Chongqing riverboat… Dreamliner…  ‘he chose as his co-delegate a 45 year old friend called Ho Shu-Heng. They left quite secretively on the evening of 29 June in a small steamboat, under a stormy sky , declining the offers of friends to see them off. Although there was no law against Communist activities, they hadn’t reason to keep their heads down, as what they were engaged in was a conspiracy, – collusion to establish an organisation set up with foreign funding, with the aim of seizing power by illegal means. The CCP’s 1st congress opened in Shanghai on 23 July 1921, attended by 13 people – all journalists, students or teachers..the meeting had started in a French Settlement, and the police in these enclaves, known as ‘Concessions’, were vigilant about Communist activities. On the evening of 30 July, a stranger barged in, and Maring, smelling a police spy, ordered the delegates to leave. The Chinese participants adjourned to a small town outside Shanghai called Jiaxing, on a lake strewn with water chestnuts. Moscow’s men stayed away from this final session for fear of attracting attention. The wife of a Shanghai delegate hailed from the lakeside town, and she rented a pleasure boat, in which the delegates sat at a polished table where food, drinks and mahjong sets had been laid. A thick carved wooden screen separated this inner chamber from the open, but sheltered, front of the boat, where the delegate’s wife sat with her back against the screen. She told us how, when other boats passed, she would tap on the screen with her fan, and inside the mahjong tiles would click loudly as they were shuffled. Soon it started to pour, and the boat was enveloped in rain. In this dramatic setting, the Chinese Communist Party was proclaimed – somewhat inconclusively, as without Moscow’s men present no programme could be finalised. The congress did not even issue a manifesto or charter (Mao: An Unknown History, page 32)    

Underworld… the atom…  the bomb …. Interscales across a durational fragmentation..  

          1. 

“He advertised for amateur film footage of the game and acquired a few minutes of crude action that showed a massive pulsing blur above the left-field wall shot by a man in the bleachers. He brought in an optical printer. He rephotographed the footage. He enlarged, repositioned, analyzed. He step-framed the action to slow it down, to combine several seconds of film into one image. He examined the sprocket areas of the film searching for a speck of data, a minimum of missing imagery. It was the work of Talmudic refinement, zooming in and fading out, trying to bring a man’s face into definition, read a woman’s ankle bracelet engraved with a name.”  (Underworld, Don DeLillo, 1997, page 176) 

Violence is cinematic. 

In the ubiquity of the ‘ultra­ rapid camera producing a million images per second, the tele­ detection camera, the super-high-resolution camera of the spy satellites, infra-red thermography, and radar-image technology, the smartphone on the street, suddenly, we possess this ease of passing without transition or delay from the perception of the infinitesimally small to the perception of the infinitely large, from the immediate proximity of the visible to the visibility of all that lingers beyond our field of vision. And suddenly the ancient ‘,- distinctions among the dimensions disappear. The dimen­sional dissection of classical geometry- where the point cut the line, and the line cut the plane, which then cut through the solids – has lost a critical part of its practical utility. When transparency becomes manifest, it becomes a manifesto that re-organizes appearance and the measure of the sensible world and thus, almost immediately, its figure and its image-form.

• How do we counter-engineer the cinematic techniques and probes of war to evidentiary ends? In order to geolocate and verify the dimensions of an incident (its location, timing, perpetrators, victims) we need to understand how violence is cinematic, a condition of depth, relief, scale, perspective, acceleration, movement, slowdown, close-up, long shot, foreground, background  
• The art of geolocation and verification, in this sense, is not simply a practice of technical proficiency and visual prosthetics, but a mode of learning to think, read and write image, video and sound cinematically, To Virilio’s logistics of perception in an increasingly confusing, blurred world, we might add that there is a slow, deliberative architectural sequentialism to evidence work which moves against the grain of speed, compression, and virality to expose perpetrators of violence. 
• Under the duress of deep time and shallow attention, The Long Duration of a Split Second could itself be read as an invitation to slow down reasoning of the eye and ear and to begin decoding incidents of human rights violations differently, with a cinematic sensibility to space, time, depth, rhythm and scale –  how an incident is located, a timeline sequenced, a sense of what happened constructed. 
• This cinematic sensibility is one already well established in Forensics and Criminalistics. When an investigator arrives at a crime scene, a camera tracks at eye-level key impressions, brushstrokes, traces… the investigator’s eye is that of a documentary director chasing the sequence of ghosts. It is also established in courts of law: 

