Guiomar Florez's profile

The Promise of Fire

FILM: THE PROMISE OF FIRE

Part 1- Saturno
Part 2- Prome_Theus
Part 3- The Materialist
The film is about the technique of the internet. The tensions of what seems as limitless power, actually proportioned opportunity, renders ultimately as unmerciful subjugation. The opportunistic mechanics of digitalization, fabricate procedures that if on the one hand mean the loss of the patriarchal verticality, the service of protection, on the other hand, replaces it with horizontal social organization that is embedded on non devotion which results more brutal as non recognition.

SATURNO

The first part of the film, recreates on video the theme of the father eliminating the rivals of his own making. Nevertheless, it is really about the consciousness of his own crime, the idea born unto the world as an opportunity itself.  Saturno himself, as consequence, also dies in the hands of Jupiter, his own son. In this case, Saturno does not swallow but spits, it is excess, as there is no need to gobble as the other represents surplus, in the world of surplus of today.

Two ideas I was deeply questioning during the whole process, yet in an almost unconscious form, were about immateriality and the possibility it opens through transcendence. The opportunity of an "out there" and an existence of an "in here", without implicit consequences of one over the other. Jaques Derrida’s idea that all can be reduced to language, is too difficult to asses, in a world of techniques (apps, softwares, hardwares, algorithms, memory devices, calculators, digital procedures) bounded to their material attainment: license and tenancy. There is also to consider, the habituation of behavior they pursue. Avita Ronell, alludes to the permanence of the files uploaded on the internet, as a ghostly permanence, yet it is imposition on matter, a footprint on an electromagnetic field.  Micheal Betancourt exhorts the indestructibility of the digital realm, yet it is only a play of powers, which is a social realm but sadly not Donna Haraway's affinity conglomerations. 

Hospitality derives from the latin hospes which means at the same time host, guest and, stranger. 
Is forgetting an option if excess...is affordable? 
Here, I address the rigidity that arises from banking (creating a system of value) and, structuring through memory.
Sometime positive instances are collapsed in the name of the new, innovation for itself. Can there be too much fluidity?
The search for connection entails encountering obstacles. Connection as a force that generates tensions, more than distentions.
Lacan's mirror image experience is here transposed to the other as material of objectification, gullible substance. The gaze of the subject, as only possible through objectification.
The ‘technique of the internet’ renders as the fulfiller of the promise of the realization of will, the ultimate superpower. Nevertheless, where seemingly limitless connectivity presupposes liberation from law, the excess of freedoms overturn the liberation and new rules, regulations and usurpations, forge. Freedom is a dual concept. When unlimited distribution supposes lessened urgency of demand, the hierarchical system that is imposed on it, artificially creates inflation. Demand is also dualistic concept, as unfair as freedom. Limitless community is a false claimer of immediacy, what is important about community, the opportunity to be heard and taken into account dissipates in a code that cannot apprehend but dis-represent. Actuality of the web can be confused with vitality, ‘lines of flight’, and it’s continuous reproduction with the ‘phant-orgasmic’ feed; can seem as vitality “at hand” but, ‘the lecture’ or the ‘lecturer’ can be ‘movement incapacitated’ by excess and thus bored. Apparent infinite focus, incapacitates from making a difference. As mechanical systems, attrition is generated at the limites of excess. 
The Will of power can override the will of self survival.
Programable repetition is the creator of excess. Excess that is sufferable for the living.
New aesthetics arise from the blindness produced by surplus of language.
In Post-Homerica, Quintus accounts Laocoon to have pleaded to set the Troyan horse on fire in doubt of amable intentions. Athena blinds him, in the need to believe at all cost, the dream of peace. Furthermore, sets two giant serpents to kill him and his sons.
The physical metaphors, social constructions based on shapes. 
The surplus is not gullible, it is just for showcasing what is not understood, the supposition of a childish, imaginable, seeable, "out there".
New aesthetics that arise from the blindness of excess, machine codes are different from the alphabet in their substantialness.
What is played over and over again, is not life as we "know it to be"?
PromeTheus

