NOTES / IDEAS / PHRASES / IMAGES

"Also if we are moved by a photograph it is because it is close to death" - Christian Boltanski

"Is the evolution of time (temporal dimension) denied to the photographic still any longer?" - David Green Marking Time

"This has been" - Roland Barthes (what does this become?)


The Becoming image:
Hesitating
Held back
Consumed before emerging...


The architecture of inter-activity (audio-visual structure), what to view and when? Narrative reorganisation. Who is a viewer, who is a user? Nothing happens without the user's initiation. Is this predetermined?

Photo - having been there
Film - being there
Becoming there
Blooming.


The photo recedes (it has already been there), the film proceeds (slow), caught between linear stretch back and forward in time. The delay. Delay of what? Time, a moment, an action, a thought, a realisation, an ending, a resolution?

The external present tense THIS (indexical). No tense - just factuality and something.

New temporalities - an image viewed on a screen as opposed to an image object (refreshing the screen).

Real-time (unreal-time?), the internet's lure of connectivity and availability, a "denial of mediation" - MaryAnn Doane - Real Time.

The visibility of time in visible time - David Green.

"Of the countless movements of switching, inserting, pressing and the like, the 'snapping' of the photographer has had the greatest consequences." - Walter Benjamin, "Subject grows into picture".

Power in the unknowable - no speed, delivery of information (I can feel it moving). That is the pause and delay, longer exposure, focus not fixed, belonging to a narrative that is never revealed. What are the implications? "A small concussion" - Martin Arnold sp sp spaces of inscription.


WORKS:



Susan Hiller - Whispering Voices. In ‘Witness’, whispering voices can be heard coming out of hundreds of suspended speakers.




Hiroshi Sugimoto - Theatres. Long-time exposures run the length of the feature, the white glow of the screen is an entire narrative capture in stillness.




passage à l'acte - Martin Arnold. Four people at the breakfast table, an American family, locked in the beat of the cutting table. The short, pulsating sequence at the family table shows, in its original state, a classic, deceptive harmony. Arnold deconstructs this scenario of normality by destroying its original continuity. It catches on the tinny sounds and bizarre body movements of the subjects, which, in reaction, become snagged on the continuity. The message, which lies deep under the surface of the family idyll, suppressed or lost, is exposed - that message is war.
"The first shock, the first flight, the fear at the beginning of the film: The son jumps up from the table and throws open the door, which sticks in an Arnoldian loop of hard, hammering rhythm. He is compelled to return to the table by a mechanically repeated paternal order, 'Sit down.' And at the end, when the two children spring up, finally released from their bondage, Arnold is again caught at the door; at the infernally hammering door, as if it were completely senseless to try to leave here - this location of childhood and two-faced cinema." - Stefan Grissemann.




Lori Hersberger - Sunset.




Seven Minutes before - Melik Ohanian.




Michael Snow - Breakfast (Table Top Dolly).

The instability of water contained in fleshy ground. The ground is a container - a receptacle. We can feel the moment; the time in this image through the vision of water contained for a moment. The water in the image speaks of the rain that fell, and the ground that will soak it up. Leaves blow across the surface, and a small glow of light shines as the water collects together. Time lets like meld into like, across an uneven surface. The moment before a dam bursts, a creek flows or rain falls is a stillness of a body awaiting escape. The moment here is the containment. The moment gives us a sense of power. We can see here the glittering sun; the seeping water, full of promise to become something else, to become part of something else, swallowed up. After it came, before it goes.




Emerging specters. The known is obscured being light; shadows; information. Between here and there is a journey. So the cinema of moments shows us how ones gets to somewhere else. A figurative journey, or a physical one. We almost can feel being present here, wanting to crawl through the leaves, pull branches aside, get there, faster. But we are caught, suspended in an uneasy state. Our eyes have time to wander, occluded spaces are revealed, time slows and we can SEE, for a moment, a thousand paths we could take, where to from here? Are we passing by? What do I want here? To look, to see, or to be there, to be present in that space? In some instances objects in the foreground give a sense of retreat. I am leaving this house, I am covered again, clouded, surrounded by information I know nothing.

