Transcription of: Gazing into the Flames of Anamorphosis: the Nothingness of Open Secret, Unconscious/Television, and CoreCore
This was a talk given by Palais Sinclaire & Lucas Ferraço Nassif at Casa Do Comum, at the Lisbon edition of Open Secret, the third event of Becoming Press’ launch of the book Unconscious/Television (2025), on January 22nd 2025, in Lisbon.
Palais Sinclaire:
Okay—if everyone's ready, we can make a start. We are going to be in this room until about seven, to give an introduction to the program tonight. The main reason we have come here today is for Open Secret, or rather, for an edition of Open Secret, which is a project that is traveling around the world, and it involves screenings of some really interesting video art and film. So we will be going upstairs at 19:00 to watch a schedule of films curated by Open Secret. The reason we are in Lisbon this week, at all, is because we are releasing a book by Lucas Ferraço Nassif which is called Unconscious/Television (2025). The book itself comes as the second in a series, which we didn't know when it started, but we now consider this to be the second in a series which started with this book: Dialogues on CoreCore and the Contemporary Online Avant-Garde (2024).
So tonight, my task is to explain how these three things fit together, at least from our perspective as a publisher: Open Secret, Unconscious/Television and Dialogues on CoreCore. And I will try to tie these things together in a knot, as a way of prefacing the films that you're about to see. I will split [this talk] into halves, where the first is going to be a kind of background of Dialogues on CoreCore, and an attempt to show how it connects with [Unconscious/Television]. And the second half of my talk will be, I will be sort of LARPing as a psychoanalyst and I will be trying to kind of give an introduction to Open Secret, to leave some thoughts in your head to hold in your thoughts while you're watching these film screenings, because, again—and I cannot stress enough—we are here today to watch a very beautiful program of film and cinema that have been curated by Open Secret.
We, as Becoming Press, the publisher of this book, came into contact with Open Secret via the book Dialogues on CoreCore, which is an anthology of essays and artworks which several people in this room participated in, and we are again very grateful for these people coming in today we have, Mischa, Dana, Rokas, in the room with us as well as ChaoticRhizomatic, Angel Kether (and more). I'm arguing that the book we are launching this week [Unconscious/Television] is spiritually the successor to the project Dialogues on CoreCore. On one level, Unconscious/Television turns to Japanese anime in order to make psychoanalytical point that would be otherwise difficult to make, and in the same way, I feel like we needed to include Open Secret in this series of events in order to explain the connection between CoreCore and Unconscious/Television. Open Secret, in a way, mediates the connection that is otherwise hard to refer to. In Dialogues on CoreCore, the subject of this anthology that brought us all into contact was a transient, micro-Avant Garde movement that flickered through TikTok and Instagram for a while, an avant garde filmmaking movement that made use of social media technologies which have increasingly attempted to incorporate things like miniature [editing] suites such as TikTok’s video editing capacities [or Instagram Create]. So I wouldn't exactly say that Open Secret limits itself to CoreCore, but at the very minimum, the overlap between the participants of Open Secret and Dialogues on CoreCore speaks volumes. This group of artists, filmmakers, and writers collaborated in the CoreCore book, and they continue to collaborate in Open Secret, outside of the specific framework of CoreCore.
I wanted to take a moment to read a passage from the editor of both of these books, a friend of ours based in Montreal, a very interesting filmmaker, and intellectual who goes by the alias 0nty [the.ontological.turnt], so I can start by just reading a little bit of a passage from their introduction, starting under the subheading “why make this book at all?”, or, “why does this book deserve to exist?””
“None of this actually demanded any explanation. Commentary is an interaction, not an unfolding of secret meanings”.
That's a quotation from Louis Morelle, the person who wrote the introduction to our first book.
