immanence

Chris at Networkologies has an excellent reply to my post on time- and crystal-images and the campaign ads he had described here. Chris writes:

When we first see a campaign ad, our first thought might not be that there is virtuality lurking within the images before us, but of course, for Deleuze, there is virtuality lurking within everything, the trick is to find ways to unveil and release it. But as each reworked rif on an ad is produced, each new version expands virtual potentials present within the original, just as each of these new versions can serve as potential fodder for new reworkings. Many of these reworkings are incompossible with each other, but they are all fundamentally mirrorings of the original ad, which is its germ, with YouTube as the medium which then crystalizes into the new ads themselves as so many mirrors. Its in this sense that we see time ‘gush forth’ from these images in multiple directions.

Acknowledging some puzzlement over the Slowdive video I had included in that post (which I chose partly because it resonated with Tim Morton’s post, and because it was simple — a remix/reviewing of only two elements, or moments from two other films, sutured together through a single piece of music — and partly because I liked it), Chris still manages to insightfully read the video as a crystal-image in which “Difference emerges within the image in previously unexpected ways, producing new potential pasts and futures of the film images.” See the rest of the post here.

With our shared interest in Deleuzian, Whiteheadian, and other process-relational approaches and in media in general and cinema in particular, I’m finding Chris to be a kindred spirit in cultural theory, and am looking forward to his forthcoming Networkologies book.