Vortrag, gehalten
am 8.3.2005, University of California,
Irvine
Jens
Schröter
3Defense. The
volumetric display and the localization of the
Other.
1.
Talking about ‘defense’ means
talking about space. Defending yourself, your body, your people, your so-called
nation or whatever means drawing a distinction, constructing a border which
separates you from the – then defined – hostile Other. You may try,
perhaps, to make this barrier as impenetrable as possible to prevent every
movement across the line. But in reality this strategy might fail. In the moment
the border is crossed by the Other you have to defend yourself, for example by
trying to destroy the invader with weapons or with pharmaceuticals. This
is even true for the seemingly immaterial realm of
cyberspace – as it is revealingly
named – in which you have to erect ‘firewalls’ that defend
your digital domain against the hacking
invader. Although this usage of the term ‘space’ may be somewhat
metaphorical, I think it is plausible to state a fundamental connection between
defense and space.
2.
So if you want to be successful in
defending your proper realm, you need to control space. To control space simply
means – of course – to know
that space. You need information about where the Other is, how fast he
can move through the territory, how fast you can move, whether there are for
example natural phenomena such as storms which complicate the situation and so
on. That is: you need representations which give you information about the
terrain. Traditionally – think of Lessings’
Laokoon –
images are the type of media which are
associated with space. There is – of course –
the map as a kind of image/text-hybrid
which had an enormous role in the history of the representation of space
(Abb. 1, Vermeer) – indeed
Farinelli spoke of the ‘cartographical reason’ of modernity. The map
is a fascinating topic, which I do not address here and now. It suffices to
say that as the wars became bigger and faster the static map alone wasn’t
satisfactory any longer. Gathering information faster and faster became vital.
As already noted by Lev Manovich, radar was invented during the Second World War
to retrieve real time information about
the structure of spaces in which the enemy presumably moves
(Abb. 2, Radar): „Detected objects
appear as bright spots on the display watched by [a] radar operator. [...] All
it sees and all it shows are the positions of objects, 3-D coordinates of points
in space, points which correspond to submarines, aircrafts, birds, or
missiles.“ The radar screen shows 3D coordinates of points in space
– but it often shows them using a two-dimensional screen. This became
problematic under specific circumstances, insofar as the spatial structure of
the observed territory would be much easier to understand and therefore to
control if the spatial relations could be grasped intuitively. So some of the
early developments in spatial imagery took place in relation to radar.
I’ll return to that later.
3.
But first I’d like to state the problem in
somewhat more general terms. I said that images are the preferred medium for
representing spatial relations. This is completely obvious when one is concerned
with two dimensions. But the representation of the third dimension on the
picture plane is traditionally accomplished by techniques of
projection of which the most important
is of course perspective in painting
(Abb. 3 Perspective). Since the
19th century perspective can be
automatically rendered by a lens or systems of lenses (as in photography,
cinema, video and even in photorealistic computer graphics, where one can find
‘virtual cameras’ with virtual lenses). The perspectival system of
representation reigned for centuries and continues until today. But in modernity
– the decomposition of perspectival representation in modernist painting
set aside – perspective comes more and more into conflict with the needs
of modern warfare, modern science and modern medicine. The problem simply is
that perspective, although it may not be a conventional, but a mathematically
based and in so far objective system of projection, is not
isomorphic. That means: You can’t
reconstruct the spatial layout of a three-dimensional scene from a
two-dimensional perspectival representation of that scene. Many other
configurations of objects would fit the same pattern on the image-plane.
It’s not difficult to imagine that perspective's non-isomorphism is a big
problem for e.g. aerial reconnaissance, the analysis of bubble chamber volumes
in particle physics, the visualization of weather phenomena, the correct mapping
of the interior of the body in medicine and so forth. So it comes as no
surprise that in modernity different types of post- or trans-perspectival images
were developed. These trans-plane
images give more and more precise spatial information. One example is
– of course – stereoscopy. It was originally invented in 1838 by
Charles Wheatstone to prove his arguments about the binocularity of vision and
then became, roughly until the 1890s, a popular entertainment medium
(Abb. 4 Wheatstone Stereoskop/Nutzung).
As Jonathan Crary argues in his influential study
Techniques of the
Observer, stereoscopy disrupts
the perspective paradigm by functionalising the binocularity of the observer,
even when the single images are still perspectival. His argument on why
stereoscopy disappeared at the end of the
19th century rests exactly on that
point. He argues that stereoscopy destabilizes the – so called –
‘paradigm of the camera obscura’, which he sometimes seems to
identify with the perspectival order (p. 118), whilst on other occasions he
clearly differentiates both fields (p. 34). This destabilization was – so
Crary – somewhat too obvious and therefore stereoscopy lost the fight
against photography which reconstituted the monocular, disembodied, perspectival
gaze. There are surely many problems in this argumentation but my main
point of critique is that stereoscopy simply
didn’t disappear at the beginning
of the 20th century. Even if it
vanished as a popular entertainment medium and left that field to cinema, the
post card, the Kodak-self-made-photography and so on, it continued to operate
more and more in aerial reconnaissance, especially in the First World War. It is
downright impossible to discriminate between a valley and a mountain range on a
photo made from a very high altitude – unless you use stereoscopy. It was
and is also utilized in photogrammetry or in the analysis of bubble chamber
volumes in particle physics and so forth
(Abb. 5). It was used in these
discursive practices to provide the necessary spatial information. Considering
this, the all-to-popular conviction that modernity witnesses an
‘annihilation of space’, as for example Virilio teaches us, has to
be differentiated. Of course telecommunications shrank the world, or better: the
richer countries, into the the global village. But in other, especially
pictorial contexts, space didn't shrink – it literally expanded.
