Catherine Ingraham after Peter White says: "One might . . . [think] about the etymological connection of locus/place to locking up. . . ."(1)

slow:time | in:place
I've noticed a trend among Flash sites toward temporal slowness, spatial interiority and the rhetorical invocation of naturalized biological formations as the idealized structural foundation for a depicted world.

As an alternative, I'm suggesting a model in which the exteriority of the screen is given primacy in order that it function as an intact, confrontational surface with a fixed spatial position. By coming into physical contact with this Other-ness, the exterior quality of this fixed flat surface, one retrieves one's ever-changing position in relation to it.

this is a list of flat things. this is a list of straight lines. this is a list of points.

things as flat as a screen: number one: discourse

Prophets of Extremity.(2)
Allan Megill writes describing discourse in Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge, the program of which book, according to Megill, is to attack Cartesianism, "understood . . . as the whole subjectivist emphasis that allegedly underlies modern science and technology."(3) Discourse is a surface which is flat and planar, and which Megill contrasts to depth interpretation readings of Marx and Freud, depth interpretation being "a search for 'deep structures.'"(4) So discourse is a flat plane, but not a Cartesian plane. Discourse has no grid overlay and has no fixable points.

Megill says, "[Foucault] distinguishes between analysis and interpretation, telling us that the 'analysis of statements . . . avoids all interpretation.' To put this in another way, analysis avoids all attempts to move from the manifest to the latent, from the statement to the intention. In thus refusing to repeat in the opposite direction the work of expression, it finally escapes, according to Foucault, from the domination of the subject, of the cogito."(5)

I take this to mean that on the plane that is discourse:

Analysis is limited to the description of statements forcing the epistemes which carried The Order of Things to give way to patterns (repetitions?). Description finds patterns in "discursive formations," "discursive regularities," patterns on the surface of the discursive plane.

But never temporal patterns which, as in the search for intention (the search for a subject) would require a dimensionality (an intentionality, a will) which would destroy the plane.

Refusing to recognize intention, we can keep subjecthood from rising up in the midst of lateral, discursive space. As a subject surely would rise up if we did not refuse to trace temporally backwards, refuse to seek/find/locate/point out the speaking subject's intention. Moving backwards is a temporal move which takes us either down into depth interpretation, or up to the position of the cogito.

(A Cartesian/Lacanian subject would stand erect on discourse's plane,
giving him both a point from which to speak,
and an elevated eye for spatial depth:
perspective from which to gaze upon an object.)(6)

Conversely then, the analyst/author must be similarly without subjecthood.
As theory is published, and enters discourse, it is at once subsumed and flattened.

Taussig on Caillois on Flaubert's The Temptation of Saint Anthony:
"The hermit, notes Caillois, wants to split himself thoroughly, to be in everything, to immerse himself in matter, to be matter."(7)

Me on Taussig's Caillois's Flaubert's Saint's Tempting:
"Surfers, I note, want to split themselves thoroughly, to be in every place, to immerse themselves in cyberspace, to be cyberspace."

slow:time

Robert Smithson says, "The 'time traveler' as he advances deep into the future discovers a decrease in movement, the mind enters a state of 'slow motion' and perceives the gravel and dust of memory on the empty fringes of consciousness."(8)

depresentifying

["a devaluation of all ideas of presence"(9)]:

And neither shall the author be present on the discursive plane (there is no model for the temporal).

And neither shall the author be a thing [a thing is "an extra-interpretive entity"(10)], to be signified by his text.

Because there is no temporality, the text has no past. It can describe itself, though, and it can have sex with other texts. In discourse, the author is a text?

no presence (only present tense), no things (only embeddeness in space)

therefore no orientation.

