Mix and Stir --Final Instruction for Recipe

In the previous classes, I have lamented that I do not have access to my popcycle's archive (aside from The Mask). Today, I furthermore was continuously frustrated by the lack of useful images in my Mystory,even as my own instructions have led me to realize I must take a picture.

After much reflection, frustration, and a little dread and anxiety, I have figured out how to connect the present and the past in a transferential relationship, both the past of the creation of the Mystory as well as the fundamental scenes and elements that structure and gather my life into a coherent pattern.

My mistake was to focus on the Mystory as an archive of pictures and images that represent my past. My final instruction is not to try and duplicate images in the Mystory (or, necessarily, in the film The Mask), but rather to isolate a fragment of the micro-narratives in my Entertainment, Family, and Community Discourses (let's say, 10 fragments) that I hit me in a punctive manner. They might only be a few words (or one word!), they may be a complete sentence or an image/description of an object that I mention.

Either way, my task will be to isolated fragments of the micro-narrative, as if it were a film still ripped out of the overall context of the narrative. Like my previous instruction from Cindy Sherman, we will sense that the images belong to a narrative, but will not be able to place them (perhaps I won't even be able to place them after awhile!).

I will estrange the language of the Mystory and then look at the world for how that 'partial object', that fragment, may show up in my present life to create a connection between the two scenes and the two times. In a sense, I will be looking for the photographic "objective correlative" to the fragment of narrative I select from the Mystory. The fragment will not be "interpreted," but used to write with my present world.

This concrete strategy corresponds well with the demands of the theory slot. The project allows me to construct a montage of elements that both attract and repulse. That is, I will recognize some resonance between the fragment of my past and the photograph of my present, but the goal will be for the photograph to express something the fragment cannot, an excess, the objet a. And vice versa. Even when attempting to produce a scene from my Entertainment discourse, I will inevitably not "be in the picture" (as Lacan says)  because I am in a different context. "I" am never really in the picture since, as one theorist in Cinematics points out, the "I" of the picture is already dead.

I do not think it necessary to produce actual "moving" images, since the movement of film is ultimately an illusion of it anyway. I think that the tension created between the fragment of the narrative, which recalls the "fuller" scene and the photograph as objective correlative will set off a movement of imagination and understanding (to use Kant's categories in the 3rd critique).