Permutations

Marc Lafia

Permutations

Marc Lafia

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Once you begin to see things as multiple and iterative, mutable and relational, the idea of the image, the ontology of the image, the single image, the image alone, begins more and more to lose authority. Perhaps that is why in the mid 90s we began to see life size and larger photographs. Size can confer authority, but regardless the size of the image, there is always a next image, an image answering, conversing with another image. Permutations are multi-screen films Lafia started in 2005 that he produced once a day with a Canon Xapshot digital camera over a period of several years that can be viewed at Lafia’s Cinema Engine site. In Permutations, Lafia continued to pursue his interest in “the instrumentation of playback in multiple screens and what could be articulated and continually re-articulated in the image-sound relationship through permutation” as “played and composed in a software environment created in MAX MSP.” Influenced by the work of Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec, and Oulipo, the group Queneau and Perec formed in France in 1960 that investigated strategies for constrained writing for potential literature, Lafia explores in Permutations how sound inflects the image and what potential cinemas can emerge from the digital characteristic of an excess of organizational and narrative tropes. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Lafia)

5 Permutations I’ve written about Permutations in Everyday Cinema but want to mention them here. Once you begin to see things as multiple and iterative, mutable and relational, the idea of the image, the ontology of the image, the single image, the image alone, begins more and more to lose authority. Perhaps that is why in the mid 90s we began to see life size and larger photographs. Size can confer authority, but regardless the size of the image, there is always a next image, an image answering, conversing with another image. Permutations are multi-screen films Lafia started in 2005 that he produced once a day with a Canon Xapshot digital camera over a period of several years that can be viewed at Lafia’s Cinema Engine site. In Permutations, Lafia continued to pursue his interest in “the instrumentation of playback in multiple screens and what could be articulated and continually re-articulated in the image-sound relationship through permutation” as “played and composed in a software environment created in MAX MSP.” Influenced by the work of Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec, and Oulipo, the group Queneau and Perec formed in France in 1960 that investigated strategies for constrained writing for potential literature, Lafia explores in Permutations how sound inflects the image and what potential cinemas can emerge from the digital characteristic of an excess of organizational and narrative tropes. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Lafia) In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari proffer three modes of artist production that correspond, more or less, to three historical eras: the classical, the romantic, and the modern (see “Of the Refrain”). The classical artist, they claim, is he who lends form to the formless, who forges the very world itself, Yahweh amidst the clay, artist as god. The romantic artist, on the other hand, speaks the forces of the earth: The mountains! The ocean! The undulations of this earthly world! The modern artist, meanwhile, harnesses the forces of the cosmos. He stands amidst the fray of the cosmic winds, amidst the great swirls of galaxies just taking shape, at the limit of sense, at that precarious juncture of order and chaos. And rather than extending his will over this great teeming, he proffers a gesture or two, hedging here and there, allowing these forces to express themselves within these or those stipulations. The modern artist remains at the periphery of this production, lending shape but not shaping, allowing a form to become, not forging the form. This artist faces two risks. On the one hand, chaos: the production never comes to the fore as it is torn asunder by the very forces it seeks to harness. Look at Lafia’s films: they are constantly on the verge of collapse, of veering off the screen and back into the teeming chaos of the cosmos (what Joyce and Guattari call “the chaosmos”). Each Permutation risks nonsense, pure babble, form never 103 Raymond Queneau, Eadweard Muybridge, Two Kinds of Permutations quite coalescing, no consistency ever getting a foothold, as it were. In fact, we might say that each Permutation slides here and there into the chaosmos as it takes its shape before our eyes, a relentless movement from nonsense to sense, from sense to nonsense. The other risk of the modern artist is too much form, over-doing it, dampening or deadening the forces of the cosmos. Lafia avoids this risk by disallowing any post-production editing. And by the play of sound that persistently recasts each image: as the sound of one image plays, it inflects all the other images thereby letting this shape of the cosmos—this shape right here, before our eyes—emerge and play as it will. Lafia, then, is not a filmmaker or photographer. He does not capture or create images; he accrues them. Lafia is an agent of the image; he does its bidding. He is not the embodied eye lurking behind or within the technology; he does not “use” the camera to express himself or his vision or the world. On the contrary, the camera uses him. Or rather, the image uses him and the camera is one component of the image. Of course, Lafia is not irrelevant; he is a productive cog within this image-making machine. After all, the images in Permuations are beautiful. Lafia has good taste, his eye and ear function as an effective screen, letting these images through but not those. The image might beckon but he gets to choose which will make its way—which is lucky for us. But he is not the master. Lafia heeds the call of the image by putting the tools of imaging in play (his cameras and computer) and proliferating images (Daniel Coffeen) 104 105 106 From internally displacing and attenuating time by repetition of a small set of images, to an assemblage of various clips that make up a particular permutation in real time (Muybridge to Qeuneau). 107 108 109 110 111

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