Method // Machine

A Sky Without Constellations
What is the star? How does it function? - These questions call forth not only a descriptive analysis of the star as a tool, but question its genealogy as a symbol The star is a symbol that emerges from a natural observance: the dots that mark the night sky. It has functioned as a guide for travelers, as a natural text to be interpreted. Together stars have formed constellations, associative images that are written not read. Ultimately though, the star functions as a beacon, as that to grab attention. Is it not coincidental that the star is privileged as it is that which functions in the Western grand myth of the messiah arrived?
The star is too restrictive, too immediate. Our analysis will call for another symbol, one which will still function to fragment the text. This symbol shall be []: the frame.

The Framing of the Shot
In our formal critique of Barthes' analysis we will maintain a shared ideal in our process: a “method [that] through its very slowness and dispersion, avoids penetrating, reversing the tutor text, giving an internal image of it: it is never anything but the decompostion (in the cinematographic sense) of the work of reading: a slow motion, so to speak, neither wholly image nor wholly analysis” (S/Z, 12-13). Whereas Barthes “speaks” a metaphor, our methodology takes the metaphor literal. This is a strategy of a radical adherence to a particular denotation, that in our method will function as an originary detonation. This is a detonation that functions as an explosion of the text's pluralities. In our methodology the “I” who reads the text will move beyond a writterly function: an “I,” who is a plural in its own right, shall double as “Eye,” a particular but theoretical eye: the eye of cinema. This destabilized subject renders not only a text through the “act of writing,” but a mechanical reproduction as the “I” indentifies with an “Eye” that is both Camera and Projector. We shall reject a process that is step-by-step, each step is too quick a movement: each step is constituted by multiple frames. Rather we shall slow our methodology to a near halt: we shall interrupt the text as if manhandling the film strip. In this sense we shall observe the lexia shall not suffice for our process of reproduction. Now we will observe the shots, which contain multiple frames: a non-hierarchal presentation of frames and codes that form the a shot. These shots shall be named not to act as a weak summary but to comment of the structure of editing revealed in the reproduction. For our analysis we shall take a moment in the text and transform it, through a reproductive labor, into a sequence. We will also note that our particular frames are to be manhandled as well. The cinematic I/Eye shall attempt a zoom that retains focus: an approach to seize the forms apparent in our methodology without penetration. The subject shall relinquish itself to the machine; as a cinematic machine it shall not only construct a mise-en-scene, but in precisely acting under the imperative mettez – a mise-en-sens.

From our method to a product of madness.
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