preliminary proposal
Abstract
Proposition/Observation
Anticipated Investigation
Anticipated Results
Discussion
Proposition/Observation
Anticipated Investigation
Anticipated Results
Discussion
A reflection is required because we are human beings with thinking mechanisms.As long as human beings possess the ability to think, the mechanism of reflection has deeply embedded in their consciousness. Since the start of postmodernism, all forms of knowledge are starting to bound within their localized, fragmented forms without further connection to the universal truth. Of course such view has its own significance. Yet what is resulted from this movement is a complete loss of eternal values within this flux. There remains no trace of thinking, but only scattered debris of knowing. The failure of thinking, which is different from knowing, in Arendt’s terms, would lead to the banality of evil that embedded in human mind. Nonetheless, this is something with further consequences that is beyond good and evil regarding moral principles. Just as in physics, without reflection, there only remains darkness, and furthermore, nihility. Without reflections, we will have no past, get lost in the present, and become malfunctioned to produce better future.
Reflection is an inevitable mechanism that constantly chases us in the present, reminiscing the past towards our future. Though it creates an eternal return, it also produces infinite plural choices. In my current work, I seek bridgeable freedom within thoughts, establishing the intersubjectivity between each individual existence varied from textual studies and visual productions to actual human beings, making everyone a happy Sisyphus. Rolling the rock becomes an enunciation of the power of active individual selection. A systemic framework is inevitable from this eternal return of knowledge. The project aims to embrace the proposed system and to value human’s breath within such matrix via a fictional narrative. IN Deleuze's terms when refering to Leibniz, this project strives to create infinite, compossible inflections.
Instantaneity and ephemerality has already forecasted its surmounting figure since the uprise of modernity. Speaking of “shock” in Benjamin’s terms, the ongoing society is filled with countless stimulus that triggers individuals’ shocked reactions. Yet, such reactions does not linger on. Neither does it produce any further contemplations. After one experience it, soon it fades in their mind which is crowded by all sorts of other previous similar stimulus. While modernity aims to seek for an essence of things, mapping the genealogy to one true origin, postmodernity transcends such teleological purpose, swimming in the ocean of fragmentations and discontinuities, celebrating the plurality brought by such ephemerality. It is more democratice, liberating every individuals. The downside of that, nevertheless, turns to the tragic fact that we are filled with these instant, anarchic shocks but there is never enough time for us to truly pick up any of them and spend enough time for reflections. One can argue there is indeed reflection at the instance when such shock invades them. Yet such reflection is nevertheless only a glimpse shadow, a biological reflex: It resembles the somatic neurotic reaction conducted involuntarily towards such instantaneous triggers. Never may it generate any profound meanings. Therefore, while modernity fails to recognize localized plurality, postmodernity is equally dangerous, for it leads to a communication breakdown. Nevertheless, the central point here is not about criticizing any of them. Instead, the project has a greedy will to value the danger derives from both of their sides, trying to generate greatest possibility for plurality that provides space for everyone's agency. In what way is reflection reflected in our existing forms of knowledge? How can a better future be formed based on that eternal formula reflected? In what way can it bring a closer relationship between the self and the others?
All results produced by thinking are evidence of reflections. These reflections will be classified into three focuses: the Reflection accomplished by the external objects varied from literature, psychology, film, philosophy, etc.; the Reflection that occurred inside me as the object; the Reflection between this project and its audience. The previous two will be the foundation of the project, while the third will be interwoven into them to further bridge the audience and the work.
Three forms of reflections in physical terms will be used as the lens to map existing ideas. The three approaches are diffuse Reflection, multiple Reflection, and specular Reflection. Diffuse Reflection, which creates no certain image of the reflected subject, forms the aspect of a communication breakdown resulting from the massive vortex of thinking with a flooded amount of perspectives. One experiment in my portfolio, working with sound-making and visualization of Rashomon, uses this specific mechanism. For Specular Reflection, which generates an unaltered image of the subject based on self-referential means, the study will focus on how one or multiple specific localized meanings that are true to its creator come into being. Multiple Reflection, last but not least, functions as a tunnel of infinite images formed inside the mirrors facing each other. It assesses how reflective works produce a multiverse through both self-referential and externally-reflective qualities.