Foucault says, "[I'll] dispense with 'things', [. . . I'll] 'depresentify' them . . . [and] substitute for the enigmatic treasure of 'things' anterior to discourse, the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse."(11)

.fla

Flash imagery is gorgeous, luxurious, and too beautiful. Trance music drives me into lethargic animations. The animations are slow because at 12 frames per second, Flash's default frame rate (designed to create optimally small file sizes) is such that quick motion does not render smoothly. As a result, imagery is universally and unilaterally slowed down, drawn out, extended, and expanded. Faced with this beautiful, slow-moving imagery, I can't contain myself, I can't stay in my chair. I follow the imagery by mirroring it: I slow myself down, extend myself, and draw myself out_of_myself, draw myself across - crossing - cross into the web space free-falling invitingly slowly inside my screen:

Taussig: ". . . the gaze grasping where the touch falters."(12)

why so slow?

The sites are non-commercial, produced by artist/designers and contextualized as artistic endeavors. A language is employed in describing both these sites and the process of making them that relies on biological metaphors and refers to the sites as self-contained worlds.

They are hermetic and almost always characterized by an exaggerated, slowed-down temporality. As a viewer I experience an empathetic slowing down of my own and find myself "entering" the pictorial space of the world projected inside the screen. In addition to being slow, these worlds are inviting. Imagery and sound are aestheticized, luscious, beautiful: I am seduced and drawn in.

When I say that I am drawn in, I mean that I enter the illusionistic world portrayed across the screen from me. I both begin to behave as a subject borrowing the spatiality and temporality of the site's world, and cease to be a fully functioning subject acting in the space and time of my own. I become as the cursor. That I am participating in the world inside the screen is most clearly evidenced by my re-aligning my sense of temporality in accordance with that of the slowed screen world. I lose track of time and lose myself.

Going in / Buying in.
(e-)Commerce (is) in (web) space.

We're looking for the object of our desire,
for ourselves,
for the objet petit a.
And if we see ourselves chasing
ourselves across every space,
we are buying something there too.

If the screen does not resist our forward-seeking, perspectival looking, if the screen gives way, we barrel through into an expanse of (what else?) landscape. Then we recognize ourselves empty in the horizon, in a vanishing point. We buy in at the vanishing point. We buy what (it's us) disappears away from ourselves because we see in emptiness an entrance.

Our desires sit across from us at the dinner table, at the boutique counter, at the computer desk. Really, when I look outside of myself, I don't think I'm looking for the objet petit a, unless it is that the objet petit a that I want to find outside of myself is my own coherent self, _mySelf_ coherent. If it was that it was other than myself, what could I lose of myself or find?(13)

Maybe it is our own coherent selves which we seek. In that case we need the screen to stay solid, to deflect and reflect our gaze and stymie our bodies, to frustrate our desires enough that we recoil hard into our physicality. And in hitting up against a place where we are refused, a place we can't enter (a glass monitor, for example) we're experiencing the realness of our physicality. This is coherence in a bodily presence, as opposed to in (a glass mirror, for example) representational space.

screen

Phelan:
". . . the looker is always also regarded by the image seen and through this regard discovers and continually reaffirms that s/he is the one who looks."(14)

The object of a gaze returns a gaze. If the gaze of a person looking outward is a singular cone of perspectival vision, then the reciprocal gazes exchanged between seeing subjects and seen objects can be diagrammed by two symmetrical cones of vision overlayed one upon the other. Where the cones intersect a line of symmetry forms a plane at which the two gazes converge. This is Lacan's image screen.(15) The point out of which one gaze emanates is the same point into which its partner disappears. The screen is where these two lookings meet and pass each other, reverse, switch and exchange.(16)

To uphold this screen an object of my gaze must look back at me. If my gaze is not met and returned by the object so that our two gazes congeal on the screen to form an image, my cone of vision finds its end in the non-space of a vanishing point, and, sensorily, nothingness is my reflection; I believe myself to be nothing. I disappear, spread into the: (_horizon_)

If I look out and no gaze pushes back (_props_ my looking), my gaze pushes forward through the screen: it gives way to me. Then the screen falls flat and I can see only its edge, a line, a: (_horizon_)

Then I follow my gaze pouring out of my eyes running like something which has spilled to the edge of what I can see, the edge of my hope of finding myself: (_horizon_)

Phelan writes:
"The symmetry between the vanishing point and the viewing point reflects the other side of the premise of the plentitude of visual fulfillment - the imagination of annihilation and disappearance."(17)

I run up to the horizon line and not having found my (screened) self, I am out of space: I lose myself and at this point I vanish.