The etymology of Prometheus associates with fore thinking, getting things done in a way one can get “around the world”, or in other words, bypassing experience. It parallels perfectly the sentiment, the internet and its facilitations and services, suggest. I chose Prometheus as a character, the rebel titan who is condemned to perpetual suffering, because in a way, the excesses of the ‘technique of the internet’ have generated martyrdom. The martyrdom of an nonbiological staged rage. A gain, is always accompanied by a distress, an affliction. Distribution entails the loss of authorship, hypertext existence (mutilation, appropriation) and, the loss of the control of monetary recognition. 
The value of beauty.
No death drive possible.
Beyond the Oedipal nightmare, identity can become categorical and bestial.
Monsters made from hormones.
In biology it is about being the strongest.
Desire. 
In an Arab bull competence, the bulls are cared to not hurt each other. 
Desire and the death drive; to be seen.
New hopes, awaken ancient angers that have solely identities.
Shapes are not eternal.
Nostalgia for the end of a theater of the artificial. 
The Materialist

I developed phrases, that contest assumptions made to appear “natural”. Wordings that reveal the difficulty of the alienation, its being made “natural” in the sense Donna Haraway refers to the woman made “natural” in her conception where “natural” is about justifying unjust intensions. The phrases are the following. ’Desperate search for infinite connection’. It contests the assumption of the leisure and lenient character of  the urge for connection, in contrast to, its indispensability and, its proper place as an aspect that should be beheld as a common. ‘Is forgetting an option, if excess is affordable?’ This prompts to think of the effects of memory insomnia, the non plasticity of a mind in such a state. Questions, what state of mind relates to the technique of the internet, when by contrast, the web seems so plastic and in fluid metamorphosis. ‘At the regions of infinity, our monsters are awakened’. It adverts of the compulsions of the alienated Will.  That is the Will that cannot relate to the whole of its society, the unrecognized and ineffective Will, but solely feeds and permits the greedy individuated Will. The inverse of the Overman’s. (Nietzsche 2017) The expression ‘The physical metaphors’ tells of materialism. The mind “made up” by and of the world. ‘There is no empowerment from permanence’ insinuates the need for the bring together in affinity, to detain annihilation. The voice of Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’. ’What is done with the excess?’ proposes to reevaluate excess, as a positive goal. Follows Betancourt’s spirit, that which also implicates the phrases : ’Programable repetition is the creator of excess. Excess that is sufferable for the living.’ Which denounce the effects of data recollection. ‘The size of the Trojan horse, is of the magnitude of the whole simulacra effectuated by excess.’ induces to understand how the content created on the web, is the excess by which one is fooled into being administered. While ‘Making opportunity while annihilating multiplicity’ mirrors Deleuze’s worriment on the web not being a rhizome. The sentence ‘The desire to create a man that is not a recreation of himself’ is to show how oppositional constructed identities, are still at play. ‘Ideals that overturn’ is Deleuze’s simulacra. ‘Techniques permit structuring, as foundations for solidifying memory’ comes from  Bernard Stiegler’s thesis in “Technics and Time, The Fault of Epimetheus”.  ‘This scene was repeated many times, until we fought about sin’ adds a confesional tone but also demonstrates the impossibility of innocence. (Foucault 1990) ‘Simulacra without prior identity’ is one of Deleuze’s axioms on simulacra. (Deleuze & Patton 2014) The question ‘Why do we have to play a play of the most superficial kind?’ is asked to provoke reflexion on the need of objectification, to view ourselves in the world, as Jaques Lacan illustrates. The phrase ‘Programming hinges on habit’ incites on questioning human exceptionalism in late capitalism, in a cynical tone. ‘New aesthetics that arise from the blindness of excess’, is a remark on the new figuration of humans as objects. While the utterance ‘Monsters made from hormones’, hints of bio-determinism. ‘Self designing, self moving machines’ incites on the false “conceptual” boundaries that tend to disavow vitality. The phrase ‘Attaining and maintaining riches upon the alienation of a life’ is fairly straight forward.  Although ’New hopes awaken ancient angers that have solely identity’ incites the psyche. ‘Beyond the Oedipal nightmare’, attributes Post Humanism. The statement ‘Autonomy, in reference to machines, means the contrary of agency’, is guileless and direct. ‘In Chiaroscuro, light and darkness are one’ directs to the side of univocity. Finally, the list ‘Fire, photon, electricity, electron, electromagnetic field, heat, radiation, feeling from a distance, seeing from a distance, effect, affect, bending, brining to one’s knees, organization, stardust, STARDOM’ shows the extensive elasticity of the relationship between fire and humans.

In conclusion, I have came to recreate a three part video that induces to perceive how we have been alienated from our difference, our language and the possibility of materialism. 
Mountains are in constant movement.
The Promise of Fire
Published:

The Promise of Fire

Film that critiques on the technique of the internet.

Published: