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

New work 2007

Some new images from Nov 2007

A pictorial reflection on Henri Bergson Matter and Memory

Matter thus resolves itself into numberless vibrations, all linked together in uninterrupted continuity, all bound up with each other, and travelling in every direction like shivers through an immense body.- Henri Bergson Matter and Memory

A story - reflection from Berlin 2004

For months, while living in the student dorms in Berlin, I would pass this window. I became obsessed with looking out of it. The view was the bramble branches of a tree, and one day I saw in the branches a nest. The nest had eggs, blue ones, grey ones, maybe blue-grey, and I would state at them each time I walked past, waiting for them to hatch. They never did, at least while I was there. Maybe the eggs just went away, like they were eaten or the wind blew them away. More likely I forgot if they just went away or I left before they changed. But I like the repetition in my head, when I think about it, the pause, the waiting, this internal stasis.

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.

Apparitions at twilight
Night storms, darkness, hidden existence. An electric clap and the hidden is made visible. A drama of space between the negative and the positive, light and dark. Knowable forms give way to blooming apparitions. We see a change, a shift, an uncomfortable awakening. For a moment I must recognise: what I hear, see, and feel; this forms what I know. These are the senses that make me, and my knowledge of this space. Then, seen slightly, as if in a dream state, a flash, the sky opens, a temporary emergence of the hidden, an illumination in the half-light. In a quickening of optical impulses I see the leaves, the tree. Then it is gone. The photograph slows the apparition. An eternal moment.


“In either case, what is seen fills the field of vision, but the field of vision is never taken as all there is to see.”- Marilyn Strathern After Nature


I am thinking about here, to borrow a term from Walter Benjamin, the body as darkroom. The body itself as a house of images. Light impressions pressed into the skin, literally burnt on our bodies. A participation in an organic process. The water creates rivulets on her back, her hair is like a foliage creeping over, moving towards the light. Outside, in the darkness, light floods through branches. There is a slow awakening, a blooming as the trees take their shape, other organic apparitions. Once before the trees were hidden from themselves, or hidden from my own self. I am seared through with light. Becoming an apparition.


I am experimenting with photographing as I walk, as I interact. The photographic act is integral, the camera is my third eye, it uncovers what I can not see alone. There are twilight forces; storms, the sea, wind, lights, and also, apparitions of the day. Full sunlight, shimmering iridescence, blindness by light. I am reading Words of Light I am reading Fear of Freedom, I am reading Invisible Cities and Warped Space. I recognise that my images are informed by the junction, or in some ways, collision of the natural organic world, and the constructed human world. In images such as the above I want to have an absence of the perceptible (the street) but recognise that the natural is still bound to the constructed world it pushes against. The hidden world exists in the one I live within. It is not a metaphoric or idealised natural landscape or the country-side where nature exists as intended. It does exist both outside of me and inside of me. It is my physiology. It is nature slipping between and beneath buildings. It is oil slick. It is the water parting over concrete, it is a body and a skin, existing on the edge between sight and touch, measured in the time a word is spoken, a memory recalled, a flash of lightning, a sunburn to form.


Transformations of the landscape affect the definition of the subject regarding them. I am interested in the meteorological nature of my work. A leaf falls against a gutter, clinging for a moment before being swept along.


I think of the work of Bill Viola - Departing Angel and The Reflective Pool. My own physiology dwells in contrast to the immediate constant flow of water, and its ebbs and cycles. I am still, and a participant only in stages. I wonder about wandering in a fog, and how different things would seem there. Known things, a road, a sign, a path, a puddle. I think about technology, how I could know all things, maybe. I could know everything, but I know nothing. I comprehend cyberspace but barely know my own geography. I am a stranger in the dark. The tree resembles a human limb, my limb, my phantom limb.


My Ghost