[0nty continues:] “It is almost inappropriate to create a book like this. A book whose static, physical, two-dimensional frame cannot but violate its twin foci of CoreCore—video work and film, which is composed of “movement” and “online”, which is both in perpetual movement and requires no external IRL supplement in order to be interpreted. Furthermore, a book is necessarily somewhat gatekeeping, and archivization at the same time, we cannot afford to give the book away and it cannot be updated after we print it. The interaction already happened. It happened on December 2nd. So why make this book at all? I can only speak to my own motivations as the editor of this volume, when I invite the reader to treat this book primarily as an obstacle. I am intimately aware of the inner-workings of the academic cultural interpretation machine having participated in those institutions for many years, and we are, by my estimation, less than a year away from the first academic article being published by some anthropologist or cultural theorist on the subject of CoreCore. The progenitors of the genre are already being contacted by MA and PhD students. On its face, there is nothing wrong with this, but soon there will be a minor stratum of academic literature on CoreCore, and academics will read that literature. And when more is written, they will cite that literature, and so on. And the distance between the cultural object and the scope of interpretation will widen until the artists, autodidacts and shitposters, and so on, will have to demand passage before crossing.
So by obstacle, what I mean is that this book's intended function is to introduce a tollbooth of sorts into the cannibalistic citation loop. The cost of this tollbooth is that this book does not simply offer a transduction of CoreCore into text, it imports its difficulties into its form. The design of this book was entirely composed with this aim in mind, and this book for me is a staged intervention in the interaction between cultural writers and culture. Bearing in mind Redacted Cut’s wonderful observation that CoreCore assigns primacy to the position of editor as opposed to the conventional films cinematographer, the major design choices were in terms of form and structure. The book can be read in any order, perused, discarded, and picked up again. It's a meandering survey, a discography, a collage. It has no overarching perspective or thesis, and the texts are created as images. Design elements are incorporated into their layout, and in some cases they are directly imported as screenshots, or they are printed, then scanned and then imported again; they are scarred with rain scroll and other files. What you see in the book is the intersection of various stages and mechanisms of production. Some of the texts might be a bit hard to read or look at, but so is CoreCore, and so are images. URLs and QR codes are incorporated throughout the book, most of which are functional. Scan your phone over the pages and you might open some line of flight into video, audio, or website. This book is not just about CoreCore, since CoreCore itself is not about CoreCore. It hovers between a survey of grassroots online art, an anthology of experimental and critical essays, and a para-academic volume of the conference proceedings. And indeed, while certainly being para-academic, this text invites the reader to take each work seriously without an academic editorial perspective.
Many of the works are experimental, or difficult, and composed from individuals both inside and outside of the institutions of writing. Anthropologists should think of this book as written by interlocutors. An exciting variety of artistic methods and philosophies are featured. For example, at Edson Javier’s Cursed Image Archive, originally a video work, is here decomposed into a series of still images archiving the strata of online material that subsists below the surface of authors’ suggestions through an active methodology of online archeology, we might call a reverse censorship curation. Another example is Machine-Yearning’s film Ways of a Swamp. It is a combination of text, video A.I. and LLM technology, crafted into subtle Lovecraftian and Southern Gothic atmospheres. Filmmakers Louis Higgins, Dana Dawud, and Redacted Cut present reflections on how CoreCore has come to inform their respective works in terms of method, form, and political thrust. Internet Artist Societyiftextwall features a selection of their ongoing project: Digital Repository of the Utopian Impulse, deploying memetic and diagrammatic imagery, to amass an ever-growing map or syllabus of utopian literature.”
And I'll end this with the final passage of this introduction, which reads:
“a recurring motif in this volume’s design is the asterisk (*). The asterisk is an ancient symbol found as early as the Ice Age, and its meanings crystallize neatly around the themes of this volume. At once, the asterisk is deployed to omit, to indicate the use of censorship, and to indicate the presence of something in excess of the text, or to indicate exception, to indicate emphasis, to indicate zero, all instances of a change in level or order, and so”.
And you can see that we designed Unconscious/Television to include, or to foreground the use of the asterisks as well, something that we felt was a really strong reflection and representation of the work 0nty did, alongside Dylan Smith, in Dialogues on CoreCore. The asterisk, in a way, is the marker of the continuity between Dialogues on CoreCore and Unconscious/Television. It is a symbol we incorporated into our design in order to create a fusion.
