A Pentagram for Conjuring the Narrative

Okay Hollis Frampton lets just open this article with a total mind fuck why don't we. As someone who constantly has dreams where I live through weeks at a time the opening story in which his friend is born and dies as two different intertwined persons is a lot. It an interesting story as the woman is born into a life that is being recorded 24/7 until the day she dies, then she is born again as a boy who then watches every second of his previous life as this woman. The boy doesn't have a life outside of these images, and instead lives through the recordings of his past life, almost living the same life twice. Makes me think of movies and how sometimes we live through movies and place ourselves in the position of the characters we relate the most to.
Also made me think of this -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szzVlQ653as


"A waterfall is not a 'thing,' nor is a flame of burning gas. Both are, rather, stable patterns of energy determining the boundaries of a characteristic sensible 'shape' in space and time. " This quote stood out to me during section III and reminded me of the Treachery of Images which is a painting by surrealist painter Rene Magritte. It is a painting of a pipe with the words This is Not a Pipe painted in french underneath. This is not a pipe but rather a painting of a pipe.

The photographic illusion is brought up on page 63 and how photographs don't necessarily portray reality, even when they are directly documenting it. That is a concept I have always been very intrigued by and is something that I fall victim to a lot. Believing photographs to be reality because they are portraying the "real"and showing us something that we view and process as concrete. I looked up a couple other articles that talked about this phenomenon and came across one called Warning: the Objects in the Photograph are not as Real as they Appear. This section I attached I found particularly interesting.
The Simulacra of the Real

A camera is a very rare phenomenon: it possesses the power to depict reality in a controllable way. A photo also possesses the ability to distort reality, as we’ve seen. But this distortion is not inconsequential: it can alter one’s conscious states. For example: if the image depicts something morose – refugees, war-torn villages – then the content can grab the viewer’s mind, tell her the world is like this, and so convert the happiness she was experiencing into sadness.

One philosopher, Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007), argued that photography has led to ‘the death of reality’ (see for example, The Perfect Crime, 2008, p.87). He claimed that photographs announce the disappearance of the real thing, because to Baudrillard, the photograph is made more attractive ( ‘more real’) than the real. The photograph always hints at something better than what is, and so seduces the viewer into what he called ‘hyperreality’. I don’t oppose Baudrillard’s view of photographs being more attractive than reality, but find the idea of ‘the death of reality’ dubious. Yet there’s another view of an object’s relation to its photograph.

It is a fairly common philosophical claim that an object’s appearance is different from its reality. This idea can certainly be applied when examining the relationship between an object and its pictorial representations.

Plato said that to assist in their studies, students of mathematics imagine depictions of mathematical objects such as squares, triangles and other geometrical shapes. These depictions, he writes, “they treat as images only, the real objects of their investigation being invisible except to the eye of reason” (The Republic, p.239). To Plato, true reality is the world of the Forms, from which the world of mere appearance is derived. It’s not that the pictures the students imagine do not exist (in their minds), but even so, to Plato these geometric images are ‘less real’ than those Ideal things they represent. In a way similar to how to Plato a drawn or imagined triangle is not a real triangle, a photographed object is not a real object. So when a photograph is taken of an object, an object undergoes an existential splitting – a development of two types of existence: reality and image.

Baudrillard claims that the world is made absent by the photograph, in that images decontextualize their objects, “taking the world away.” But while Baudrillard sees a loss of referent in the photograph, one should instead see a lack of realism, precisely because of its anamorphic nature. Thus, the problem with photography is not that it somehow destroys the object, as Baudrillard might over-poetically put it; but rather, that the image is a false image. The photograph is a mere simulacrum of the real which is often taken to be true.

section IV