User's guide to detournement_ Felix Kreidel

One must determine one's public before devising detournement. Détournement not only leads to the discovery of new aspects of talent; in addition, clashing head-on with all social and legal conventions, it cannot fail to be a powerful cultural weapon in the service of a real class struggle.

Metaphors on Vison - Serena Milan

This excerpt has an interesting perspective.  It reminds me that we are limited by our experiences.  With vision for example, from the moment we are born, we are learning things (composition, good, bad, ugly, nice). These lessons limit our vision as well remove our innocence or naivety. This article resonates with me  because I would like to have a Kino-Eye, an eye that moves without the restriction of what we are used to seeing or have learned to see, an eye that perceives things in a unique way.  I realize that when I think of filming, I feel limited to recording things in the way I am used to seeing them, which is not necessarily the best way. I agree with the writer "after the loss of innocence, only ultimate knowledge can balance the wobbling pivot point." To me this means that after the world has affected the way to perceive things, having ultimate knowledge brings an awareness of our skewed perceptions. We can follow all the rules that we have learned or we can break them on purpose, an option only education can bring.

Metaphors of Vision - Trang Pham

Ever since the human learned about rules and restrictions in a society, they subtly restrict themselves in every action to fit in the norm of what a good society looks like. We bounded ourselves in a box, only do what we're told or seen, define things that already be given, completely forgot about the choice to be freely express how we can observe things. By understanding and knowing that you have to let yourself out of the prison of limitation, we can let our's consciousness roam freely in the realm of imagination, and see things that simple but holds the deeper but beautiful meaning hide within it.

Metaphors of Vision - Samuel Gallardo

This brief reading is a way for one's understaing of how to think and view our surroundings in a new way. What really gets to me is how Stan explains a process or in better words gives knowledge on how to become inspired just by changeing one's self perception. As the reading ends Stan suggests that a good way of doing this is by letting go of what your mind already processes and to go further back to a simpler time in which one's mind was pure and had an underdemanding mind set. Futhermore giving more creativity to any work this pertains to.

Stan Brakhage and the artist’s crusade to redefine imagery

Cover of Metaphors on Vision by Stan Brakhage

By Nancy Cantu Harris
 
In the same way that Umberto Eco made explaining the world through semiotics his very own lifelong apostolate, Stan Brakhage, in the 1960’s, set himself out on the mission of using moving picture images to create an artistic language that would allow us, in time, to understand abstract and complex concepts such as birth, death, sex and the search for God.

The dissertation that titles the book, Metaphors on Vision, (Film Culture Inc. U.S.A., 1963) opens asking the reader to defy all preconceptions acquired through our eyesight, and to challenge our common need for labeling and organizing everything we see in a logical way.

What would we “see” in our minds if we didn’t have a prior idea of what an object looks like? How wide and deep our imagination would go without being restricted by our prior knowledge of the world?

When I read the premise proposed by the director of Window Water Baby Moving, I remembered a conversation I had with a congenitally blind man who worked as a Braille teacher at the now extinct School for the Blind and Visually Impaired in Ciudad Victoria, Mexico.

In order to better understand the way someone without eyesight goes about his everyday life, I asked him how he chose his clothes in the morning, and he revealed to me that he could “tell” colors, he could not elaborate what the different colors looked like in his mind (that’s a hard thing to do even for those of us blessed with the sense of vision) but he said “I can tell you that the shirt I’m wearing is blue, I cannot put in words what the color blue looks like but I can feel it, it just feels different, and it’s my favorite color.”

Needless to say, that exchange was permanently archived in my mind, and reading Stan Brakhage’s text made me draw some similarities between a congenitally blind person, who has no preconceived images of the world around him, and a visual artist who uses cinema to explain, in a non-literal way, his vision of the profound concepts that concern him, since they both disregard conventional imagery to express themselves in a way that others, whose imagination is restricted by their eyesight, simply can’t.

Metaphors on Vision _ Felix Kreidel

To see is to behold now an eye that is unruled by manmade laws is free to know each object encountered in life instead of just the name of each object. Letting go gives you personal freedom like that of the innocence of a baby's eye.