Yet, I think I need to go several steps further back in order to explain this point. So without knowing, in the first year of becoming, we were designing some video materials for some part of our website. And those video materials, without us really being aware of the movement, had the kind of CoreCore aesthetic to them, or a style that related to CoreCore—though again, we had never heard of this term at that point—and for this video task, we enlisted the support of some friends that we had made via Instagram, including Machine-Yearning, who I mentioned just before, and 0nty. The two of them stepped forward and asked if there was anything we can do to help with the video aspect of this project? And we were very grateful for these contributions. But at some point, 0nty, the editor of these two volumes—these two books—presented us with a film: Ultra-Core Anxiety 2023. We're not exactly sure why they decided to send this film to us. We hadn't been hosting films at the time, but we really liked this work and we were talking about it a lot. Some essays were published about it (some by 0nty, and by myself etc.). There was a flurry of activity in response to this, and so the idea of the conference emerged in order to address all the dialogue that was coming up around this topic. The conference—as some of you may know—was called All is Nothing to Us.
By themselves the connections had already started; they were fragile, but the amount of fragile connections we saw started to create a kind of binding-power. The attendance of Louis Morelle at the conference, for example. No one was really sure at that moment in time whether CoreCore even still existed, as a movement. And some had suggested that by now any analysis of the topic was a matter of autopsy. Regardless, something essential to both the CoreCore book, and CoreCore itself lives on in Open Secret. The conversation, however, within this community moved on from CoreCore to “Internet Cinema”. Was CoreCore, as a period, a specific manifestation of Internet Cinema? Or did Internet Cinema somehow grow out of the CoreCore movement?
In the middle of this situation, we received an email from Lucas containing the book proposal—and it turned out that Lucas was recommended to speak to us upcoming by a contributor to the CoreCore book, although that is something we only found out quite recently. But nonetheless, Lucas appeared with a book proposal, which we read, and we loved. But I kept thinking, as I was reading, about 0nty’s work, and so I also wanted 0nty to work with us once again as the editor of Lucas' book—again, without fully knowing the extent that their becomings were already connected. They felt aligned like two sounds harmonizing. We decided as early as that to play into this and to start imagining Unconscious/Television as following on from Dialogues on CoreCore, in spirit, in design, in color and style and so on. And that's how Becoming arrived at CoreCore.
Dana Dawud, the curator of Open Secret, has said “Internet Cinema doesn't exist”—“Guys, there is no Internet Cinema”—Personally, I could enjoy to add the word “yet”, because whether it will ever come, or if “it” will always remain in the future, is an interesting question, as reflexivity or immanence seems to be the inescapable subject of CoreCore, Open Secret, and Internet Cinema. Internet Cinema is not Cinema about the Internet, neither is it simply “for” the internet. It is Cinema of the internet, perhaps; cinema possible through the internet. Another series of self-referential reflexes. In another sense, Internet Cinema is a nothingness. It doesn't exist. And yet we are still talking about it, and it is happening nonetheless. Perhaps it is this nothingness that forms the bridge between these three domains [Unconscious/Television, Open Secret, & CoreCore], and we could look more at this nothingness. And I would perhaps like now to turn to a text that was in Dialogues on CoreCore, by Persis Bekkering. It's about… Negation and the Unconscious, so the unconscious played a role in what people were thinking about when it came to CoreCore. I will read just a part of it:
“In his short, rather enigmatic text on negation, Freud offers a theory of the meaning, ‘NO.’ Beginning with an exploration of the ‘NO’ of the Analysand in the clinical setting, he quickly and without warning, moves on to speculate on the nature of thinking itself, of the function of negation in perception and apprehension, and ultimately of negation as constituent of dialectical understanding and a step to absolute ‘NO.’ In its most simple sense, negation is at work when an object is denied, such as an interpretation of a dream that seems rather obvious. Negation allows the speaking subjects to keep this element repressed, not having to face it, yet still speak it. ‘It's not my mother.’ ‘So it's your mother,’ Freud replied to his Analysands after the symbol or signifier of negation. After all, the word ‘mothering’ is still uttered.
Negation, Freud thought, enables the subject to study an entity as an object while maintaining repression. The ‘NO’ keeps an object at a safe distance as an external point of reference. We negate that which is repressed, a gesture that is purely formal, to be able to face and salvage the content of it without overcoming repression as such. We can speak about mother as long as we speak about ‘not-mother.’
