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

LeVeque's contortions and manipulations transform Hollywood cinema from a narrative psychic zone into a social space constructed out of a series of visual relays. The films are deeply marked by codes of gender, power, economics, and race; they are imbued with a cultural presence overdetermined with ideological baggage. The Birth of a Nation (1915, by D.W. Griffith), Gone with the Wind (1939, by Victor Fleming), Forbidden Planet (1956, by Fred Wilcox), Vertigo (1958, by Hitchcock), and The Sound of Music (1965, by Robert Wise) are films that LeVeque grew up with and are therefore, as he explains, as much psychic landscapes and imprints of personal history as narratives. LeVeque's video works engage with the desires inherent in the cinematic apparatus, albeit with a marked difference: his work inscribes the spectator's archive of desires and memories back onto the film's surface. This signifies resistance to the otherwise predetermined spectatorial, psychical, and ideological space that is mapped out for the boxed-in spectator.

The algorithms transpose the unconscious of cinema into a material object. Jacques Derrida writes that the archivist, "produces more archives ... and that is why the archive is never closed." (1) LeVeque's work actualizes a conceptual model of the archive as open, moving, and transforming rather than inert. By mobilizing the collision between the archive of cinema and its psychoanalytic analog residue, LeVeque reconfigures established meanings and forms of authority in Hollywood films and engineers his own subjective truths into the fray. The possibilities of the digital machine produce and animate contingencies of meaning, politics, and desire through algorithms. By figuring the archive as a problem worked on through algorithms, LeVeque's videos open up a field of the unexpected; they focus on the production of an aleatory space between the images rather than on the images themselves. The archive is not only a physical place but also an imaginary field. For LeVeque, the archive is without walls, always an open source, an endlessly mutating and material field. Not only in possession of the celluloid, the archive has an unconscious dimension and is a repository of repression. LeVeque's archive is not only made up of Hollywood films and media images but also his subjective relationship with them. The archive enables Deleuze's concept of the brain as a screen that tracks a cinematic lapse from active extension into the intensity of the brain, memory, and thought; discovering "subjective images, memories of childhood, sound, visual dreams and fantasies." (2) These works represent an onslaught on the ideologically laden films and media images that LeVeque uses, making it possible to conceive of the cinematic contingent through physicalized temporal hybridities.

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LeVeque's video works juxtapose the archival analog object with a mathematical logic by jamming the original narrative into a paradigm of flicker and rhythm that plays with persistence of vision, a nineteenth-century scientific trope that forms the foundational visuality of cinema. They also jettison the informational and evidentiary in Hollywood films and shear away the psychoanalytic. In 4 Vertigo (2000), he poses the conceptual problem of deleting the male gaze, a notion coursing through virtually all scholarly writing on Hitchock's original work. Condensing the film by grabbing one frame every two seconds and duplicating it four times, a new digital gaze is inscribed--one that exists in social exhibition space rather than psychic space. LeVeque's works refuse the iconic and representational; they are not rearranged examples, excerpts, or fragments. Each video runs the source film from start to conclusion while continually dropping frames and serve as experiments in shifting the temporal into the durational.

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LeVeque's digital practice charges the space of exhibition. It activates a conceptual space through the physicality of watching and experiencing rhythmic patterns. This physicality generates an experiential exhumation of the political valences in the works as they screen in the present, not in the past. For example, Backwards Birth of a Nation (2000) reverses racism and Dramatically Repeating Lawrence of Arabia shows the essentializing of the Middle East as a static masculinized landscape, with all movement removed in the reprocessing. The works migrate Hollywood cinema from a space of transference to a space of dissonance.

HALLUCINATIONS 

Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that realism and rationality block minor histories that require "plural ways of being in the world." (3) However, the poetic, the dream-like, and the phantasmatic "pierces the veil of the real," transports beyond, and transcends the "mere thingness of things"; reconstituting, but not denying, reality. (4) The aesthetic and imaginary moment "creates a certain irreducible heterogeneity in the constitution of the political" by interrupting the one definition of the political aligned with the realist and prosaic, "to introduce unannounced the political change that only poetry can deliver." (5) The political, then, must be constituted in a plurality that includes layers from lived reality to dreams, nightmares, and ghosts; thereby enacting a minoritarian politic that differs from constructing oppositional or peripheral positions. Deleuze and Felix Guattari observe that "in erecting the figure of a universal minoritarian consciousness," one becomes revolutionary "by using a number of minority elements, by connecting, conjugating them, [inventing] a specific, unforeseen, autonomous becoming." (6) Whether working with classical realist texts, such as Lawrence of Arabia (1962, by David Lean), Spellbound, and Vertigo, or genre-driven works like The Sound of Music and Forbidden Planet, LeVeque destabilizes the embedded realism by implanting plurality as a conceptual model within the reprocessing. These works reverse the repression of incoherence, as though the hallucinations of Scottie in the original Vertigo were privileged moments rather than aberrations, alluding to Deleuze and Guattari's assertion that a "schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst's couch," (7) as well as their rejection of prescribed psychical equilibrium.