 “‘[T]he moviemaker’s art is not all that different from the lawyer’s – espe- cially the courtroom advocate’s. Both must capture, in a very short space, a slice of human existence, and make the audience see a story from their particular perspective. Both have to know which facts to include and which to leave out; when to appeal to emotion and when to reason; what to spoonfeed the audience and what to make them work out for them- selves; when to do the expected and when the unexpected; when to script and when to improvise.(Judge Alex Kozinski1) (Source: Visualising Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque – Arabesques and Entanglements, 2011, page 56) 

Yet in what way does blipwork diverge from the forensic optics of the state? Where the former operates and remains often in the microscopic realm of the crime scene, it often does less to telescope out into the longer durational embers of the flash, the wide lens and panning shot are amiss. 

          2. 

“Klara stood on the roof watching stormclouds build bluish and hard-edged, like weather on some remote coast, a sky that seemed too lush and wild to pass this way….she didn’t want more, she wanted less. This was the thing her husband could not understand. Solitude, distance, time, work. Something out there she needed to breathe…the two children did not want to go inside but the rain was getting close…She took the laundry basket to the door and left it just inside. The surrounding rooftops were just about empty now and the yowl of the alley lines had stopped. Even from this height she could hear the rapping sound. A woman rapped a penny on the window, calling her child in from play. Then the rain came hard. Klara picked up her daughter and scooped the blanket under her arm and took the other child by the hand and they ran laughing across the roof under racing skies.” (Underworld, Don DeLillo, 1997, page 746) 

Notice how here and in the previous scene with Klara on the rooftop, the internal dialogue of the protagonist and her milieu co-conspire… similar to Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, optical inertia… the porous osmotics where milieu and retina blur…  

rk note 210819. When I left for Vietnam in the February of 2015 after university, broken up writing at the back of that coach to meet the boys…  the forgetting was giving a forward shoot to time…it was only when I got to Arizona that I sat and wrote more… like the kaleidoscope in Penelope Lively… fragments distilled over several separate durations in my life. 

 The boys snuffed out… Paul McClean,  Anjool Malde, Tim Hetherington… perspective is emergent from feeling, I cannot know but try to discern out the general structure of a feeling at a time, though it is always tempered by where I am now, optical inertia humming backward and forward across the dispensed shards of a life cord… the multiple genetic yous turning over every 7 years, mutating longitudes of a sun wet Spain when we were young, in the Arab bricks and three crosses of Almunecar. Write this as if you are dying…Transpose the death to now…the sort of mythic structure in which we can only reminisce, evaluate a lifetime from the perch of age…  

The thought recurs, a dreamscape walking out, many retinas… pointing to an inertial past, the longhulking glacier in the cupboard…  and the lens out to China….   The intersection of it all coming to a head….   syncing, tort… the austere missile shot out across the steppes… the fragmentary moments, the power of the lens, losing reals,  loosing the reel on a bullet train to Chengdu. I had visited Arizona, China… strung between the dipoles 

My grandfather – Dziadek – on dad’s side …the ‘hedgehog’ installed on a ship…U-boats lurking underneath…yet meeting my grandmother in Portsmouth, the other grandfather, his daily trip out across the hills, on bicycle, swimming in the bay… my mother’s proactivity…a. Motor of him, with the stern informational bow of Nell. … the day the windows in town blew out, when the French tanker went missing… her brother Martin working on the oil depot, the faces of shiphands from the infinite elsewheres, staring out, as the blood of economy pumped into their stern and their families waited at loss back home…a whole economy driven on the return… we never left, we all the Ulysses of Optical Inertias. 

Perspective is not something they teach you at university…certainly not Oxford…the high-strung essay race…the chase for position, the competition, the shortness, the brevity,  perspective emerges from feeling, feeling needs duration…I looked back and thought about the time wasted in third year with Zzul…the time eking out…perhaps I was chasing a different knowledge after all… the perspectival shift of rendering the heart strings asunder, the underworld from which we spent so long racing, erasing the surface… that first essay…the man in a cast from Catch22 – ask ken if he has this still, ask ben for all papers back. 

          3.