This brings us back to the negativity of CoreCore. The point of this short diagonal reading of Freud is to show that through the symbol of negation with which CoreCore presents us a chain of content, some kind of bypassing of the compulsion of the pleasure principle could be operative by sidelining the conscious cerebral meaning-making ego, which is always a judging ego deciding good or bad, pleasurable or not pleasurable, reject or keep. Existing regimes of judgment and interpretation are disabled. Interestingly, and contra-Freud, this just feels pleasurable. It feels autonomous. We like CoreCore because it is not imposing anything. Through this mobilization of unconscious understanding, however, other connections could be forged.
My hypothesis is therefore that CoreCore is not meaningless, yet points to a constitutive contradiction in the production of knowledge. In deploying this strategy, CoreCore would be able to break open existing structures of compulsion. So repetition, finding a new language, and new modes of engaging with the world, much like the work of psychoanalysis.”
So that's from a text by Persis Bekkering: It's not meaningless: On Negation and the Unconscious in CoreCore. The text I have just read comes from, as I said before, a different psychoanalytical position, one that draws a lot from Freud, despite then arguing against him in the conclusion. And there may well be some disagreements about how the Unconscious is [elaborated] by Persis and by Lucas in Unconscious/Television. We acknowledge this differentiation, but nonetheless, it helps us to hint at the importance of the unconscious and the negative in thinking about Open Secret, CoreCore, and Internet Cinema.
Unconscious/Television attempts to [elaborate on the potential connections] between Guattari and Lacan. We might joke that it's an attempt to rescue Lacan from Lacanians, mediated by Guattarian psychoanalysis and schizoanalysis. So the book brings to the foreground various matters which also help elaborate on what is happening with CoreCore, Open Secret, and Internet Cinema. And these elaborations form more connections and strengthen all of these subtle bonds.
I would like to talk now a little bit more about nothingness, and I would like to begin at the start of the French philosophical tradition, of which Lacan and Guattari, and this book arguably, are a part. So I would like to start with Sartre.
By chance, I have been reading a book by Fredric Jameson. It's a book called The Years of Theory, and I haven't read Jameson before, and in many regards, I still haven't, because this is a talking-book; it's a transcription of a lecture series that he gave, I believe, at Duke University in 2021. But nonetheless, I picked up this book kind of randomly when at a bookshop some time ago, and it goes into the history of the French philosophical period, and it tries to talk about the development of its problematique.
Reading this book, whilst very much involved in the process of putting together Unconscious/Television, brought to my mind something that I would like to share with you before watching the films of Open Secret. So [Jameson] starts with the idea of “the Look,” and [he frames] this idea as coming [through] Sartre, and it has a lot to do with [Sartre’s] understanding of être, with being, which he also considers to be a nothingness. So for Sartre, being is être-en-soi—Being-in-itself—and being is not consciousness. For Sartre, consciousness is Being-for-itself—être-pour-soi—and then we could say, within this existentialist framework, that you cannot “be” conscious, you can only be conscious “of something.” There is always an object involved, or an Other involved, which means, for Sartre, Being (in-itself) is a nothingness. It is not a thing at all. And I can read a small passage here from Jameson about “the Look,” if I just find the place.
“We are always ‘Look-at-able,’ we are always ‘visible.’ We are always victims of ‘the Look’ of other people. We are always vulnerable to ‘the Look’ of other people. And that's why the look is an alienation. And our own look always comes second; “I can't see it anywhere.” What comes first is the existence of other people. Other people are looking at me and therefore I have some kind of existence. Then maybe I look back at them and I could do something to them. But you don't need to philosophize whether other people exist, because that's the certainty that you have from being born.”
So from Hegel, we have this kind of story that Jameson now recounts through Sartre. At first, you are one with everything—the Universe or God or whatever word you might use there. And then that oneness is broken into two through the appearance of the Other. And “appearance” here has to do with eyes and light. So through the appearance of the Other in your Eye, you see the Other, and you are terrified, because if there is a “you,” then there must be a “me.” You've become aware of yourself through the Look of the Other, because they look at you, and in that moment they transform you into something that can be looked at, as something. So the Look alienates in that sense. The Look splits the one into the two, both affirming our existence and, in some ways, violating it. There is a kind of chaotic interdependency where our being is mediated by the Other, and it's determined by the Look of the Other. So our being is mediated through negation, mediated by the other. And this passes, I believe, from Sartre to Lacan.
