Like Proposition One, this second claim progresses the claims of softvideo, of video online in networked environments, of a properly webbed video and the possibilities of movement to a further, discrete, small and always only ever minor step. (Minor, in Deleuze's register, not so much small or insignificant but an economy of action that is not subject to a major and/or dominant discourse, institution, force and as such the minor falls not within or under but to the side. Overlooked, not even warranting consideration as, well, simply minor.) Now each of the 9 video fragments, parts, segments can now be played and paused independently of each other. So proposition two becomes relations of movement between parts.
The default condition of the cinematic and videographic is the continuous signal, generally realised through the index of movement. In the case of cinema this is literal as film advances via a mechanical gate for recording and then, later (always later as video art is quick to insist upon) projection - the limit test cases of works like Jarman's Blue (1993), or Warhol's Empire (1964) gain their particular currency precisely for their almost refusal of this relation of the indexicality of movement to representation to cinematic formalism. For video this is the passage of tape past a head, or perhaps just the transmission of a signal. For softvideo, what video becomes when it is only ever computational, networked, programmatic - softvideo problematises this progression. Here, in the second proposition all fragments can be paused, yet it is still video, still even, in the context of softvideo, performing its work as video (it is not merely video 'paused'). This would appear to be something different to a freeze frame, which is technically still a continuous moving image, but is certainly closer to pressing pause on your VCR or DVD player, except the work invites such pausing. Stopping some parts, letting others continue. This is how Proposition Two is to be played, needs to be used to become propositional. This is its condition. This is much harder to do on your DVD player, where pause is pause and it is an interruption into the flow of the work. Here it is all interruption.
Proposition two, as Deleuze's Cinema One so elegantly argues, is that video online, that softvideo, a networked video, is about the incorporeal transformations that are effected by the variable relations between parts that can be created and established. In traditional, or better yet, heritage, practice the relations between parts was always highly variable at the points of making, of editing. But in the case of the cinema it these variable relations become always fixed through an edit into a sequence which guarantees the repetition of the same. In the case of video that is shot then edited then we have simply petit Cinema, video in the aura of the cinematic. When there is a video signal which is generative, interfered or played with then, we have variable single relations between parts, where the shots may be generated/played with, but they are still, quintessentially a single sequence. (Video art recognises this, by default, through its almost obligatory use of multiple screens, whether television screens - Nam June Paik - or in more recent cases multiple channel video installations.) Such relations in the gallery play with serendipity and may introduce chance, yet generally leave the viewer as, well, audience. In softvideo the possiiblity of intervention in playing with these relations between parts, whether shots, sequences or parts of a whole, are developed somewhere, someplace between the work, its authoring and design, and the user. None have complete control, all have some agency.