LeVeque produces hallucinations through erecting bi-polarities between the original narrative and the persistence of vision; furthering the relationship Sadie Plant discerns between drugs and the cinema, the two "chemical responses to the speeding changes of the nineteenth century," (8) and reminding us of a contemporary mediascape that, quoting Paul Virilio, bases "itself on psychotropic derangement and chronological disturbance." (9) The soundscape of many of LeVeque's videos contribute to this hallucinatory aesthetics. The dance music of 2 Spellbound, the remixed sound track of 4 Vertigo, and the pulsations of 16xTheHillsAreAliveWithTheSoundOfMusic (2005) serve to modify "states of mind, perceptions, bodies, and brains; [and are] music that become[s] almost as immediate as drugs themselves." (10) These soundscapes "let the body escape the structures and boundaries that keep it organized" (11) and allow an exit point from ideological baggage and the spectatorial regime.

Produced through systematic algorithms, works like 2 Spellbound and 4 Vertigo engage a kaleidoscopic effect by doubling and flipping the image. These abstract patterns shift with scene changes and underscore the image as a spatialized zone. These two works in particular, and LeVeque's video exploration of the historical hysteria around bio-terror, Strained Andromeda Strain (2002), operate as puns on the digital. Although the images appear digitally composited and layered, each frame is actually only one image extracted from the original film; the layering effect is a result of persistence of vision--an operation that suggests a further conceptual pun of an embodied virtuality.

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COPYRIGHT AND DISLODGING AUTHORITY

LeVeque emblazons all of his work with an anti-copyright sign, indicating his allegiance to expanding and redefining the threatened public domain. However, one must not position his oeuvre within the exploding sector of pirate media, collage, and cut-up genres, even though it shares with these works a politic embracing archives without borders, a rejection of intellectual property as part of corporate relations of exchange, and an aggressive anti-authoritarianism. In the range of cut-up work, for example--which remixes and re-edits speeches by Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair on the Iraq war--re-edits of image and sound depend on reorganizing the level of the denotational to generate readable ideological interventions. LeVeque's works, however, function differently from works that critique political hegemony and transnational corporate power solidified around issues of intellectual property and information technologies. Although LeVeque's project, the variety of cut-up works, and pirate media are all influenced by situationist practices, LeVeque's projects heed a particular directive in their manifesto: "detournment is less effective the more it approaches a rational reply." (12) For LeVeque, the practice of digitization of Hollywood films is a practice of dislodging authority on multiple levels: the authority of the narrative, the authority of desire, and the authority of linear coherence. These videos activate a Deleuzean network of flows and contingencies by reconfiguring the dynamics of power and the politics of media activism in the face of globalized corporate power. Graham Meikle observes that the impact of tactical media "often comes through high-jacking the agenda of mainstream media." (13) LeVeque's video works do more--they corrupt the integrity of mainstream visual images and open up a struggle for interpretations. Such tactical protest and resistance is infiltrational and eats into the authority and established meanings of the object. Furthermore, it is more formidable as a model for media activism than opposition through hijack.

Beyond appropriation and collage juxtapositions, which often function on the level of the rational and the indexical, LeVeque's works are suspended between a double movement. While their reprocessing suggests the idea that intellectual property in the context of transnational corporate media exists within deeply embedded social, historical, and psychic networks, they also examine the possibility of restoring physicality to the cinematic object and spectator. LeVeque's pieces disengage the denotative, connotative, and legal from the image. Each functions as more than an interrogation of what the image represents or how its meaning can be twisted into new subversive meanings. Rather, these works propose that Hollywood films are not proprietary property but circulatory, etherealized phantasms that lodge within us as a parasitic psychic fungus, occupying cells. LeVeque deploys the digital to reposition Hollywood films as a shared psychic and political zone, requiring exorcism through mathematics, rather than as property and evidence. The algorithmic cycles produce a visual and political yield that is not in the source film, arousing conceptual ideas through the production of the unexpected.

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TENSIONAL ZONES

LeVeque's exploration concentrates on engineering tensional zones through machine interface. In geology, a compressive zone piles materials on top of each other vertically, while a tensional zone pulls materials apart horizontally. LeVeque describes his process as "pulling a string of images taut and then plucking it to see what field of waves emanate." (14)

These works do not function within the conceptual framework of montage editing, with its reliance on productive dialectical collisions between images, formal structures, and ideas. Instead, they propose an exploration of cinema as surfaces, where algorithmic structures provide the only forward drive that foregrounds machine language and generates tensional zones. A form of digital alchemy, LeVeque's project proposes a challenge for contemporary media practices: how to make something new, beyond the location of cinema, in order to charge and open up its space.

NOTES (1.) Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 68. (2.) Gregory Flaxman (ed.), The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of the Cinema (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2000), 6. (3.) Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 101. (4.) Ibid., 170-2. (5.) Ibid., 178. (6.) Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone, 1987), 106. (7.) Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone, 1983), 2. (8.) Sadie Plant, Writing on Drugs (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), 48. (9.) Ibid., 51. (10.) Ibid., 166. (11.) Ibid., 167. (12.) Author(s) phone interview with Les LeVeque, July 2005. (13.) Graham Meikle, Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 124. (14.) Author(s) phone interview with Les LeVeque, July 2005.

SHARON LIN TAY is a lecturer in Film Studies at Middlesex University in London, England, where she teaches film theory, world cinema, and digital culture.

PATRICIA R. ZIMMERMANN is a professor of cinema and photography at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York. She is the author of Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (1995) and States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies (2000) and co-editor of Mining the Home Movie (forthcoming).