In the final moments of Inventing the Future [link], the view of an incubated baby traveling to a point-of-view is cut across the same shot reversed. Halfway through the methodical back-and-forth between I (‘baby’ → ‘windows’ → ‘brightness’) and I* (‘brightness’ → ‘windows’ → ‘baby’), having seen both parts of the segment simultaneously, we assume that the destination of I is the origin of I* and vice versa, we expect to know that I and I* will end with one another: their identity is retroactively mapped.
And there, with itself in front of itself in the form of an object, it looks at itself outside of itself. But it thereby also looks at the way in which it looks at itself. Art is the immediacy of spirit’s creation of another world in and through the form of a peculiar kind of an object that makes a difference in and to spirit. (…) It is what we see when we see spirit in the form of an object; viewing itself as object, spirit sees art. [link]
Neither the point-of-view, nor the exterior view of itself is given without each shot’s retracement of one another. What we thought was ‘brightness’ and ‘windows’ turn into a point-of-view, what we thought was an incubated baby becomes the baby’s view of itself from outside: at the symbiotic moment where I and I* coincide, their difference both dissolves and splits each counterpart into a new interpretative iteration of itself. Absolute knowledge marks this difference within itself, at once a ‘self-viewing’ and a ‘self-knowing’: facing its own projection, the original point-of-view of the baby looks at the way in which it looks at itself.
Recall such a recognitive pattern, where the first shot appears natural and the second shot conceptual in its point-by-point reversed repetition, and where the segment has the initial natural appearance pointing to itself in the reverse, and in this self-referential activity navigates away from what appears as naturally given towards the conceptual. [link]
This inaugural ending – whose image of artificial incubation alludes to the speculative notion of a ‘self-positing I’ as an ultimate ‘infinite judgment’ (coincidence of opposites) – calls forth what has been characterized as ‘absolute art’, wherein content is equal to form and form is its own content, whose future, yielded by invention, reflects the bidirectional actualization of a new present: an ‘infinite’ brightness, a ‘brightness’ to stare into, one which will reverse-shot back at you.