The Conversation

Including analysis by Brenda Austin-Smith

"The Conversation has been described as an "Orwellian morality play" in which the spy becomes the spied upon, and technology is used against the user. (1) In generic terms, the film is a psychological thriller that pays stylistic homage to Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966) in its use of repetition and its parsing of sounds rather than images to create ambiguity, and to Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) in its depiction of a hotel murder"

The narrative of The Conversation relies as much on the subjective reality of a single character than on the world outside him. The sound of the film reaches the audience through the surveillance microphones, filters, and amplifiers of Harry Caul. The whole film hinges on his personal interpretation of a single line of dialogue: "he'd kill us if he had the chance." Caul's past work might have been the cause for the murder of his subjects, and he is paranoid his current assignment will lead to the same end. His work does play a role in murder, but the imagined victim turns out to be the perpetrator.

The complexities of Caul's personality are presented to the audience through a series of relatively insignificant moments. The sum of all these layers gives us a picture of a disfunctional man, paranoid to the point of paralysis. The audience is presented the story through the eyes, and more importantly, ears of Harry Caul, and the narrative comes to resemble his personality.

"In his creation of a narrative of Ann's oppression, persecution, and possible death, Harry acts as a film editor, marrying image track to sound track to produce a coherent story. And like the film viewer, Harry fills in narrative gaps and ambiguities, supplementing what is visible and audible with what he believes to be the truth."

The film succeeds because the protagonist is so compelling that the story surrounding him is irrelevant. The audience cannot help but become transfixed by the subjective reality of Harry Caul.

Proust: Swann's Way: Overture

In Proust's words:

Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them.

Its memory, the composite memory of its ribs, knees, and shoulder-blades offered it a whole series of rooms in which it had at one time or another slept; while the unseen walls kept changing, adapting themselves to the shape of each successive room that it remembered, whirling madly through the darkness.

But then, even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.

I don’t deny it,” answered Swann in some bewilderment. “The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance. Suppose that, every morning, when we tore the wrapper off our paper with fevered hands, a transmutation were to take place, and we were to find inside it—oh! I don’t know; shall we say Pascal’s Pensées?”

Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase, up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb, was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which, I imagined, would last for ever, and new structures have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are difficult of comprehension.

The truth was that she could never make up her mind to purchase anything from which no intellectual profit was to be derived, and, above all, that profit which good things bestowed on us by teaching us to seek our pleasures elsewhere than in the barren satisfaction of worldly wealth. Even when she had to make some one a present of the kind called ‘useful,’ when she had to give an armchair or some table-silver or a walking-stick, she would choose ‘antiques,’ as though their long desuetude had effaced from them any semblance of utility and fitted them rather to instruct us in the lives of the men of other days than to serve the common requirements of our own.

But my grandmother would have thought it sordid to concern herself too closely with the solidity of any piece of furniture in which could still be discerned a flourish, a smile, a brave conceit of the past.

And so it was that, for a long time afterwards, when I lay awake at night and revived old memories of Combray, I saw no more of it than this sort of luminous panel, sharply defined against a vague and shadowy background, like the panels which a Bengal fire or some electric sign will illuminate and dissect from the front of a building the other parts of which remain plunged in darkness...

And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die.

What an abyss of uncertainty whenever the mind feels that some part of it has strayed beyond its own borders; when it, the seeker, is at once the dark region through which it must go seeking, where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not so far exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day.

Some thoughts:

I'll never have the time to read all of In Search of Lost Time, so perhaps I could create something to read it for me. As it reads, it could develop a memory of its own, using the EEPROM of the chip. The interesting thing is that this EEPROM is limited in size and stability. Only a certain number of details could be stored in the device, and after a certain number of "write" opperations, it will no longer be able to reprogram its own memory. In a way, I'd be designing some kind of memory organism.

This device tackles a number of technical issues I've been meaning to address:
-Preservation of state: if a device is going to have memory, it needs to reprogram itself
-Scales of data: the device could handle huge streams of data, but it can only store a small amount of this. What data is important and how is it encoded?
-Wireless: how does it connect to a large amount of data

Building on Calvino, I need to decide what the motivations of this organism are: what will I reveal to the audience, and what will be a secret of the machine itself. There is a great deal that could be hidden, but enough needs to be displayed to captivate the audience. Further, the more you watch the organism, the more you should be able to understand. It needs to demystify itself, but only to a point.