Phelan quotes Bryson:
"'The viewpoint and the vanishing point are inseparable: there is no viewpoint without vanishing point, and no vanishing point without viewing point. The self-possesion of the viewing subject has built into it, therefore, the principle of its own abolition: annihiation of the subject as center is a condition of the very moment of the look.'"(18)

But if gazing and meeting a gaze are synchronous and equal pressures and can dually confound each other, then the screen is held aloft between them. My image in the screen reflects myself back to me: ". . . all looking is an attempt to find a mirror."(19)

challenge:

I want to see imagery that doesn't create an illusionistic world inside the screen. I want the imagery in front of me to be so flat that I can't pass into the screen, but rather bounce back off its surface.

I don't want the screen to be something invisible through which I can pass into another world without noticing. I want to hit the screen and blink and shake my head and know where I stand in relation to it.

natural world
slow:time | in:place | nature:rhetorical

The world I lose myself to when I surf is in every sense intended/authored to be a "World" proper and to be modeled on the Natural World.

Biological references are consciously invoked to instill a sense of structural integrity. Similarly, Art History and Mathematics are used to invoke cultural heritage and precedence. These worlds are built on a reassuring foundation and on an (ironic) solidity, giving viewers confidence that there will be firm, earthly "ground" underfoot, allaying fears and luring the first step across.

New Masters of Flash(20) features nineteen renowned Flash designers. Each introduces him or herself with a section devoted to personal philosophy about process and design before going on to instruct readers in a particular trademark technique.

A sampling of outquotes taken quite at random from the philosophical sections:

Eric Jordan:
"I like to think of motion graphics in terms of web-scapes rather than web sites. As a motion graphics designer I attempt to convey a sense of atmosphere in the sites I create. The concept is simple: if the site can sustain itself as a world in and of itself, I've succeeded in creating a tangible atmosphere."(21)

Joshua Davis:
"A tree is an object. It exists in an environment, an environment built on rules. Working in the web is no different - you're building objects, and they need to be designed into an environment - an environment based on the rules and boundaries of technology, and any additional rules you program. Any object, or button, or navbar, or menu you design should be fastened rock solid to your layout or environment that's just as strong as the roots that hold that tree to the ground."(22)

Eric Jordan:
"If it maintains its form and doesn't deviate from the intended purpose, the site exists as a self-sustaining form of media. The content it carries is justified independently of anything else."(23)

Ivo van de Grift:
"You have to study the real world before you can create an accurate virtual one."(24)

Joshua Davis:
"Our work should reflect the nature of this fern and be comprised of tiny little objects that all talk to each other. . . . Just like the fern, our Flash project needs a firm foundation from which to grow and a set of parameters within which individual objects communicate and repeat themselves."(25)

Luke Turner of thevoid:
". . . building a site is usually a process more of evolution than of design and construction."(26)

Tony Ke:
". . . my primary source of inspiration is . . . life and nature."(27)

Todd Purgason:
"I look around . . . and see the vast gap between the most extravagant thing that man has ventured to create and the amazing balance of complexity and simplicity that exists in even the smallest thing in nature."(28)

Yugo Nakamura:
". . . I chanced upon the pure environment within the machine in front of me, the computer."(29)

Which brings us to Landscape. And by association, back to Smithson who now says: "Only when art is fragmented, discontinuous and incomplete can we know about that vacant eternity that excludes objects and determined meanings."(30)

Elegance

Good math, we say is 'elegant.' And good women. This, what I'm writing now, I want to be gracious and stately and well-mannered like good math is. What circle I inscribe on discourse's surface, the extent and radial reach of my writing, I would like to (grow up to be) elegant and clean like good code (like a good, clean woman. I would like to be. Writing at once effective and silent). I was born and schooled somewhere in New England.