Before Focus is Fixed

The purpose of this MFA study is to develop a contemporary understanding of and visual response to the photographic in relation to the moment, pause and delay. The study takes the knowledge expressed in historical and contemporary readings of photographic and cinematic time and seeks to readdress this knowledge in relation to a modern technological framework. My visual practice centres on a “point of convergence” between separate modes of creating and theoretically indexing the photographic moment. This revaluation of ‘the moment’ and the slippage between historical distinctions between cinematic and photographic time is manifested in the subject, object and content of the work produced.

A central concern of my visual investigation is with the contemporary blurring of the distinction between the photographic object’s inherent stillness, and the constant narrative sequence of cinema. New technologies such as the internet, DVD, home cinema, digital video and photography are staring to collapse the distinction between photographic stasis and cinematic fluidity. The ability for a person to pause, rewind, re-watch, stop and manipulate the narrative sequence of a film has disturbed the flow of narrative; an expectation of narrative and conclusion has now given way to a pause or delay, a glitch in the flow of cinematic time(1).

This delay has effectively exposed the separate still images in cinema and disturbed the continuity of narrative, resulting in a state, where, as Mulvey writes, a ‘film’s original moment of registration can suddenly burst through its narrative time … the now-ness of story time gives way to the then-ness of the time when the movie was made, and its images take on social, cultural or historical significance, reaching out into its surrounding world’(2). This now and then dichotomy is also explored by Barthes when describing the function of the punctum(3) in reading a photograph.

Effectively as cinema is slowed and paused, the resultant stills take on a photographic reading, and combined with their cinematic origins produce a new sense of time, where expectation is both muted and delayed, and a new relationship containing the real and unreal, still and moving and then and now is created. The narrative is now controlled by the viewer, who can slow time at will. The viewer divests new readings into the resultant still images, paused in an effective slumber, repetitive short moments on repeat, fixed upon, re-watched and re-contextualised. The cinematic still provides the viewer with the opportunity to categorise, memorise and reorder cinematic images far from the specific temporal confines of time past/future. The effect is very immediate.

My work, though use of still photography, narrative film sequence and time capture stills, seeks to examine this pause or break or ‘irrational interval’ before focus is fixed. Historical modes of reading the photograph will be taken into consideration and reinterpreted in relation to contemporary filmic and photographic modes of production and consumption. My research attempts to make sense of this delay and examine the power the delay has on the way images are produced. I will discuss how our contemporary relationship to the image is changing the way we interact with ideas of the moment and representation. My research aims to discover if the disruption is limiting or liberating, and, that by way of delay, if cinema becomes reliant on the photographic index as narrative shifts between movement and pause. What lonely spectres emerge from the repetitive pause? How do we read “movement and flow” when we have the power to delay the eventual ending? What does the photographic image(4) mean to us now when we have the power to delay time? Does this change our expectation of the moment contained in an image? What is revealed?

In this vision conscious contemporary world, there is a deep impulse to seek meaning and truth (recognition) from a photographic (still) image. The artists I will discuss in relation to my own practice explore issues of time, delay, blur, mnemonic register and repetition in the image, through process, object and output. They cover a historical and contemporary field of “vision” and seek to impart a sense of how spectatorship of the (still) image is informed by both photographic histories and ideas of the cinematic narrative (slowed). Particular attention will be paid to Douglas Gordon, Hioroshi Sugimoto, Martin Arnold and Peter Tscherkassky with theoretical reinterpretation of the works of Laura Mulvey, Roland Barthes, Paul Virilio and Jonathan Crary.

I aim to produce a lyrical essay reflecting on my own practice, and questions that arise from my own image creation. The function of the essay will be to strengthen my question asking capacity and situate my work in the now. A basic proposed structure is below, but of course is driven by the evolution of the artwork.