Yet, in the end, when thinking of them as entities, finding that they are infused together with all of these three qualities. The final idea is about the equalization and hybridity between losing and gaining meanings
To see it in a clearer way:
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Like the labyrinth of time and space presented beautifully in Borges’ Ficciones, and the violent journey of Noboru in Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the project will reify the proposed framework in grandiose, fictional narratives. Yet, as Foucault and Lyotard rejects the meta-narrative in literature, the story's narrative will never be in my full control. A mise-en-abyme structure is the mechanism that generates the folds and the inflections in Deleuze’s terms of presenting both the interior and the exterior. Like Irma Vep and Clouds of Sils Maria by Assayas, The Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov, and Pale Fire by Nabokov, by constructing the narrative telling a story/play within a story, this project aims to creates infinite folds of specular reflections and diffuse reflections under the umbrella of interactive multiple reflection. To be more specific, the exterior story analyzes and reflects on a fiction play while there will be various, interior experiments/spreads’s narrative accomplished by specular reflection and diffuse reflection reifying such play. The audience will first enter the exterior reflection and then discover the details of such fictional play through the small experiments.
With such mise-en-scene structure, this project aims to show the coexistence of the interior and exterior of the Zwiefalt through reflection, creating a tension in which each fold is extended into the other. Furthermore, instead of constructing the story myself, everyone is in this flux of abstractions, this language game, deciding their own paths. The audience can both engage with the exterior and the interior of the mise-en-abyme. Using Deleuze’s term to sum up, I aim to bring out “both the coils of the matter and the folds of the soul”, creating a cyborg-like labyrinth of hybridity.
The exterior story - one video / videos that interact with each other
Different people’s debate on a play that does not have an end
These people’s own stories
These characters then discover their indescribable relations with each other, having the vision of their parents impregnation
(like monads, or to say, like the living mirrors of each other)
The interior play - spreads, and folded paper
the scattered, discursive artifacts of the play’s protagonist’s experiments
The play’s content: a greedy, Faustian figure who aims to master all knowledge in the world overwhelms by their defections, ending up in an asylum
-trying to master the intersubjectivity of knowledge, but locked within the interior
There will be multiple results generated. For this semester, I may only focusing on generating the mise-en-abyme narrative which ultimately merges the boundary between the exterior narrative and the interior experiments. The final outcome is anticipated to be placed to the audience, where they can develop their trends.
The ideal version will involve the audience’s choices with multiple story lines created by different people engaging with multiple characters in the three prototypes.
If success, this project will envelope all localized, individual answers in a both abstracted and concrete form with great fluidity, corresponding to these metaphysical systems proposed by different philosophers while carving out democratic inflections within their totalizing nature. Leibniz’s Monadology and Deleuze’s analysis of it regarding compossibilities may be its closest relative.
One of the main issues here would be to what extent would this method be practiceable. Another key concern would be the level of freedom handed to the audience. Also, how to visualize the narrative is still in consideration. So as the container for the final outcome.
Reflection is an inevitable mechanism that constantly chases us in the present, reminiscing the past towards our future. Though it creates an eternal return, it also produces infinite plural choices. In my current work, I seek bridgeable freedom within thoughts, establishing the intersubjectivity between each individual existence varied from textual studies and visual productions to actual human beings, making everyone a happy Sisyphus. Rolling the rock becomes an enunciation of the power of active individual selection. A systemic framework is inevitable from this eternal return of knowledge. The project aims to embrace the proposed system and to value human’s breath within such matrix via a fictional narrative. IN Deleuze's terms when refering to Leibniz, this project strives to create infinite, compossible inflections.
Instantaneity and ephemerality has already forecasted its surmounting figure since the uprise of modernity. Speaking of “shock” in Benjamin’s terms, the ongoing society is filled with countless stimulus that triggers individuals’ shocked reactions. Yet, such reactions does not linger on. Neither does it produce any further contemplations. After one experience it, soon it fades in their mind which is crowded by all sorts of other previous similar stimulus. While modernity aims to seek for an essence of things, mapping the genealogy to one true origin, postmodernity transcends such teleological purpose, swimming in the ocean of fragmentations and discontinuities, celebrating the plurality brought by such ephemerality. It is more democratice, liberating every individuals. The downside of that, nevertheless, turns to the tragic fact that we are filled with these instant, anarchic shocks but there is never enough time for us to truly pick up any of them and spend enough time for reflections. One can argue there is indeed reflection at the instance when such shock invades them. Yet such reflection is nevertheless only a glimpse shadow, a biological reflex: It resembles the somatic neurotic reaction conducted involuntarily towards such instantaneous triggers. Never may it generate any profound meanings. Therefore, while modernity fails to recognize localized plurality, postmodernity is equally dangerous, for it leads to a communication breakdown. Nevertheless, the central point here is not about criticizing any of them. Instead, the project has a greedy will to value the danger derives from both of their sides, trying to generate greatest possibility for plurality that provides space for everyone's agency. In what way is reflection reflected in our existing forms of knowledge? How can a better future be formed based on that eternal formula reflected? In what way can it bring a closer relationship between the self and the others?