I can read another part here where he says he's commenting on some feedback he had about a class from his students. And he says:
“Some of you were scandalized that Sartre would say, ‘you either look with your eyes or you are looked at, but you cannot do both.’” Think then about passive and active, because in Lacan it's this schism—that will become schizophrenia later on—between the Eye and the Look that provides one form of “break” that I can never get rid of.”
But he says here something that is, to me, very interesting:
“So that's the point at which we miraculously, in some sense, arrive at aesthetics. We get to painting and we find out what painting really is. It is the place in which the Gaze of the Look is given a place of rest, so to speak. The painting is going to absorb in itself all of the light, all of the Look, and suddenly the Look, as vulnerability and anxiety, as this alien object, will be for me somehow, momentarily safe.” And Jameson also says: “It's a trap for the Gaze. It's a place in which the Gaze can roam around and be safe. It's a way in which the anxieties of the Look can somehow be domesticated and given a moment of rest.
Why should people be wasting their time on painting pictures, buying and selling them? Isn't it just representation?”—“No, it's not just representation. It's the place in which my Gaze can be captured and can roam around as if it's in its own reserve. And in fact, he uses the term reserve here in the sense that we talk about reservations of enclosed spaces.”
Now, what I want to do is to try and situate Television and Cinema as the next step in this chain, where we arrive at painting as the means of capturing the Gaze. Because this is a point that I missed, and I should not forget to make this point, because in Lacan, like in Sartre, the eye and the gaze are incompatible. And in this world of visibility, there is a kind of blind spot in the painting, a blind spot where you cannot be seen not because you are hidden, but because everybody else’s gaze is captured by the painting.
So this idea from Lacan of painting capturing the look positions the painting as the next stage from the familial fireplace, perhaps, or the central bonfire, positions television after it. We can think about the painting as taking the place of the fireplace, a seemingly infinite place for our look to roam around, mitigating alienation. We might think about the amount of people who gather around the Mona Lisa, for example, the amount of effort poured into decoding and analyzing this painting. It seems to function as having an infinite capacity to absorb our Gaze.
In a way, Cinema and Television can be seen as following on from this. And perhaps that's the magic of television, that it can capture our look and disrupt the process, the alienating process of Othering. For example, there is a cliché that we might all be aware of—whether or not we relate to it or not is a different matter—but we are aware of this kind of stress that comes from Thanksgiving Dinner or Christmas Dinner, where you have to gather with your family around the table, and the Look is going while we're all making eye contact with each other. And in a sense, as we mentioned before, this Look, this Gaze, it creates a table of schizophrenics, and the chaos ensues.
But this situation seems to stop when everybody moves to the other room and they start watching a film, or they start watching TV, and suddenly the cause of stress seems to evaporate as everybody's Gaze is captured by the Television, and we move into this new situation of relative harmony. This is something interesting when thinking about Sartre's “Being for-Others” (être-pour-autrui), this intersubjective dependency often characterized, or always characterized, by tension and conflict, in the same way as the Hegelian/Dialectical struggle for recognition and freedom. But this situation of confrontations and stress stops with the Television.
So I hope this delivers a little bit of insight into the thought behind this. The connections are subtle, yet unbreakable. All of these situations are held together by a kind of nuclear force. The investigations of dialogues on CoreCore were a part of the becoming of Open Secret, and a part of the Becoming of Internet Cinema, which is itself a part of the ongoing becoming where fire leads to painting, which leads to cinema and television, all tied together by the Look, by Being.
I think I have time to cover one more point that I hope is pertinent to this, because I wanted to talk a little bit about “anamorphoses,” because through Lacan specifically, what captures the Gaze is “the anamorphosis of the painting.” And instead of turning to Lacan to look into this, I wanted to perhaps pose something that I found within Deleuze. Now, Deleuze does not talk about dreaming much. In fact, he warns against it. There is this famous quotation of “beware of the dream of the other,” but you will find something about dreams in Deleuze. It's just hidden away in, of all books, the Cinema Book, “The Time-Image.”
I will try to summarize [the quotation] because it's quite long, and it's very poetic, but you'll find it in the cinema books. He is basically explaining that you have the Dreamer living within the [Sleeper], experiencing the dream in a desubjectified way. And he talks about the first image [in a chain, in this case], a plane of green light that is interrupted by spots of [white] light. Now, in the eyes of the dreamer, this image may become a field with flowers, but it only becomes a field of flowers when this image has already become a billiard table with balls, and that only becomes a real image, or it only becomes a fixed image to us when it has already moved on to something else. And he uses this explanation to talk about a large circuit of anamorphoses that is being sketched out.