1. Maria Walsh, in ‘Against Fetishism: The Moving Quiescence of Life 24 Frames a Second’ refers to a Cinema of Moments, which seems to accurately describe the condition of the cinematic flow made still, the delay and rupture of filmic sequence. Further it could be said that a stilled image could now be read as belonging to the cinema of moments, wether captured from movement out of a cinematic sequence, or wether a standalone photographic image not related to an original narrative structure.
2. Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image pg 30-31.
3. In my research Barthes’ Punctum refers not to the ‘detail’ of the image that draws you in, but of time, the duration of the image, the “that has been” - a call back to the true moment of representation.
4. Terms of distinction between the photographic and film still are still hazy, though I expect a more concrete term will emerge though research and practice. Perhaps just ‘the still’ will suffice prefixed as appropriate with cinematic or photographic. Combined they are as previously mentioned the Cinema of Moments.



Before Focus is Fixed - Chapter Outlines

The Bruise of Time
A re-reading of photographic and cinematic time – what is a “still”, what is contained in an image, what is the image’s duration? How do we read still images now – in light of new technologies and impulsive image viewing practices?

Coming Up for Air
Repetition and delay in contemporary visual practice.
If the distraction and flow is taken from cinema in the form of a delay, a pause, how does this affect our reflection, and, is the reflection and pensive and sometimes obsessive action of viewing the pause, consuming the delay – different from the photographic still? And if the delayed moment constant, repeated, duration is put on hold, then what does that moment become – is it contained, or does it break free from its stream of messaging?

I have nothing left to give; but you always want more
New modes of spectatorship.
What is discovered by the pause? How does this change the way we read a photographic still? Is the still now imbued with the power of the cinematic contained?

The Bloom of Recognition
Towards new interpretation on indexation and mnemonics in the cinema of stills.

But what does it mean for me now?
Afterthoughts of an image.

a visual reminder

The duration of time - After Bergson, Barthes and Deluze

“…looking at a photograph, I inevitably include in my scrutiny the thought of that instant, however brief, in which a real thing happened to be motionless in front of the eye. I project the present photograph’s immobility upon the past shot, and it is this arrest which constitutes the pose” - Roland Barthes

Expectation of movement

Repetition without difference (The Photograph) not without difference from the “original” object, but without difference from itself a moment ago -Geoffrey Rhodes

Repetition with difference (Cinema) Barthes considers the “distraction” of cinema, the constant flow of images.

The photo has no “durée” (Henri Bergson) but forces the viewer to impart their own “durée” (subjectivity), their own perception. Cinema occupies the mind, does not allow for contemplation, images are forced to be viewed in a sequence, unfolding a narrative.

Relationship to the photo image (per Deluze) is that we view our changing present and an unchanging point in the past.

The spectator is actually stringing together pieces of duration into a whole, a present, a virtual. This launches the viewer into the film: lured in by his own perception, the viewer becomes a denizen of the cinemas durée, forgetting his own.

The photograph forces contemplation with the self (sublime, but an ideal of wanting to submit to the static form of the image (this causes a tension) there is no resolve.

Barthes “Photographs are signs which don’t take, which turn, as milk does. Whatever grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see”

Mnemonics (transference) subjectively and physically, a connection through the impress of light and the impress of subjective thought, the duration of time for the bloom of a burn or light and the creation of a memory, the act of viewing, the bloom of the image awakened in their viewers mind.

Light -> duration -> image creation-> Image viewing -> memory formation -> recognition - > mnemonic referencing

Light -> Impression -> Recognition

Image post - The Grotto

A conversation regarding this image

N:
as if you were flying when you took this
i do not like the title.
cause i do not see the whatever "nothingness" in it.
its vibrant, luscious, in motion...the image in motion, my eyes sway.and for whatever feeling i am feeling it feels like nature symbolizing the digital age....????
i think you should do more of this.....

