Throbs and pulsations: Les LeVeque and the digitization of desire.

Les LeVeque, a New York City-based sculptor turned video artist, has spent the last decade exploring the idea of machine interface by mathematically reprocessing a variety of mass media forms, such as Hollywood films, advertisements, presidential broadcasts, and publicly televised hearings. His use of algorithm and computer interface demonstrates how new technologies reposition the cinema and raise issues of political and theoretical urgency for media practices and activism. Reverse-engineering old technologies like analog film with simple mathematics, he develops a high-tech aura through low-tech means. In place of the spectatorial relations and psychical control that govern much of our understanding of the cinema, LeVeque's works produce an alternative field charged in different ways, whether through the use of gaps and fissures, durational strategies, rhythms, or soundscapes. LeVeque reflects on how the contemporary mediascape presents a series of theoretical and political provocations that unsettle how we consider the image, interface, spectatorship, and copyright. The rising uncertainty over the status of the indexical sign shifts discussions of the image from that of representation and meaning to that of interface and materiality thereby modifying conceptualizations of spectatorship and desire and allowing the possibility of freedom from authority, whether psychoanalytic or proprietary.

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Of interest is how LeVeque's video projects, influenced by situationist politics, digitize desire--a contradictory movement between algorithms as controlled experimental systems and desire as uncontrolled, inchoate, ineffable, and immaterial. Looking at digital media from the perspective of Gilles Deleuze's conceptual model of contingency is significant to developing a theory of the "unexpected"; moving from a model of inert theory and practice of control to a model of a mobile media interface that produces unexpected and unpredictable results. It also moves media practice from the question, What does it mean?, to What would happen if? In this essay, we consider the key conceptual and political nodal points in a vast network of relations that make up the new mediascape through the challenges that LeVeque's video works present.

MATERIALITIES AND OPERATION

The early film theorists Rudolph Arnheim and Siegfried Kracauer represent opposing approaches to the cinema. While Arnheim privileges the medium's inherent ability to manipulate images, Kracauer considers the machine's ability to record reality as a definitive aspect of the cinema. Fortified by inclinations toward realism and the generation of psychoanalytic meanings, Kracauer's approach dominates discourses on Hollywood cinema, while placing filmic specificity second. However, given the contemporary explosion in digitality and new media technologies, we must consider the significance of cinematic materiality to sustain a political imperative, especially when considerable political autonomy has been lost to the imposition of an eroticized psychical economy on film theory and criticism. It is productive and necessary to look at the interface rather than the image of digitality.

In LeVeque's works, algorithms function to rid the psychoanalytic from the image by investigating and then releasing its materiality from the immobilized shrouds of identified and eroticized models. Often producing a visual field that is not inscribed in the original films, algorithms function not as inscriptions or deconstructions, but as an alchemy to release the unexpected.

LeVeque subverts the dominance of psychoanalysis in cinematic discourse by digitally remediating classic Hollywood films. In 2 Spellbound (1999), LeVeque condenses Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) into a 7 1/2 minute flickering Rorschach test by extracting a single frame from every second of the original film in a linear fashion--from Hitchcock's opening sequence to the copyright warning. LeVeque then re-edits these frames into a series of flickering patterns that appear split down the middle, accompanied by a dance track punctuated by voices repeating phrases taken from Spellbound's dialogue, articulating desires and mental states. 2 Spellbound reconfigures the menacing and irrational desires of the gothic romance behind Hitchcock's film, which focuses on finding an identity for Ingrid Bergman's amnesiac lover. It then transforms these coded desires into free, pulsating desires that thrive and proliferate on the surface of the image in non-sexually differentiated terms.

While some artists inscribe desire onto the material surface of their respective works to expose or evade the psychoanalytic codification of desire, LeVeque challenges the dominance of psychoanalytic interpretations by reconfiguring desire to the extent of freeing it from such codifications--desire is in the machine, not the image. These released materialities summon different theoretical considerations of fluidity, flow, and immersive embodiment, turning from the eye of cinema to an exploration of the politics of the immersive body of the digital.

The algorithm functions as the spine on which the visual field hangs; rather than being embedded in the machine, these processes expose the machine operations themselves. In 4 Vertigo (2000) and 2 Spellbound, LeVeque employs algorithmic procedures through cutting and pasting by hand one frame per minute of screen time into the editing software Premiere. In these earlier works, he used a time-based corrector, a jitter patch, and old Amiga computers to manipulate the materials systematically exported from the original films. 2 Spellbound reverses every other frame, disposing of the psychoanalytic desires embedded in Spellbound using speed, symmetry, and dance music. In the more recent Dramatically Repeating Lawrence of Arabia (2004), a work demonstrating the link between orientalism and stasis, a more complicated algorithm changes sequences between one and four; producing convergences and divergences, or mirrorings, that are then pulled apart. Temporality is not condensed through algorithmic sampling but transmuted into spatiality and surface, a zone of tactility and sensory excess.

IMAGE TO INTERFACE

Interface--the physicalized relational structure between user and machine--constitutes a key issue in theories and practices of digitality because it prompts a reconsideration of the image as no longer fixed and immutable but constantly changed and interfered with in order to generate new meanings and social spaces. A Song from the Cultural Revolution (1998) re-edits, frame-by-frame, hand gestures Bill Gates made during testimony before the United States Senate committee on the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) to spell out text from Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (1967). In this piece, questions of interface move theory from the relationships between images to the relationship between machine, image, and user; from the image as representation to the interface as tactile relation. Although manipulating Gates's hand gestures expresses LeVeque's anti-authoritarian stance, the objective of A Song from the Cultural Revolution is not to enact parody but rather to reconfigure the relationship between image and signification by inscribing the user on the surface materiality. Similarly, Notes from the Underground (2003) manipulates the blinks of President George W. Bush during a televised speech to spell out, in Morse code, a statement made in 1969 by the Weather Underground--another case where parodic intentions were possible and tactile on the interface.

LeVeque's project shifts reception from ideas of the spectator and interpretation of texts to interface--a productive, physicalized, and always changing coordination between user, machine, and image. In Doubling Forbidden Planet (2003), a 99-minute experiment in the durational, every image from the film is a double pas de deux that removes chiaroscuro and depth, generating a conceptual shift from narrative to abstraction and emphasizing shapes, forms, colors, and textures as the interface of the work. This doubling enacts another conceptual pun: the original story is about a machine that enables the user to manifest their conscious and unconscious desires. LeVeque's piece doubles the machine in the film with the machine of the digital, proposing wryly that subconscious and conscious can be respectively remapped as the analog and the digital, with the physical as an interface. A theorization of interfaces suggests a shift of analysis from the visual spaces within the screen to the idea of the screen as one vector within a larger social and physical space.

CHARGING THE SPACE THROUGH RELAY