Anamorphosis, as Jameson suggests, [somehow] refers to the thing within a painting that captures our look. And, I spoke a little bit yesterday about Aphrodite, at the NOVA Institute, because there is a sort of fusion going on [in the creation myth] where water reaches up into the sky and captures air within its folds, and in doing so it becomes foam. And there is this kind of miraculous moment where Aphrodite arises from the foam. She's “aphros,” Aphro-dite, foam. So it's a fusion of the water and air—but it's about this kind of capturing. And when we think about the image, even if it's static, we understand that there's motion there, and it's within the kind of anamorphosis of these motions, the large circuit of imagery that comes out of the static image, that captures our gaze, somehow being incorporated into it. It's reaching up in the same way that the water does when capturing the air to make form, and within the Greek mythology, it's the moment where Water Captures Air, that Aphrodite arrives on Earth [Water mediates the schism between Earth & Air]. So Heaven arrives on Earth at this moment of capturing, and sometimes I'm finding it very interesting, at the moment, to think about this in terms of the Gaze and about finding some sort of harmony and stillness within these situations in which we gather around a painting or a film.
So I think I'm going to leave it there because we should open some time for some questions. If you have any questions for me as the publisher, for Lucas about the work or perhaps about Open Secret, now is the time that you could ask any questions, as we [should] have a 15-minute break before the screenings. So I open the floor, whether you have anything you would like to say.
Lucas:
Yeah, I actually have just one thing. I've been talking so much in the last few days, it's so good that you're talking today that I'm just sitting here. But something that comes to mind when you make this picture of the dinner table, of the family dinner table, and, even though we can see some schizophrenic energy there that goes chaotic in lots of places, what comes to mind, [however], is a very neurotic table where everybody has to perform the roles. And then suddenly you go to this idea of watching TV as a peaceful practice for the family, and what comes to mind is suddenly all these people are free of being the roles that they have to perform. So the mother doesn't have to be the mother anymore. She can be something else. The son doesn't have to be the son anymore. So there's some kind of emancipation by this relationship with art.
And I don't know if it's art, but, most of all, what I'm trying to elaborate in “Unconscious/Television” is narrative, that we watch together, even if it's Star Wars or even if it's Pokémon. It is something that [contains] a narrative in there, so [it’s] television that is narrative. And what happens when suddenly we are free of performing some roles? Deleuze & Guattari, in What is Philosophy, in the last chapter that is Affects, Percepts and Concept, they're going to say—it's something that I said to you, when we were discussing the book, and when we're discussing this presentation and thinking about this idea of the bonfire, of this idea of the television, of the painting—Deleuze & Guattari say that “affects” and “percepts,” when you draw the figure of Man, even if it's a representation, but also if it is [an idea of] Man through some other kind of [form]. I mean, so even if you're talking about Man and doing minimalist art or, say, some performative art where you have to go somewhere, [either way, when] you put Man in the constitution of affects and percepts, on the screen or as a sculpture, this sets Man free of being Man. So you could be something else. There's a confrontation. There's another possibility that you face when you're looking at art, and then you can make a not another story for your life.
Palais Sinclaire:
Could you say that it's a kind of “reverting” back to nothingness, because you don't have to perform that “thing” anymore, and you become nothingness again? Because before you're performing your role as the son of the daughter and so on, and now you're kind of liberated, emancipated from that, as you said. So there's this kind of, yes, something that I wanted to [ask] about in particular. I have this kind of interpretation of the unofficial subtitle of [your] book: “the Moving Image on the Other of the Other.” I have been wondering about the role of this Other of the Other, and to what extent it relates to this Other object [Fire, Painting, Television]. That is not another subject, and it's not the Other in the sense that it doesn't have an Eye that Looks at you necessarily, but nonetheless, it seems to mitigate this problem of being a nothingness, that is, by the Look of the Other, captured, as you are reminded of your finiteness. So there is this kind of reversion back to being infinite, this kind of desubjectification that Deleuze talks about quite often.