M:
the nothingness is the antithisis of this picture. the opposite, this image is the everything. its movement, colour, light, shape, it is tone and form, it buries us, overwhelms us.
It transmits, like a virus, all the feeling, and all the knowledge of a moment in time, staring, falling,
But never still, but always contained.

Image from The Grotto October 2007 (I have my new Mamiya!)

And her hair creeps over her shoulders like foliage...

reflection on: A History of Colours, Manilo Brusatin

This is beautiful:

Sounds reveal a passage of time, an intensity, a timbre; colours a darkness, a clarity, a tone. Timbres and tones may possibly bear a resemblance to each other, but beyond these, sounds seem to fly away (reverberate) into the dimension of space, which contains them, whereas colours move through the dimension of time, which keeps or consumes them. We are pushed toward the colours of our memories as towards the resonances of places we have known. - A History of Colours, Manilo Brusatin


This is kind of exactly what my entire practice is about. Colour, Light, Memory, and the psychology of these tones' physicality, the knowledge of their appearance and their use as mnemonic devices.

Its like pathology, and photography captures it so well. The drama of space that contains them, propels them, and the bodies that feel their pulse and perceive them. Its so quiet, so slow, so elongated, the feeling of describing them bloom of light/colour in the mind or on the body of a person. Like a memory or scar. A secret.

3 words:

Mapping
Physiology
Perception

of a site, by a person.
It is the perception of the usual and knowable aspects of a site, and how we use ideas of mapping to understand a site :

- I go here, this goes there, I move here, this follows this path, A is next to B
- This is how one perceives it, this is how one sees and hears and touches a site, this is the way we believe a site to be
- This is how I feel when I see this, this is my belief, this is my emotion, this is my though process
- This is how I move, this is my body operating in this space/site, this is what my senses see

But then, the unusal, the unknowable, the hidden, in these sites, how do we perceive them, how do they make us feel, how do we "know" them, what do they make us think of, what are our reactions, fear, flight, anxiety, unease, sadness?


Mapping the hidden (or not immediately apparent, not percieved, seen slightly, seen in a dream-like state) physiology of space and how these hidden aspects make us feel/react/question our usual relationship to a space/site and our role in it.

'We cover the universe with drawings we have lived.'
Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space (1958), tr. Maria Jolas, (Massachusetts: Beacon press, 1994) p. 12

Discussion Points

How does one identify an anxious state, an anxious place or an anxious act? How can a state of anxiety be created or represented through an artwork? What are the triggers of an anxious state? Do we hide from these triggers, or do we cultivate them through the way we act and subsequently, through the way we make art?

--

I want to:

examine how the viewer's own subtle self-references of memory, guilt and culpability condition them to be influenced and affected by certain imagery, be it of a person or a specific space.

explore how anxiety manifests (influenced by internal and external sources) and explore the performance of these manifestation or apparitions in my work, through way of gesture, gaze, construction and intent.

elucidate ideas of duration, permission, exposure, tension, intimacy and claustrophobia.

focus on the psychological manifestations of a space and our preconceived notions of how a space must occur and behave (and in turn, us within such a space).


Currently:

I have been thinking a lot about images of the landscape, particularly urban landscapes, reconfigured as menacing, collapsing and containing, or in opposite, landscapes that are completely autonomous and impersonal.

I am interested in explorations using the gestures and physical movements of the human body, and their source from and effect on an anxious state, and how one can explore these movements within the photograph.


Some Ideas of why?

These concepts are relevant in view of the hyper-real and super-connected channels of communication existing in contemporary culture, such as language barrier breakdown, mutable geography, the Internet, and the slow corrosion (or superseding) of “normal” cultural practices in favour of an ideal or acceptable way of acting.

Ideas Post 1

Anxious Landscapes

Anxious Spaces
Actions of Anxiety
What is an anxious state?
How do they manifest/operate?
What is a cause, and how do I perform it?
Photograph -> Performance -> Video -> Installation


Mirrors
Exercise
Rain