mapping the studio

using the camera to stand in for the viewer, mapping my actions and the studio space, particularly thinking about totalising views such as the panorama.

daily mapping on a makeshift lazy susan

panorama hugs

real time vs. constructed time

In working with these clips I’ve begun to think about my use of footage as a medium. So understanding the act and duration of recording, whether it be for documentation or representation purposes.

I’ve been looking at Tarkovsky films, particularly his signature long takes which track between rooms, zoom or pan extensive landscapes or expose multiple occurrences, in real time within the one shot. He referred to this method as ‘sculpting in time’ as an affirmation of the materiality of the mediation.
Robert Bird, reiterates this emphasis on the medium and mediation of duration in Tarkovsky films in this paper.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBZsj8FPSbo - The Mirror

I am also intrigued by his ability to actualise a kind of ‘extra dimensionality’- as described by David Haines, small metaphysical investigations which exceed a conventional understanding of time and space.
For example the levitating love making scene in Sacrifice - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_aEjbYED0Q
and the final scene of Nostalgia - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXYhLF2z_NM&feature=related
Perhaps these moments could be seen as realisation of the virtual?

I've also been jotting down some dialogue from the films

‘poetry in untranslatable like the whole of art…’
‘I’m a good translator. I even improve on the original’
‘where am I when I’m not in reality or in my imagination’

exercises in exceeding

Perhaps I need to define this idea of the ‘charged moment’ of a work that I have been referring to. In a charged moment, I hope for the work, or more so our understanding of how we perceive the work to begin to exceed itself. So by altering or moving beyond the expectation we have of a representation, I want to make a viewer more conscious of how we perceive in a certain way. Bergson refers to an ‘affective-gap’ or a moment of ‘hesitancy’ between seeing and processing what we see. A moment of latency.

But this is all still remaining in cognitive thinking. To overcome this philosophising I’ve been trying to create a rupture in our conceived expectations of different dimensions. Initially by trying to address what is our preconceived expectation of these dimensions and then how I can conflate, move between or exceed them.

Some exercises in exceeding the page.

‘Percept, Affect, Concept’

Thoughts from Deleuze & Guattari, What is Philosophy (1991)

“the work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself” 164

Consider the work of art as a being of sensation, where sensation is the point between the act of perceiving (by the perceiving subject) and the percept (object of perception.) This in between mediation is the moment of art. It is not material, as material constitutes only its de facto condition; rather it is the duration for which it remains between these states. So the work exists in this duration or the space between percept and perception.

Rather than an object perceived by a subject it is the meeting between ‘sensing’ and ‘sensed.’ (my understanding of this is ‘sensing’ being the moment of experience itself and ‘sensed’ being when we realise or attempt to frame it within our understanding.)

I have been nutting out these ideas in diagram form, as a physical way of addressing the notional. However they are more interesting and seem to make more sense in the process of making, so I’ve started filming myself figuring them out- a form of live thought tracking.

As a bit of a fluke I havealso come across John Rajchman’s writing on diagrammatic practice as a visual strategy that can incorporate the virtual. He uses Foucault & Deleuze’s notion of the diagram as an ‘abstract machine’ able to represent the temporal or fleeting. I’m not to sure my diagrams make that much sense to anyone other than myself but I found this a little reassuring.

(re)presentation & the space of visual reception

I have arrived at a point of focusing my project on the relationship between visual realisation and perception. Questioning the actualisation and subsequent reception of representation; basically how one views, becomes conscious of and formulates an understanding of what we experience through visual art.

For some clairity I’ve divided my thinking to three categories.

How visuality is

i) realised

ii) (re)presented &

iii) received (by a viewer)

Realisation is my action in actualising the work, (re)presentation is the mediation or presentation of the work while reception is the situation of perceiving itself or how a viewer comes to visually understand a work. This obviously still remains to be very broad, and indeed could be considered the reasoning behind most art addressing cognitive thinking, so I am attempting to explore this through a concrete example of layering and moving between the 2D (line, surface, image), 3D (space, depth, object) & 4D (time, temporality, movement).

aligning self with recorded self

the footage on the left was projected back into the space, where I attempted to re-perform myself both from memory and by being prompted by the projection. a doubling of past and present action.

Bergson - duration & virtuality

Thoughts post reading ‘The Future of Space: Towards an Architecture of Invention’ Elizabeth Grosz

actual vs virtual - newness

- otherness ---> potential

- divergence

I am interested in Henri Bergson’s notion of duration as an unhinging of temporality in opposition to an understanding of spatiality.

Space - real, external, comparable and calculable

Duration - continuous, emergent and virtual

If space & time (duration) are thought of as discrete opposed phenomena we do not allow for the process of spatialisation through notions of duration & temporality. Bergson conceptualised space as the contraction of time while time is the expansion of space hence recognising the becoming one of the other (relation of direct inversion).

Space (medium of actuality) instead of being the dualism of duration (temporality) could be conceived as the field for the virtual, where motion unfolds and actualises space. Thus we could consider space not as an existing measurable relationism but rather consider it as we consider time, unfolding, emergent and open to ‘becoming’- that is becoming other than itself, other than what it has been considered to be. A re-invention of the concept of space, rather than an expectation of what we know space to be.

Spatiality contracts with the perception of the present (specificity of location), the possibilities of action and a memory of past (pre-established ‘being’?). Bergson suggests a return to the space of the immediate lived experience in order to override the pre-established understanding of space. Return to a moment of instability between what we know and the anticipation of what is to come.

Bergson defines perception and memory in pragmatic terms as our mode of access to the present and past.

Present – that which acts, lives, anticipates immediate future

Past – no longer acts, accessible as re-collections

Memory is faded perception (past, conciousness, duration) while perception (actual, present, space, objects, matter) is dawning action- action in potential. Perception relates to how we may experience, act and interpret.

perception – memory

present – past

Memory is the present’s mode of access to the past. The past could be seen as powerless but can moblise (have influence on) present perception. Therefore the present is not self-contained rather it straddles the past and the present and is thus the threshold of interaction of perception & action, the site of duration, the moment of the virtual.

Deleuze’s reading of Bergson goes as far as to say that the only subjectivity in life is time, which we experience through duration.

Bergson theorises the paradox of temporal simultaneity of present & past. Present not purely self contained- it requires the past as its precondition, hence the past is contemporaneous with the present. The past can only exist with the present of which it is the past.

If these two types of time coexists, one virtual (past) & one actual (present) is there a spatial correlation for this unhinging of temporal continuity? Can the virtual be transferred to concepts of space? The virtual implies an opposition to the actual, it has a sense of reality without any actuality. As well it seems the virtual cannot be specified directly, for when it exists, it exists as actual. In the process of actualisation the virtual annuls itself in order to re-emerge as an actual & therefore produces its own virtualities.

Bergson & Deleuze speculate on the potential of the virtual to be actualised, a capacity of the actual to be more than itself, to become other than how it has previous been seen or functioned. In the fleeting moment of the possible actualisation of the virtual we may experience an unhinging of spatial and temporal understanding.

things to consider

does the paradox of duration have spatial counterparts?

is (re)presentation past? – memory

conscious perception

duration as a charged moment?