Lucas:
What comes to mind as well is—how many years has it been?—it's been 80 years since Lacan wrote the text about the mirror stage, and about what is very important in the mirror stage, [at least] when he's going to conceptualize it. So I think the text is written between ‘45 and ’50. And he presents it as a lecture which is transcribed as a very important text (that has only 5 or 6 pages). And this elaboration of the mirror stage is very important because Lacan is going to understand, in a very clear way, what Narcissism is, and Narcissism is this investment in your own image being looked at by the Other.
So it's not only looking at yourself in the mirror [because] Lacan is going to make this image [where] the child is looking at themself in the mirror, but the child also has to do this movement with the head to look behind and have a confirmation of this image. This confirmation is pretty much the Other with capital O, but in that position [there might] be a father, mother, grandmother, aunt, or a nanny who is going to confirm this image that you're looking at. Your schizophrenia comes from not having a confirmation because you don't know if this image is valid enough.
And I think, especially when we do art, we don't have the confirmation of those new things that we have to do. So when you're doing fiction, you don't have a confirmation because you don't know how it is going to work with this [big] Other that Lacan is going to elaborate as language. So this position of being alienated is something that art is constantly making us think about. Are we doing art that is alienating? [If it is not, then perhaps] it's not interesting.
With Unconscious/Television—and I think this is what CoreCore says to us—is that even though those are internet images, or even though those are Television Anime—something that is taken as like lesser culture—they're making much more interesting stuff than what people call... good art; you're doing something that is much more transgressive.
So even if we get the idea of CoreCore: those are two words, but they are the same word. There's a mirror stage with the core looking at the core; who is going to confirm what the Core is? In certain ways, that’s what DaDa does: it's a Da with a Da, and what is Da? In German “Da” is not a new word. I mean, if you get it with the signifier, Da means to be “there”: are you there? “Bist du da?” So what is there at the end of the core in CoreCore? Who is going to be there to confirm it to us? Is it this book? Or is it something that somebody is going to confirm in 20 years? Or never? That's this “nothingness”, but nothingness is a friend of chaos. That is, there is a force of potentiality. Yes. I mean, this is my contribution for today.
Palais Sinclaire:
Yeah. We have 15 minutes until the screenings. Does anyone have any questions before we take a small break? We do have time for a question or two, but we can be relatively prompt about moving upstairs.
Mathilda Sousa:
This was fascinating. First of all, thank you. You were making the jump between “the bonfire”, “the painting”, and “the cinematic” (be it film or television), and I find it interesting that the first one, the bonfire, has the light. Then the third one, the cinematic again emits light, but the middle one, painting, doesn’t. How do you see that transition between the stillness of painting and the moving image? What happens there? Is there more absorption in painting?
Palais Sinclaire:
Something that I've been thinking about, because I noticed that in this series of four that I put out, there are these kinds of relatively big jumps, and it makes sense to think about it in terms of something capturing your Gaze. But I would say, we discussed this yesterday actually. You know that there is a lot of movement in still images, and this comes up in Unconscious/Television—It's also coming from Thomas Lamarre, to whom [Unconscious/Television] is dedicated—that people tend to judge animation from Japan as being “limited animation”, because there [are many still frames] within it. It's not entirely animated. And Lamarre says that instead of judging this as a lesser form of animation somehow, perhaps there is something more interesting going in there because of the static images.
So that's one thing that I've been thinking as of yesterday, and then maybe there's some other kind of more simple interpretations that like, even—you know, we are tourists in Lisbon, so we went to the museum and we saw the Monet, and this “breaking up of the ice” where, you know, it's a static image, but there is a lot of motion to it. And you can either talk about the way that the painting implies motions through brushstrokes, or you can talk about the way that the thickness, the extrusion of the paint off the canvas creates shadows that as you and everybody else is moving, it creates a movement [of shadows]. Even though it is static.
So I'm thinking about it in terms of, yes, you have something moving, something still and then something moving again, but somehow the techniques of painting perhaps create movement even where there's a still image. And I'm curious about, then, the role of cinema and television, because again, you have this external object and but the Television itself doesn't move. Something is moving on it. And there is this kind of contrast between the static again and the motion of the static. But then there's also the element of heat. And it's something I find that interesting, that where painting is maybe cold with television, you end up back with the bonfire a bit more, or the circle closes around again, because the television, especially for Japanese kids sitting so close to the television, they're getting a heat, they're getting a radiation from this external body.
