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Of interest is how LeVeque’s video projects, influenced by situationist politics, digitize desire–a contradictory movement between algorithms as controlled experimental systems and desire as uncontrolled, inchoate, ineffable, and immaterial. Looking at digital media from the perspective of Gilles Deleuze’s conceptual model of contingency is significant to developing a theory of the “unexpected”; moving from a model of inert theory and practice of control to a model of a mobile media interface that produces unexpected and unpredictable results. It also moves media practice from the question, What does it mean?, to What would happen if? In this essay, we consider the key conceptual and political nodal points in a vast network of relations that make up the new mediascape through the challenges that LeVeque’s video works present.

MATERIALITIES AND OPERATION

The early film theorists Rudolph Arnheim and Siegfried Kracauer represent opposing approaches to the cinema. While Arnheim privileges the medium’s inherent ability to manipulate images, Kracauer considers the machine’s ability to record reality as a definitive aspect of the cinema. Fortified by inclinations toward realism and the generation of psychoanalytic meanings, Kracauer’s approach dominates discourses on Hollywood cinema, while placing filmic specificity second. However, given the contemporary explosion in digitality and new media technologies, we must consider the significance of cinematic materiality to sustain a political imperative, especially when considerable political autonomy has been lost to the imposition of an eroticized psychical economy on film theory and criticism. It is productive and necessary to look at the interface rather than the image of digitality.

In LeVeque’s works, algorithms function to rid the psychoanalytic from the image by investigating and then releasing its materiality from the immobilized shrouds of identified and eroticized models. Often producing a visual field that is not inscribed in the original films, algorithms function not as inscriptions or deconstructions, but as an alchemy to release the unexpected.

LeVeque subverts the dominance of psychoanalysis in cinematic discourse by digitally remediating classic Hollywood films. In 2 Spellbound (1999), LeVeque condenses Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) into a 7 1/2 minute flickering Rorschach test by extracting a single frame from every second of the original film in a linear fashion–from Hitchcock’s opening sequence to the copyright warning. LeVeque then re-edits these frames into a series of flickering patterns that appear split down the middle, accompanied by a dance track punctuated by voices repeating phrases taken from Spellbound’s dialogue, articulating desires and mental states. 2 Spellbound reconfigures the menacing and irrational desires of the gothic romance behind Hitchcock’s film, which focuses on finding an identity for Ingrid Bergman’s amnesiac lover. It then transforms these coded desires into free, pulsating desires that thrive and proliferate on the surface of the image in non-sexually differentiated terms.

While some artists inscribe desire onto the material surface of their respective works to expose or evade the psychoanalytic codification of desire, LeVeque challenges the dominance of psychoanalytic interpretations by reconfiguring desire to the extent of freeing it from such codifications–desire is in the machine, not the image. These released materialities summon different theoretical considerations of fluidity, flow, and immersive embodiment, turning from the eye of cinema to an exploration of the politics of the immersive body of the digital.