s relationship to his own works? Put differently, questions of authorship and spectatorship emerge with the socialization and connection of the artwork to the spectator’s ‘real’ world. The artwork no longer constructs a fictional universe that may be seen as separate from reality. However, the creator of the fictional universe, the artist, cannot be the creator of our physical reality. Or can he? The latter suggestion forces us to review the exact extent to which our worldviews, our realities, are imminently shaped by the media and the mental schemas it transmits.

Finally, if the artwork has shifted in its means of exposure and production, and is never completed due to its ever-changing nature, are we witnessing a redefinition in the ontology of art? Must it change our understanding of art created before the upcoming of novel technology? Typically, conceptual shifts brought on by innovative creations do occur and affect our stance towards the ‘old’. Sometimes, as happened with the art of painting after the introduction of photography and later of film, this may liberate the previous from certain constraints and set particular expectations on the new. Whether Internet Art can be perceived as changing the very nature of art is therefore equally a valid enquiry – and I have already hinted above at one change: art’s nod to tactility.

As a last addition to this discussion, I wish to point towards the essay that overhauled certain ways of perceiving the arts within a contemporary, technological society: Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (2008 [1936]). He anticipated the revolution that the mass reproducibility and mass-consumption of art would entail and one of his insights holds that “‘Getting closer to things’ in both spatial and human terms is every bit as passionate a concern of today’s masses as their tendency to surmount the uniqueness of each circumstance by seeing it in reproduction” (2008 [1936], p. 9). In many ways, Zanni’s works are the embodiment of this conclusion: ‘getting closer to things’ indeed echoes what Grau saw as the main potential of the extension of one’s mental spheres through the media and works such as Zanni’s. ‘Surmounting uniqueness by reproduction’ indicates a shift from the individualized world to a more social one, one in which repetitiveness (which Zanni’s works clearly display by their daily re-editing) is key to the passage to a social meta-level. In his essay, Benjamin already foresaw many aspects of Internet Art.

In conclusion, Zanni’s works are but one instance of the exploration of the World Wide Web’s prospects without relinquishing the benefits of other arts, creating varied approaches, phenomena and even alternate worldviews. They may point towards a new human being, one with a distinct position and relation between its self and the world, one with a ‘globally mediated’ world-image. Only time and study will tell in how far these arts will prosper and catalyze. As Stallabrass puts it:

[N]et art, then, is [to be] seen as an archaeology of the future, drawing on the part (especially of modernism), and producing a complex interaction of unrealized past potential and Utopian futures in a synthesis that is close to the ideal of Walter Benjamin (Stallabrass, 2003, p. 48).

[1] Globalism takes place in four sectors: the military, the economic, the environmental and the social (cultural). The rise in globalism (globalization) is seen to progress in increasingly densifying networks, where a lack of point of reference likens it to ‘chaos’ theories, where “small events in one place can have catalytic effects” (Keohane & Nye, 2000, “Density of networks”).

This message was brought to you by...  Aske Bos. Passionate about all things visual, she posts mostly about film, photography, other visual arts and design. She believes interesting understandings of the visual can be achieved in combination with philosophical and psychoanalytical theories. She loves it so much that she is currently studying Film Aesthetics at Oxford. To learn more about Aske, have a look at her info page!