I recently discovered the work of pioneering video artist Paul Ryan (no relation to this asshole), whose theory of motion picture articulated through his Earthscore Notational System and concept of “Threeing” touches on many themes I have been exploring in my repeaters body of work as well as essays such as this one. A good introduction can be found here. I found a particular affinity in the following quotes:

“I would avoid the term visual to describe video. You can see a bottle of perfume, but sight is not the sense it really affects. You can see video images but their effect is primarily kinesthetic or proprioceptive when you see yourself. Video is about perceiving events with the nervous system, not visualizing in a pictorial way.”

“The moving image allows the natural event to occur in the mind like a fist in the hand.”

In his application of the semiotic theory of C. S. Peirce to motion picture, many will see a parallel to Deleuze’s film theory. However, I think I prefer Ryan’s formulation— at least for the examples discussed, though not for its metaphysical conclusions.

Where Ryan and I differ is in his reading of Peirce’s semiotics as a form of Kantian categorical perception (in the text linked to above, he made several references to William James’ “blooming, buzzing confusion”) in order to reinforce the ecological naturalism that underlies the subject matter of his video work. This is best summarized by the following quotation:

“Once we know the score we can observe and monitor how the ecosystem actually performs or fails to perform in compliance with that score. Failure to comply would mean that we need to reinterpret our score and/or to correct any behavior of ours that is making the ecosystem incapable of performing according to its natural score.”

The inability of his ecological theory to draw a distinction between the accuracy of man’s interpretation of nature and the extent to which nature is influenced by man’s actions seems to me to be a textbook example of the base/superstructure confusion that runs through all structuralist theories. Therefore, I would define the crucial distinction between Ryan’s theory of motion picture and my own as hinging on the contingency of any interpretive schema, or to put it in Peircean terms, the fact that (as far as I can tell) his naturalism relies on a distinction between the firstness of thirdness and primary firstness, whereas I (and I believe Peirce himself) would posit primary firstness as equally contingent.

FInally, something more practical I have gleaned from Ryan’s writing relates to the viability of the landscape as a genre of video art. Though it seems to have fallen out of favor in recent times, possibly due on one hand to a current view of it as a mark of the provincial in visual art in general and on the other to the sublimation of video art to performance, I have long seen the landscape as fertile ground for motion picture and it is heartening to know this was the case in video art’s early days.