All results produced by thinking are evidence of reflections. These reflections will be classified into three focuses: the Reflection accomplished by the external objects varied from literature, psychology, film, philosophy, etc.; the Reflection that occurred inside me as the object; the Reflection between this project and its audience. The previous two will be the foundation of the project, while the third will be interwoven into them to further bridge the audience and the work.
Three forms of reflections in physical terms will be used as the lens to map existing ideas. The three approaches are diffuse Reflection, multiple Reflection, and specular Reflection. Diffuse Reflection, which creates no certain image of the reflected subject, forms the aspect of a communication breakdown resulting from the massive vortex of thinking with a flooded amount of perspectives. One experiment in my portfolio, working with sound-making and visualization of Rashomon, uses this specific mechanism. For Specular Reflection, which generates an unaltered image of the subject based on self-referential means, the study will focus on how one or multiple specific localized meanings that are true to its creator come into being. Multiple Reflection, last but not least, functions as a tunnel of infinite images formed inside the mirrors facing each other. It assesses how reflective works produce a multiverse through both self-referential and externally-reflective qualities.
Yet, in the end, when thinking of them as entities, finding that they are infused together with all of these three qualities. The final idea is about the equalization and hybridity between losing and gaining meanings
To see it in a clearer way:
Like the labyrinth of time and space presented beautifully in Borges’ Ficciones, and the violent journey of Noboru in Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the project will reify the proposed framework in grandiose, fictional narratives. Yet, as Foucault and Lyotard rejects the meta-narrative in literature, the story's narrative will never be in my full control. A mise-en-abyme structure is the mechanism that generates the folds and the inflections in Deleuze’s terms of presenting both the interior and the exterior. Like Irma Vep and Clouds of Sils Maria by Assayas, The Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov, and Pale Fire by Nabokov, by constructing the narrative telling a story/play within a story, this project aims to creates infinite folds of specular reflections and diffuse reflections under the umbrella of interactive multiple reflection. To be more specific, the exterior story analyzes and reflects on a fiction play while there will be various, interior experiments/spreads’s narrative accomplished by specular reflection and diffuse reflection reifying such play. The audience will first enter the exterior reflection and then discover the details of such fictional play through the small experiments.
With such mise-en-scene structure, this project aims to show the coexistence of the interior and exterior of the Zwiefalt through reflection, creating a tension in which each fold is extended into the other. Furthermore, instead of constructing the story myself, everyone is in this flux of abstractions, this language game, deciding their own paths. The audience can both engage with the exterior and the interior of the mise-en-abyme. Using Deleuze’s term to sum up, I aim to bring out “both the coils of the matter and the folds of the soul”, creating a cyborg-like labyrinth of hybridity.
The exterior story - one video / videos that interact with each other
Different people’s debate on a play that does not have an end
These people’s own stories
These characters then discover their indescribable relations with each other, having the vision of their parents impregnation
(like monads, or to say, like the living mirrors of each other)
The interior play - spreads, and folded paper
the scattered, discursive artifacts of the play’s protagonist’s experiments
The play’s content: a greedy, Faustian figure who aims to master all knowledge in the world overwhelms by their defections, ending up in an asylum
-trying to master the intersubjectivity of knowledge, but locked within the interior
There will be multiple results generated. For this semester, I may only focusing on generating the mise-en-abyme narrative which ultimately merges the boundary between the exterior narrative and the interior experiments. The final outcome is anticipated to be placed to the audience, where they can develop their trends.
The ideal version will involve the audience’s choices with multiple story lines created by different people engaging with multiple characters in the three prototypes.
If success, this project will envelope all localized, individual answers in a both abstracted and concrete form with great fluidity, corresponding to these metaphysical systems proposed by different philosophers while carving out democratic inflections within their totalizing nature. Leibniz’s Monadology and Deleuze’s analysis of it regarding compossibilities may be its closest relative.
One of the main issues here would be to what extent would this method be practiceable. Another key concern would be the level of freedom handed to the audience. Also, how to visualize the narrative is still in consideration. So as the container for the final outcome.