This is one in a series of posts about Greg Ulmer's Internet Invention. These posts will serve as lecture notes for a class I'm teaching, but my hope is that they could also be a resource for others using Ulmer's text. I have tagged all of these posts internet invention for those who want to see them all in one place.

Art: Tarkovsky
Ulmer points us to the work of filmmaker Andrey Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky's work provides a specific mood - one of nostalgia. However, it does so in a way similar to the blues. This isn't necessarily a "looking back" or a negative kind of longing. Instead, it is a "glad-to-be-feeling" - as opposed to feeling nothing. Tarkovsky uses film to create emblems ("there is no 'point,' other than to show his world as he sees and feels it" (262)), and Ulmer notes some of the repeating signifiers of Tarkovsky's work: puddles, mud, darkness, wet, dark, damp, old or wrecked interiors. We see this at work in Stalker:

And some similar devices show up in this sequence:

Tarkovsky uses haiku as a relay for his work because it allows him to use three separate elements to create something new - much like the emblems we've looked at throughout this chapter.

Upon showing us Tarkovsky's default mood (a mood Ulmer connects with Russian nostalgia), he asks us to find our own mood: "What is my default mood? What are the 'lumps of time' and the image facts that may reveal to me my own whatever?" (268).

Seance
Helene Cixous describes the first lesson she learned from the authors who "called" her:

"In the beginning each of of them had an inaugural scene, from which writing sprouted. Because it is always a question of a scene, with a picture. The picture is the open door we must go through" (269).

Ulmer says that in terms of mystory, Cixous is talking about attunement. Stepping outside of biography "to discover the condition of singularity" (269).

Cixous also describes the "ladder of writing" as an H (a ladder with one rung):

"This is what writing is: I one language, I another language, and between the two, the line that makes them vibrate; writing forms a passageway between two shores" (269).

The emblem Ulmer is asking us to create is the vibration between two languages (or more) of our popcycle. We juxtapose these languages and see what kinds of vibrations we can create.

THE ULMER FILE
Once again, Ulmer takes us through his own mystory, this time to trace out his emblem of "Noon Star." By tracing a repeating signifier through the different discourses of his popcycle, Ulmer "remakes" the cowboy of the Marlboro man. Rather than relying on a generic cowboy to solve a generic problem (the problem of masculinity), Ulmer uses a specific cowboy to solve a specific problem (what is Ulmer's default mood?) This is the difference between topos an chora:

"Definitions select the features of substance that carry the idea of an entity; descriptions select the features of accident that evoke the image of an entity. 'Accidental' properties, in Aristotle's terms, are those that may be present in a thing but that are not necessary to its being (a horse is an animal regardless of its color, the number of flies it may swat with its tail, or the sweat on its back after a hard run). The emblem as a hybrid of picture and text is an image and an idea; in it the image and the idea exchange effects and enter into the tangle of felt." (275)