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).

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

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.

More Artists

David Haines and Joyce Hinterding
House 2 The Great Artesian Basin Pennsylvania 2003
Video work: House II, a deluge pours endlessly from a Pennsylvanian Neo-Gothic house.




Tacita Dean
The Green Ray
2001
16mm colour, mute,
2 minutes 30 secondsHer



Her work occupies a place between fact and fiction. It is pervaded by a sense of elusiveness, a search for something that exists as much in the imagination as anywhere else.


Lynn Davis
Iceberg III, Disko Bay, Greenland 2004




Ann Hamilton


At Hand


Myein


James Turrell
Ondoe Blue, 1967 (installation view at Albion, 2004)



James Turrell and his compatriot Robert Irwin were key figures in the "light and space school", a movement in which "perception" rather than the object is key to "experience" of the artwork, that is the "artwork" is a mere light conduit for experience.