The act of recording and developing a memory is the mysterious side of this organism. Almost like an alien or spy, it will be examining cultural documents in order to develop an understanding of us.

I think it would be coolest if this had no idea what the english language was. Instead, it was looking at the frequency of asci characters and the average size of sentence, including the length and number of words in order to determine the "average" sentence in "Swann's Way". This is the information it is displaying to the audience and keeping with it.

What it needs to know:
Know the average sentence length
Have an array this size of characters
Have an average character (including a space) for each position in the array
Display this string

Also display the words that is reading ... This is something the audience can follow.
The mystery is the connection between what it is reading and the garbled text that is displayed along with it (The average sentence in Swann's Way).

I can begin by desiging this program in software. I can then debug and optimize it relatively quickly before I load it onto the microcontroller.

Calvino: If On a Winter's Night a Traveller

In the first fragment of a novel within If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, Calvino is playing with the genre of mystery or espionage. He doesn't plan on writing an espionage novel, but instead uses the typical details of an espionage novel to explore the literary devices used to introduce a story. He is actually seducing his protagonist, a reader, as well as us, the reader.

If On a Winter's Night a Traveller is a story about reading, and a novel that knows it is a novel. The story understands it has been written by the author; characters and places realize they exist only as much as the author defines them.

Calvino uses descriptions of his literary technique as a technique to introduce his story. Through the novel, he moves in and out of this meta-narrative with a protagonist that is aware he is a character in the author's creation. The story is both an explanation of how to introduce a story and a story unto itself.

Some of his techniques:

Mystery: A strange thing is happening.
-An air of mystery surrounds the protagonist. He is supposed to secretly pass a suitcase along to a colleague. The contents of the suitcase are unknown, but they must not be discovered.
-The protagnoist has no name other than "I" to give him one would lessen the mystery
-Nothing about his past is known, other than something happened to make him late.
All of these aspects of the story fill the reader with questions and the desire to find out the answers. Calvino withholds information to keep the reader interested in the story.

Familiarity: A strange thing is happening in a familiar place.
-A stranger arrives in a small train station, a familiar place for most readers
-He visits the local tavern, again a recognizable location
-The description of these places match our expectations
-This contrasts the mystery surrounding the protagonist
The familiar aspects of the story comfort the reader, and make the mysterious aspects of the story even more strange.

Complication: Things are getting stranger
-The stranger doesn't want to get involved with the locals, but ends up talking to a woman in the tavern
-The woman has seen the man the stranger was supposed to meet
-A member of the village turns out to be in on the plan and orders the strager to abort his mission
Things are going to get a lot more complicated before they get resolved. We want to read on because we don't know what is going on, and we want to know more. If the author came right out and said what the story was about, we may or may not be interested in it. Now we are interested in the process of finding out. The history of the stranger and the suitcase could be relatively boring as long as the way we find out about them in interesting.

Irony and Humor: These devices are all in jest
-Calvino expects his readers to follow his play and understand his techniques
-He engages the reader by writing about the joys of reading

Harakiri

Harakiri, directed by Masaki Kobayashi, is visually stunning, but most interesting in terms of its use of time. A strangers arrives at the gate of a samurai fortress with the intention of committing ritual suicide. In truth, he is harboring a secret, revealed first through the voice of the samurai within the compound and then through his own words. As the two seemingly diverse stroies converge, the motivation of the stranger becomes clear. At this point the deliberate pacing of the film gives way to a frantic showdown.

These stories are told across many layers of time, and the whole film is framed as a tale about a specific date in the history of the ruling clan. In some ways the film exposes the layers of history that are intentionally hidden by those in power. Additionally, the director's use of narration maintains the mystery, allowing for a more dramatic conclusion to the film. Kobayashi doesn't splice the different times periods of the story together through cinematic devices. Instead, the director maintains a linear progression of time by using a number of narrators, who describe the past from the present. He weaves various layers of the past into the present.

Bergson: Matter and Memory: On The Selection of Images

Bergson explores the nature of perception, specifically how it relates to matter and memory.