Keystroke 2 

In her veil and habit she was basically a face, or a face and scrubbed hands. Here in cyberspace she has shed all that steam-ironed fabric. She is not naked exactly but she is open – exposed to every connection you can make on the world wide web. There is no space or time out here, or in here, or wherever she is. There are only connections. Everything is connected. All human knowledge gathered and linked, hyperlinked, this site leading to that, this fact referenced to that, a keystroke, a mouse-click, a password – world without end, amen. But she is in cyberspace, not heaven, and she feels the grip of systems. This is why she’s so uneasy. There is a presence here, a thing implied, something vast and bright. She senses the paranoia of the web, the net. There’s the perennial threat of virus of course. Sister knows all about contaminations and the protective measures they require. This is different. – it’s a glow, a lustrous rushing force that seems to flow from a billion distant net nodes. 

When you decide on a whim to visit the H-bomb home page, she begins to understand. Everything in your computer, the plastic, silicon and mylar, every logical operation and processing function, the memory, the hardware, the software, the ones and zeroes, the triads inside the pixels that form the on-screen image – it all culminates here. First a dawnlight, a great aurora glory massing on the color monitor. Every thermonuclear bomb ever tested, all the data gathered from each shot, code name, yield, test site, Eniwetok, Lop Nor, Novaya Zemlya, the foreignness, the otherness of remote populations implied in the place names, Mururoa, Kazakhstan, Siberia and the wreath-work of extraordinary detail, firing systems and delivery systems, equations and graphs and schematic cross-sections, shot after shot summoned at a click, a hit, Bravo, Romeo, Greenhouse Dog – and Sister is basically in it. She sees the flash, the thermal pulse. She hears the rumble building, the great gathering force rolling off the 16-bit soundboard. She stands in the flash and feels the power. She sees the spray plume. She sees the fireball climbing, the superheated sphere of burning gas that can blind a person with its beauty, its dripping christblood colours, solar golds and reds. She sees the shock wave and hears the high winds and feels the power of false faith, the faith of paranoia, and then the mushroom cloud spreads around her, the pulverized mass of radioactive debris, eight miles high, ten miles, twenty, with skirted stem and smoking platinum cap. 

The jewels roll out of her eyes and she sees God. No, wait, sorry. It is a Soviet bomb she sees, the largest yield in history, a device exploded above the Arctic Ocean in 1961, preserved in the computer that helped to build it, fifty-eight megatons – add the digits and you get thirteen. Whole populations potentially skelly-bones in the massive flash – dem bones, dem bones, sing the washtub women. And Sister begins to sense the byshadows that stretch from the awe of a central event. How the intersecting systems help pull us apart, leaving us vague, drained, docile, soft in our inner discourse, willing to be shaped, to be overwhelmed – easy retreats, half beliefs. Shot after shot, bomb after bomb, and they are fusion bomb, remember, atoms forcibly combined, and even as they detonate across the screen, again and again, there is another fusion taking place. No physical contact, please, but a coupling all the same.

rk note 210819. Dad was a space age kid… Ask him what is was like… ? Ask mum what is was like? Ask Mhairi to mine through her memory, she has an exquisite memory, and big bulging orbular discs for eyes, and a face of a thousand bones, that express a thousand films. 

Sensing the byshadows that stretch from the awe of a central event.

• When cinematographic / photographic exposure time was further reduced at the end of the nineteenth century, this led to a huge shift in understanding of the temporality of cognition – leading later to neuroscientific understandings of system 1 / system 2 / implicit bias, Benjamin’s ‘optical unconscious’
• Improvements in cinematographic / exposure techniques were also deeply imbricated in the logic of war. 
• In Virilio’s thesis, violence is not passively cinematically observed, violence is cinematic. 
• We are at a critical juncture, where on one side we are confronting Virilio’s thesis on speed, time overtaking space, the attention span of the individual shrinking to a split second as the dominant perceptual field of the individual, but we are also attending to a situation where the deep time of geological, atmospheric, cosmological, militaristic, world economic scales inflect the human-scale – where the milieu is now often moving faster than the life forms in it. 
• Power is an ability to tune in to the currents of a time, to ride them… https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3027616/us-china-rivalry-hots-what-does-future-hold-southeast-asian

And the individuals…not figurines…The degradation of your optics as the body degrades, the shrinking of the temporal horizon to just surviving now, the involuntary memories of time before the capture…aesthesias of war…modulated, intensified, neurally deadened.