James Peterson presents an argument (not his own):

"What's our problem?" asks the argument. How come we're attributing value to experimental works on the grounds that they require the viewer to work to get anything out of them. We're insisting that work is what's worthwhile, and we scoff at (fear the power of) hedonistic Hollywood's narrative pleasure. The argument says the idea that we should be working comes to us from our Puritan forefathers and mothers who tell us that nothing, not even looking should be easy.(31)

at_the_site

I care so much about your experience while you're here. I don't care if you fall in love. I just want you to be strong.

What is strength?

Strength is knowing and feeling the bounds of who you are.

I care so much about your experience while you're here how you're feeling while you're spending time with me. I don't care if you understand (yourself / me). I just want you to be sure (of yourself / of me).

What is surety?

Surety is knowing where you are that there is ground beneath your feet when you stand in front of me it's on ground we _DoNot_ share.

freud

here I go again, talking to myself about freud
talking to myself like I'm freud

surface bounding

Phelan says, "Discovering oneself to be a singular bounded body within a physical frame marks the end of the Imaginary continuity between what one sees and who one is."(32)

if (reflection == mimesis) {}

"[If] . . . we sentiently experience a window, a cloud, a tree not in our brains but, rather, in the place where we see it, then we are, in looking at our beloved, too, outside ourselves," says Benjamin in One Way Street.(33)

In a chapter titled after another quote of Benjamin's, "physionomic aspects of visual worlds," Taussig writes of seeing as an instance of touching. Writing about mimesis, sympathetic magic and the optical unconscious, he says,
". . .what is crucial in the resurgence of the mimetic faculty [is] the two-layered notion of mimesis that is involved - a copying or imitation, and a palpable, sensuous, connection between the very body of the perceiver and the perceived."(34) . . . "[C]opying, and the visceral quality of the percept uniting viewer with the viewed."(35)

And he goes on to discuss the total entanglement within mimesis between copy and contact:
". . . copy and contact, image and bodily involvement of the perceiver in the image . . ."(36)

Seeing is an instance of touching. And I begin to feel that it is also already an instance of copying, of mirroring and of reflecting. Mimesis and touching happen internally too, as in every act of seeing images are copied (and flipped upside down) on the retinal screen.

horizon - >

The horizon is a picture of Landscape's extreme. Like all absolute things it can be understood only in terms of relativity and opposition (to an Other). A horizon is a(nother) line of symmetry, one at which absolute extremity reverses and comes loose.

Standing on its axis, I flip my position upside down.

health

I worry about our health, about whether or not it is good for us to spend so much time without contact, without our bodily selves, excarnated, outside our meat.

critique on the grounds of misogyny or self-loathing

What other space yields, engulfs, has no definable or fixed form or temporal regularity, and routinely causes those who enter inside to get lost?

I am instinctively suspicious of and resistant to crossing the screen and entering web space. Do I have a castration complex? Does a yielding space ever represent something other than my mother's insides, or my own?

I am trying to make a screen that is quintessentially masculine, that not only behaves, but requires those who would interact with it to behave likewise, on a model of exclusive exteriority. Do I have a problem with my biology's interiority? How is my feminine author(ess)ship able to speak with the language I am choosing? (And why is a Lacanian speaking subject - a subject with language - always masculine?)

timid defense

On the other hand, what can be said about a woman producing a contrary model and inserting it into the dominant cultural standard? And about her doing this against a capitalist patriarchy that keeps producing and commercializing spaces modeled on its perceptions of female genitalia?

better defense

My project withstands my critiques because they do not acknowledge my intentionality, nor, therefore, my subjecthood. If I am not a subject, I'm not masculine enough to speak.

So on second thought:

things as flat as a screen: number two: mirrors

I can claim my biology as well as my interiority, defining both as _mine_ and not for sharing across a public protocol. Because entrance is a mutual yielding. One entering across a yielding screen yields too. My reflection on the screen's surface evaporates and at this moment the externalization of myself, the self who speaks in culture, the self with agency is disappeared.