"Memory, insepearable in practice from perception, imports the past into the present, contracts into a single intuition many moments of duration, and thus by a twofold opperation compells us, de facto, to perceive matter in ourselves, whereas we, de jure, perceive matter within matter" 73

"Above all, how are we to imagine a relation between a thing and its image, between matter and thought, since each of these terms possesses, by definition, only that which is lacking to the other?" 40

He posits a physical world, existing outside of all of us, governed by natural forces. All perception is linked with this physical world of matter. In his words, perception is an image with the self at the center, matter is the sum of all images. The relative size of the self in an image is variable, dependant on how much of the perception is focused on the self.

"I call 'matter' the aggregate of images, and 'perception of matter' these same images referred to the eventual action of one particular image, my body" 22

"My body is, then, in the aggregate of the material world, an image which acts like other images, receiving and giving back movement, with, perhaps, this difference only, that my body appears to choose, within certain limits, the manner in which it shall restore what it receives" 19

Furthermore, perception is directed towards action. In the simplest organisms, this link is relatively determinate and straightforward, but as organisms gets more complex, the number of options increase dramatically. Pure perception is directed entirely towards movement. Affectation, or feeling, is the opposite this pure perception, and is concerned with the absorbtion of images.

"The actuality of our perception thus lies in its activity, in the movements which prolong it, and not in its greater intensity: the past is only idea, the present is ideo-motor" 68

"The truth is that my nervous system, interposed between the objects which affect my body and those which I can influence, is a mere conductor, transmitting, sending back or inhibiting movement" 45

"We might therefore say, metaphorically, that while perception measures the reflecting power of the body, affection measures its power to absorb." 56

He argues against the idea that our perception of the world determines its form.

"That is to say that the nervous system is in no sense an appatus which may serve to fabricate, or even prepare, representations. Its function is to receive stimulation, to provide motor apparaus, and to present the largest possible number of these apaparatuses to a given stimulus" 31

"...we maintain that the brain is an instrument of action, and not of representation" 74

He is also concerned with the duration of perception, and eventually, how that relates to memory

"However brief we suppose any perception to be, it always occupies a certain duration, and involves consequently, an effort of memory which prolongs, one into another, a plurality of moments." 34

How we perceive and remember the world is of great concern to any study of narrative. First it is important to understand how we perceive a narration, and then how it mingles with our memories and itself becomes memory. Bergson is only a single opinion in this field, but the clarity of his writing and the nature of thesis make him relevant to this work. This study is focused on developing physical performers or performance tools. Bergson directly links physical matter with perception and memory. His work opens new intellectual spaces for envision such projects.

High Performance Narrative

Indpenedent Study Proposal
John Rothenberg
SMArchS MIT School of Architecture
Professor Chris Csikszentmihalyi
Computing Culture Group
MIT Media Lab

"Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them." Proust, Swann's Way

I'm interested in exploring the three themes of narrative, performance, and memory and specifically how they could be addressed in the form of mobile communication devices. I think these designs could either become performance tools or autonomous performers, and I am interested in building at least one of each type. I am also interested in mobility and exploring mobile, remote, or unusual settings for these devices. If I can sucessfully collect the electronics and power within a mobile package, I think I'll be able to place these designs in more unexpected settings. This is the secondary goal of the semester.

I have the following technical goals:
-Build projects with SMD Atmega and ISP header for reprogramming
-Take advantage of EEPROM to allow the devices to develope a memory
-Learn more about power consumption, and decrease the power needs of the devices
-Use Li-Pol batteries
-Explore wireless connectivity and remotely accessing large data sets

Reading List
Calvino - If On A Winter's Night A Traveler
Henri Bergson - Matter and Memory
Marcel Proust - Swann's Way
Robert Smithson - The Collected Writings
Lygia Clark -- Brazillian artist (writings?)
Jack Burhham -- systems art & beyond modern sculpture
Bruce Nauman
Paul Ricouer (Time & Narrative)
Sergei Eisenstein -- narrative, emotion
George Legrady (postcards and pockets)
Foucault - Discpline and Punish
Hales - How We Became Posthuman

Schedule
week 1-3: Project 1: Remembrance of Things Past
device: Autonomus Performer
reading: Bergson, Proust, Smithson

week 4-7: Project 2: Narrative
device: Performance Tool
reading: Calvino, Clark, Eisenstein

week 8: Documenting p1+p2

week 9-11: Project 3: Performance
device: either
reading: Nauman, Ricoeur, Legrady

week 12-15:
Rethinking and refining one project as a Final Project
Preparation of materials for publication

* Depending on the output of the first half of the semester, I might want to focus on a single, larger project for weeks 9-15.