And I think that brings us to Godard's image of hugging the television, somehow there is a kind of... maybe before the bonfire is “the mother” or something like this. And we have this kind of disconnected series of iterations of something that is serving some kind of psychoanalytical function. And I think that's what tracks through the mother, through the television and maybe cinema; but also the way that we watch fire, we might think that it's sort of maybe something banal and we're in front of it because it's warm, but fire never it's never the same as an image. It is constantly changing and we get drawn into that.
And I think that's where the anamorphosis comes in. Because the fire sketches out a circuit of imagery instead of being a static image. And perhaps the same is going on with something like a Monet painting, or a static painting. We know history, and we've seen other things, so in the painting we are seeing a lot of other things as well. [The painting] sends our mind racing, so there's this kind of element of like, is there some kind of fire[ness] to the aesthetics of cinema, that the cinema somehow develop out of our, our sort of habit of looking to fire, looking into warmth. I hope that answers some of your question.
Lucas:
What is interesting about cinema is that cinema, in a way, replicates what we see in the mirror stage, because it comes from behind, and you kind of have to look to see where it comes from, where this image is coming from, whereas TV is in front of you and it has this warmth of a body. Especially in the image that Godard uses in Prénom Carmen, it's a very autistic relationship that... we have the illustrations that Alexandre we made of Ferenczi, and the boy that stays inside of the bathtub, and makes the assemblage of how to live a different life inside of water; a life that denies. And there's negation, but it's a life. It's a still life! It's a life that doesn't operate with the symbolic in the same way that we do. It's an autistic life. It's a psychotic life, but it's a life. It's another way of living, of being human anyway.
I mean, I'm not even [in-favour] of using the word human in that way, but, I mean, it's a human life there, but it's a different one. So how can you have something else? I mean, I'm always interested in this differentiation and novelty, and yet.
Mathilda Sousa:
It's also something from yesterday, one of the defining experiences of the Television is the “zapping” [changing-channels], and how you're subjected to things that you did not choose. So there is a kind of disturbing feel to that, which you don't get with movies because you pay to go and see the movies that you have chosen. Even if you're on Netflix or whatever, you're choosing to put something yourself, because you like it, and I always loved surfing just because I'm subjected to something that is completely outside of my realm of choice. Like because it’s an Other that's throwing something at me.
Palais Sinclaire:
There's something very CoreCore about that, [it could be] in many ways, a predecessor to the aesthetics of CoreCore, because you are not the one zapping, but you could be I mean it would be very, very simple to frame a CoreCore exhibition where you are the one with the remote control zapping through material that has been arranged by the editor.
Mathilda Sousa:
Because that's the chaotic energy of the internet, which is being subverted by algorithms. It's an Other that's like a big brother, who knows what you want before you want it. Television is not exactly like that, it's a little more chaotic.
Lucas:
Yeah. The algorithm works like that, it kind of knows what you already want. I mean, then you might think: “oh, yeah, it's [by] chance”, but it's not chance. Yeah. That's funny. We have an image in the book that is a boombox which is playing music, with the fire [in front of it], dancing to music. I think it works with what you're talking about.
It's right in the beginning, it's from a Brazilian artist, whose name is Vivian Caccuri. She made this beautiful work where she puts candles in front of boomboxes and the flame dances to music or to every word that is spoken. So it's another way of writing, and then there are a bunch of theoreticians who are going to say that writing is not something cultural; writing is nature, and then it kind of fucks up our minds, you know, writing being something that's nature. I mean, Derrida says this.
Palais Sinclaire:
I was also going to say Derrida, because he has a kind of interpretation of writing as negative. It's a negative form, as opposed to “the dominance of the positive voice”—But for the sake of adhering to Dana's schedule for Open Secret tonight, I think we should take a break. So we have at least five minutes and we can get there on time. Thank you very much for coming for this session. I hope it was somehow interesting for you...
So we will go upstairs together in five minutes, and I hope that what we have done here helps to explain why we are in Lisbon, what's going on with these books, and perhaps influence how you might watch the films tonight. Thank you so much.
Lucas:
Thank you, and the books will be here! If anyone wants to buy, the books will be here, sold by the bookstore directly.