(Until I crossed and killed the screen it was my mirror and kept my Self, if outside, intact.)

things as flat as a screen: number three: skin

At the very least, we need a bit of surface tension. We need to prop ourselves.

propping

Kathy O'Dell on Vito Acconci's 1972 work, Trademarks:
"With [the word 'outside'], [Acconci] evokes an environmental connotation, thereby producing a crucial link between the spatial aspects of psychic separation and the material space or environment in which that separation takes place - what psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu calls the 'mothering environment.'"(37)

Anaclisis is the psychoanalytic term which refers to the propping of the child on the skin of the mothering figure during the oral phase. Contact with skin during anaclisis instills qualities in the developing child related to the skin's three primary functions. As stated by Anzieu, these functions are first to contain and retain, second to mark a protective boundary against penetration by the outside, and third to afford a means for communication by providing an "inscribing surface."(38)

The "Skin Ego" is, in Anzieu's words, "a mental image of which the Ego of the child makes use during the early stages of its development to represent itself as an Ego containing psychic contents, on the basis of its experience of the surface of the body."(39) It is the Skin Ego's haptic experience of the mothering figure's skin in "common-skin phantasy" which relates and interprets skin and its qualities to the development of two important spatial conceptions during separation: "first the interface between the bodies of the child and the mothering figure (what Anzieu calls a 'psychic envelope'); and, second, the mothering environment itself with all its verbal, visual, and emotional properties."(40) The establishment of these spatial metaphors is the context for the development of the Ego out of the Skin Ego.

Anzieu's "intra-uterine phantasy" is the phase prior to the oral phase. Without anaclisis and the accompanying "common-skin phantasy," a child's development does not proceed to "'open out' into the world." Without propping to explain separation, there is no conception of exteriority. As in cases of autism, there is only exclusive, egg-like interiority, a "with[drawal] into a closed system."(41)

O'Dell:
"Said another way, it is in the oral stage of attachment to the mothering figure's body that the psyche prepares its own spatialized metaphor, its defense barrier that will monitor input and filter exchanges with both the external forces of the world and the internal forces of the id and superego." (42)

to_point:
floating dots

So what of the intra-uterine void? What would I look like there? I'd look like nothing: I'd be my position alone: Myself only relative: My movement only slight enough to feel the space around me: My position distilled and bodiless is a point.

Henri Bergson:
"When I speak of an absolute movement, I am attributing to the moving object an interior and so to speak, states of mind; I also imply that I am in sympathy with those states, and that I insert myself in them by an effort of imagination."(43)

The other thing I've noticed surfing Flash sites is this: floating dots are EVERYWHERE. In site after site are tiny two, three and four pixel dots moving very slightly back and forth and back and forth, up and down or side to side along invisible straight lines in the interface. They don't do anything, by which I mean they don't respond to my mouse input. They only migrate short distances, as though pacing. It doesn't matter what other imagery or, for that matter, what other design language, is onscreen. Dots are omnipresent. They are subtle, clinging to the edges of things.

On a technical level, the dots are "movie clips." This means they are elements which have been inserted into the main Flash movie but which remain independent of it. Movie Clips are proprietary authoring elements in Macromedia Flash.(44)

Three characteristics that make movie clips important and unlike anything else in Flash:
1. Movie clips repeat endlessly. By default, they are designed to loop what they are "doing" until told to do otherwise.
2. Movie clips can be named, and if named, controlled by each other and/or by the main Flash movie. This is important for creating interactivity.
3. Movie clips operate according to their own timeline which is completely unconnected to the main Flash movie's timeline. A movie clip's timeline can start and stop without "knowing" that anything exists outside of itself and without regard for time outside its own, an exception being that if the movie clips have names, they can "communicate" with each other.(45)

In that they both have timelines, movie clips are almost like mini-Flash movies except that a movie clip needs to be inside a parent swf file (a true Flash movie) to be published and seen. In other words, a movie clip must be placed physically within (a set of Cartesian coordinates that determine) the viewable area of a main Flash movie and in this way given a spatial position in order to be seen. The main Flash movie has its own timeline, so the timeline which gives the Flash movie clip its temporal mode is not the same as the timeline which gives it its spatiality and visibility. A movie clip being put into the main Flash movie's timeline and in this way given Visibility and an absolute coordinate position is analogous to its being brought into culture or into discourse. [When I say that absolute coordinates give the movie clip spatiality, I'm referring to spatiality as a position which can be referenced in relation to other positions that are part of the same coordinate system. A freestanding movie clip not in a Flash movie has partial spatiality in a sense, but is only relative to itself, and only relevant within the scope of its own "editing world."]