4.
Stereoscopy (here including so-called integral
photography or lenticular imagery) is not the only type of trans-plane imagery.
There are – I think – two further basic types: One is holography,
basically developed around 1948, which as the only lenseless type of image
technology in the strict sense, based on an ontology of light as wave, that is:
on wave optics, again underscores the break with the perspectival regime of
light-as-lines in modernity. The third type, with which I’m concerned
today, is the volumetric display (into
which I include so called ‘varifocal mirror’ techniques). Volumetric
displays were developed in the 20th
century – intimately connected with the topic of defense. Only three years
after the Second World War the P.R. Wallis and E. Parker published the paper
Three-Dimensional Cathode Ray Tube
Displays. The aim is to optimize the already mentioned display of radar
signals: „The three-dimensional displays are used to display the positions
of the reflected ‘signals’ with respect to the three coordinates of
the volume, in order that the radar can be used as an object-detecting and
-locating system in three dimensions. [...] The physiological and psychological
problems of the human operator peculiar to three-dimensional displays are
discussed [...].” They describe different 3D-displays which may be useful
to optimize the performance of the human operator and hence the control over
space. Parker and Wallis analyze stereoscopic displays as well, but this, as
they call it’, „pseudo-3D”, has some limitations. Therefore
they propose first steps towards what they name „truly three dimensional
displays”. These are the first volumetric displays „in which the
echoes appear as bright spots in an actual volume of light.” That’s
the central point: Volumetric displays
represent the image not on a plane, but in a volume. In their very
early paper Parker and Wallis suggest different types of display for different
„aerial scanning patterns” – that is different ways for the
radar system to scan the territory in which the enemy is suspected . The aim is
to represent the radar-scanning of space in the most direct
way. I’ll show you one example
(Abb. 6, pattern+apparat) of a so called
‘spiral’ scan pattern and the adequate display arrangement. To the
left you see how the radar beam moves through the volume of space, the third
dimension is – so to say – into the page. On the right you see the
somewhat primitive apparatus, which is used to produce a seemingly three
dimensional image representing the scan movements. At that time, only analog
computation was available to Parker and Wallis (although digital computers
already existed) and so their goal was to map the radar scan directly into the
image volume. The Cathode Ray Tubes paint the elevation and the bearing scans on
the rotating mirror, where they fuse and represent the radar
volume. Before adressing more advanced
volumetric displays, I’d like to turn your attention to a weird
coincidence (Abb. 7, Pattern+Rotorelief;
2 Abb). Please compare the spiral scan pattern to the image on the right, which
is – as you surely know – one Marcel Duchamps’
Rotoreliefs from 1935 (this one is
called Corolle). Rosalind Krauss writes
in her book The Optical Unconscious on
these discs by dada- and proto-conceptualist-artist Duchamp: „Mounted on
a record player's turntable, the disks revolved soundlessly, the product of
their turning a series of optical illusions, the most gripping of which was that
rotation transformed their two-dimensionality into an illusory volumetric
fullness [...].“ Perhaps this is only a superficial coincidence –
yet Duchamp was interested in mathematics and you can see the spiral radar scan
and his rotorelief as so-called Lissajous-figures... But more important: The
similarity may be a symptom for a kind of – via Krauss –
optical unconscious generated by or
connected with the need to control space in modernity. I think that there is a
comparable knowledge implied in both the volumetric radar display and the
volumetric art of Duchamp, namely a knowledge about the perceptual production of
an image-volume by rotation. It is – this time in a line with Jonathan
Crary – a knowledge about specific attributes of human vision. And indeed
Duchamp was very interested in the psycho-physiological foundations of vision
and in trans-planar images as his experiments with stereoscopy show
(Abb. 8). And of course military
experiments in the effectiveness of radar operators imply that knowledge too.
