I keep on thinking how freezing to a pose and disrupting the archive could be related. Perhaps what really happens in the situation that Pavel describes (maybe there are more thinkable scenarios) is that through freezing the pose, the camera becomes part of the or interferes with the script. Applying that same language, thus speaking of role-change in approach to the archive or scripted material (history), perhaps its possible to say that to freeze is a an expression of the desire to interfere with this script.I am still not able to answer your question who or what changes role in the performance situation or imagine how 'it' could perform. I can only attempt to imagine 'it' performing, when I draw back on moments in preparation to work with a certain material, hence this crazy talk about transcendence.
I was scanning through an article by Flusser, printed in F.R. David (with the fish), I think you own a copy as well. In it a nice alternative is given to how Pavel speaks about the power of imagination. Flusser says an inversion has taken place of the historical roles of reason and imagination. That history /writing /reason instead of explaining and critcising the imagination, has become subservient to image making. That (in the worst case) writers write scripts for new images, so called techno-images and this cycle becomes a kind of 'eternal return of life in apparatus that progresses by its own inertia'. This is a very black-and-black summary, but I feel more for this vision of imagination then Pavel's. My own interpretation of this short text on an intuitive level goes hand in hand with my experience with the government archive and social service. The role that objects play in the images that document the Social Service around it's instigation in the '60s, perform a rational, divisional, hierarchical, standardized function or sometimes frustrating relation between user and provider. In the present situation, co-existant to some of these still present 'older' objects, is a much more irrational image cycle at hand, one that seems to make physical this notion of techno-imagination: 'a tecnnical progresss that has become autonomous of human decision'. They are images of people performing, personalised models. I didn't know how to call this phenomenon, still don't, it becomes too easily a judgement; but some kind of temporal cyclical time, with no sense of history. (obviously)
Back to freezing, Flusser also talks about a black box which feeds on history, text or script (lineair time) and freezes it into techno-images (cyclical time). He then asks himself how and if this can/should be resisted. Before reading any further, I let my imagination flow unobstructedly and imagined us in front of this black box, before the histories and texts are devoured, posing before it, maybe becoming script ourselves and then many possible ends:
- devoured by the black box
- unmasking the script (that it is in fact scripted), then devoured by the black box
Perhaps I can wear my dust-jacket on the opening and hang yours on the wall in the Transmission gallery, as evidence of our collaboration and your absent presence?
I like this object (in combination with a mirror), maybe it's something to keep in mind as a form for the booklet or a photo-album (ruth at work/ touching objects)