As far as the dots go, as I have mentioned, there is no interactivity to speak of, so the dot movie clips aren't communicating with either each other or me. This means that we are looking at small, independent nameless dots which have been programmed to repeatedly enact temporalities that are detached from the conditions which govern their spatial presence and visibility. It can be said that movie clips fall under the same Lacanian rules as the rest of us - they must be named in order to be speaking subjects in culture.(46) Because the dot movie clips are not communicating, it's unlikely that a Flash designer would give them discrete names. So, though given a position and visibility [brought into culture/discourse] the dot movie clips are Un-named [refused a position in culture/discourse from which to speak] and thus perform in culture as an Other.

The Other is there for the purposes of our looking [to be seen when we look for ourselves].

Up till now I've been concerned with the psychology behind the performative act of looking on the web, but all images I look at are manufactured - produced by those engaged in the performative act of image-making, who have a psychology and a politic all their own. When in Taussig's sense I touch an image by looking at it, I also touch an ideology. It is this ideology that gets reflected to me when I look for myself in an image-screen.

Phelan quotes Lacan:
"'I am not simply that punctiform being located at the geometral point from which perspective is grasped.'"(47)

Have I found my image: an image of myself as a viewer in the net? Have I embodied myself in a Cartesian point come undone?

I'm sure I've found an image that's in the web for me as a screen for my projecting, but is it satisfactory, or even adequate? If I am reflected in/by the dot, if I can inhabit its point, I am an unnamed (spatial) position without (temporal) context. If I'm one among the dots I'm seeing, I'm bound to be Other in this un/naturalized "World."

credibility
(
note not a methodical surfer. don't mean for this to be comprehensive. don't spend such a lot of time online. don't pretend that time online is spent doing research. will make generalizations without spending much time on analysis of specific projects. for reference, a short list of slowness: < Joshua Davis, Michael Cina, Yugo Nakamura> and some sites in lieu of cites in what preceded: there are more./ note

Joshua Davis made http://www.praystation.com and http://www.once-upon-a-forest.com. He says, "'The work will be whatever it needs to be for a user at any particular time,' [. . .] 'In that confusion, people want to understand what something IS.'"(48)

Michael Cina made http://www.trueistrue.com. He says, "'In nature . . . there are things that grow in patterns that are set up in a very orderly fashion.'"(49)

Yugo Nakamura made http://www.yugop.com. He says, "I realized that what I had thought of as an environment, existing outside of me was in fact entirely bound to what was going on inside me. [. . .] This concept of the perception of environment is found in an even more extreme form on the Web."(50)

for floating dots, look EVERYWHERE

The works in this short list both well exemplify the trend I'm describing and are uniquely influential in the international Flash design community. As such, they no doubt partially account for the increasing similar presences on the web.
)

(1) Catherine Ingraham, "Initial Properties: Architecture and the Space of the Line" in Sexuality and Space, ed. Beatriz Colomina (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), 265. See also footnote 11 on the same page.

(2) See Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

(3) Megill, 228.

(4) Megill, 223.

(5) Megill, 227 (my emphasis).

(6) See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992). For a direct connection to Foucault's project, see Chapter One, "Modernity and the Problem of the Observer"14–19.

(7) Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993) 43.

(8) Robert Smithson, "The Shape of the Future and Memory" (1966) in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) 332.

(9) Megill, 223.

(10) Megill, 223.

(11) See Megill, 223. I am lifting from Megill's quotes of Foucault.

(12) Taussig, 30.

