Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema

Pg. 76

The new artist, like the new scientist, does not "wrest order our of chaos." Both realize that supreme order lies in nature and traditionally we have only made chaos out of it. The new artist and the new scientist recognize that chaos is order on another level, and they set about to find the rules of structuring by which nature has achieved it. That's why the scientist has abandoned absolutes and the filmmaker has abandoned montage. Herbert Read: "Art never has been an attempt to grasp reality as a whole—that is beyond our human capacity; it was never even an attempt to represent the totality of appearances; but rather it has been the piecemeal recognition and patient fixation of what is significant in human experience." 3 We're beginning to understand that "what is significant in human experience" for contemporary man is the awareness of consciousness, the recognition of the process of perception. (I define perception both as "sensation" and "conceptualization," the process of forming concepts, usually classified as "cognition." Because we're enculturated, to perceive is to interpret.) Through synaesthetic cinema man attempts to express a total phenomenon—his own consciousness.