This is obvious in the development of volumetric display technology. In the
years after 1948 a lot of different volumetric display technologies were
proposed. Some of them are still difficult to realize up to now, but some of
them became really important. Unfortunately we haven't got the time today to
discuss their various archaeologies and effects, especially the basic
distinction between solid state- and moving parts-types of display. I'll
concentrate on the currently established forms which belong to the moving parts
category. In this type of volumetric display the image, or to be precise, the
image-volume is based on the rotational movement of a planar or helical mirror
screen (Abb. 9) (so in a sense the old
paragone of painting and sculpture is
resolved in an image-volume, which is produced on a flat screen itself moving in
space). An optical or laser beam system synchronized with the movement of the
screen writes the image in points or lines or parts (dependent on the design)
onto the spinning screen. It is obvious: The knowledge on persistence of vision
found in the 19th century does not
only lead to the movement- or time-images of cinema, but also to trans-planar
space images. The two most important advantages of volumetric displays are
first, that the representation of the
spatial object is itself spatial and insofar very intuitively understandable and
second that the representation is
better suited to collective reception and therefore teamwork. Up to now one
central disadvantage is that the images are transparent and so exclude one
important clue for the reception of space, that is
occlusion (although there is at the
moment a lot of research in ‘opacity descriptors’, which admittedly
can only be realized in static volumetric displays). But the advantages
seem to prevail – so it’s not surprising that the military already
works with such display technologies. I’d like to show you an
unclassified paper from the United States Navy, dated 1994. In this paper a
relatively advanced helical volumetric display-technology
(Abb. 10) is discussed. Especially
interesting is the part of the paper in which potential usages of the display
– to be precise: of a future volumetric display – are sketched out.
Two examples: First the potentials of the new display technology for Command and
Control (C2)-Applications is described
(Abb. 11). Men are standing around a
volumetric display which presumably shows the intrusion of the enemy or the work
of the defending forces (please note the absence of women). Another
representation of the potentials of volumetric display technology includes a
woman (Abb. 12), but there you have
– not surprisingly – the idea of bodily control, of the transparency
of the body. Here defense doesn't lie so much in the localization of the outer
enemy, but in the control of the female body which is rendered transparent to be
controllable – to allow an optimized birth.
5.
There
surely is an – if you like – Defense-Unconscious in volumetric
display technology. See for example the actual advertisements for the
Perspecta 3D-Display, which is
currently the best volumetric display commercially available – it renders
the image volume in 768 x 768 x 198 Voxels, which is the spatial equivalent of
the pixel, in 8 colors at a refresh rate of 24 hz onto a disc rotating with 730
rpm
(Abb. 13). The
advertisement is highly symptomatic. In one case the volumetric display is used
to present the flight of an airplane over a landscape; and in the other it
presents a three-dimensional representation of –
HIV. In the first case it might be the
defense of the territory against an airplane; in the second it is the defense of
bodily integrity against the deadly virus. Again we find the territory and the
body as the central sites of defense, which have to mapped and analysed.
I think that in modernity space became an
important problem (whilst dissappearing in other fields). In modern warfare
space is not any longer an always already fixed territory on which troops meet
each other and fight – space itself has to be controlled. Modern medicine
– as part of what Foucault called the regime of biopolitics – has
not just to observe the symptoms which show up on the surface, but has to map
the body in more and more detailed depth to control, optimize and mobilize the
wordly flesh. These two types of defense – against the internal and
external enemies – result, among other things, in the development of
three-dimensional trans-planar images; or at least in certain applications of
those image-types. It’s not surprising that in twentieth-century art
one can also find traces of that 3D/efense-unconscious – and in a sense
already in Vermeers representation of Map. I already mentioned the weird visual
analogies between one of Duchamps’ Rotoreliefs and one specific radar scan
pattern. Now, in my concluding remarks I’d like to direct your
attention to Jenny Holzers Installation Sex
Murder (Lustmord, 1994). One specific realization of her Installation is
especially interesting, becauses there she uses volumetric display technology
(Abb. 14) in a highly revealing context,
in which one can find again the uncanny connection between the two central
topics of defense – control over the territory and control of bodily
integrity – and space. First the work is itself an installation which
fills space. It maps out a territory which symbolizes in very different ways and
in very different materials (Bones, Tables, Media Technologies, Photography and
Holzers’ famous neon writings) the Bosnian warzone – and thematizes
very decidedly the violating assault on female bodies. The volumetric
display used here resembles a kind of shrine in which texts circulate. Texts,
which describe in a poetic and condensed way the horrors when the defense breaks
down and the Other – in rape literally – intrudes into the private
realm. We can read: “She asks me to sleep in the house but I will not with
her body and it’s noises and wetness/She is narrow and flat in the blue
sack and I stand when they lift her.” That is: she’s first in the
house and then she is
flat – this spatial metaphors
might be a further hint. Much more could be said about this complex
installation, but I’ll have to stop here.
6.
Today I
could only adumbrate that there seems to be an
intricate network connecting military and biopolitical defense, strategies for
controlling space and the development and application of trans-planar imagery.
This network implies special forms of knowledge which circulate through
different fields and can also be found in art. There is a lot of research left
to be done until this discursive network can be itself mapped out in more
detail. Today I just tried to turn your attention to this aspect of the media of
defense.
Thank you
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