(13) My thoughts on a come by way of my reading of an essay by Slavoj Zizek. Zizek writes, ". . . in Lacanian theory, fantasy designates the subject's 'impossible' relation to a, to the object-cause of its desire. . . . [W]hat the fantasy stages is not a scene in which our desire is fulfilled, fully satisfied, but on the contrary, a scene that realizes, stages, the desire as such." "Goal and Aim in Fantasy," in "From Reality to the Real," Looking Awry (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991) 6.

(14) Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993) 15.

(15) See Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996), pages 138–140, including diagrams of the returned gaze page 139.

(16) See Phelan, page 20: "While the can does not 'see' La/can, insofar as it focuses his vision it places him in a particular position (the angle by which the light of the can converges into an object on the water) and therefore returns his I/eye, precisely by orientating that I/eye in relation to the can. In this returning regard, however, the subject sees where he is and recognizes himself as other-than the can."

(17) Phelan, 25.

(18) Phelan, 25.

(19) Phelan, 25. Note that Phelan speaks of this only as a "notion."

(20) Tomasz Jankowski, et al, New Masters of Flash (Birmingham: Friends of ED Ltd., 2000).

(21) Eric Jordan, “System,” New Masters of Flash (Birmingham: Friends of ED Ltd., 2000) 158 (italics in original).

(22) Joshua Davis, “Chaos,” New Masters of Flash (Birmingham: Friends of ED Ltd., 2000) 522.

(23) Jordan, 159 (my emphasis).

(24) Ivo van de Grift, “Flashlight,” New Masters of Flash (Birmingham: Friends of ED Ltd., 2000) 68.

(25) Davis, 515–517 (my emphasis).

(26) Luke Turner, “Ripple,” New Masters of Flash (Birmingham: Friends of ED Ltd., 2000) 99 (my emphasis).

(27) Tony Ke, “Illusion,” New Masters of Flash (Birmingham: Friends of ED Ltd., 2000) 236 (my emphasis).

(28) Todd Purgason, “Acoustic,” New Masters of Flash (Birmingham: Friends of ED Ltd., 2000) 43.

(29) Yugo Nakamura, “Nervous,” 292 (italics in original).

(30) Smithson, 333.

(31) James Peterson, Dreams of Chaos Visions of Order (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 1.

(32) Phelan, 21.

(33) Qtd. Taussig, 38.

(34) Taussig, 21.

(35) Taussig, 24 (my emphasis).

(36) Taussig, 21 (italics in original).

(37) Kathy O'Dell, Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art and the 1970s (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998) 20 (my emphasis).

(38) O’Dell, 21.

(39) O’Dell, 21.

(40) O’Dell, 23.

(41) O’Dell, 22.

(42) O’Dell, 23.

(43) Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T. E. Hulme (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1999) 21 (italics in original).

(44) For additional technical information about the structure of Flash movies and movie clips see Katherine Ulrich, Visual Quickstart Guide: Macromedia Flash5 for Windows and Macintosh (Berkely: Peachpit Press, 2001).

(45) Joshua Davis talks a lot about the "relationships" between movie clips, movie clips' awareness, and what movie clips "know." See his "Outro" in New Masters of Flash, 511–525.

(46) On Naming and The Name of the Father, see Jane Gallop, "Encore Encore," The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982).

(47) Phelan, 20.

(48) See http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/events/flashforward/uk/joshua_davis.html [Web page] Wesley Hall, "Joshua Davis, Mentalities and Anomalies" flashfoward2000 (2001) [Accessed: February 25, 2001].

(49) See http://www.adobe.com/web/gallery/trueistrue/main.html. [Web page] Joe Schepter, "Truth and falsehood from somewhere near nowhere in Minnesota" Adobe Web Center Gallery (No Date Given) [Accessed: February 24, 2001].

(50) See Nakamura, 291.

Additional References:

Finck, Nick. An interview with the visionary behind PrayStation: Joshua Davis. Digital Web Magazine. [Web page] 2001. http://www.digital-web.com/interviews/ [Accessed: February 24, 2001].