Of clocks ticking: Heterotopic space, time and motion in William Kentridge’sThe Refusal of Time(2012) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Of clocks ticking: Heterotopic space, time and motion in William Kentridge’s 'The Refusal of Time'
Communicatio, 2016
In William Kentridge’s The refusal of time (2012), comment on time as both a scientific and a human entity is produced. A complex mix of the visual and nominal vocabularies of early ‘rudimentary’ technological invention, scientific experimentation and contemporary digital language characterises the artwork. Conceptually, the structural, technological and visual components of the work predominantly articulate figure tropes of space, time and motion. The work is explored through the lens of heterotopia as articulated by French philosopher Michel Foucault, with special attention to the artist’s articulation of space, time and motion. The construal proceeds through the investigation of the visual metaphors implied by the organisation of space; the depiction of movement; time ticking; the allusion to human beings’ fascination with invention, science and technology; and the products thereof, especially the creation of automatons. Interpreting the work as representing heterotopic temporality in space, it is argued that such heterotopic entities defy clock time as stringent ‘regular’ time. Examination of the meta-narratives on science and technology alluded to in The refusal of time is conducted, including mention of the early development of automatons; Modernistic French thought; advancements in Physics around 1900; and postmodern takes on science and technology.
Art, Life, and Technology, Through Time and Space
Museums and Digital Culture
This chapter focuses on the work and life of digital artist Carla Gannis. Originally from North Carolina, Gannis received a BFA from UNC Greensboro, and an MFA in painting from Boston University. In 2005 she was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Grant in Computer Arts, and since then, she lives and works in Brooklyn, where she is a professor and assistant chairperson of The Department of Digital Arts at Pratt Institute. Conveying her journey from painter to digital artist and storyteller, we explore the evolution of her artistic expression from painting to digital art, a story that ties broadly to the development of the digital arts field from the 1990s to present. Presented both through images of her work, and by way of a face to face unrehearsed interview, this chapter touches upon many of the highly pertinent topics impacting artists and museums in the 21st-century digital age. Among these, of special interest to museums are her observations on audiences, and how working in digital media affords new opportunities and multiple ways of connecting to the viewer, and reaching vast numbers of people across the globe, traveling from the gallery to the public square, in particular, Times Square and the Internet, showing that the life of a digital work can have multiple states of being. Gannis emphasizes the cultural positioning of digital spaces in physical places where diverse large public audiences can experience the work and where the artist can feel the pulse of public reaction and interaction. A feature of her work is her expression of self and gender through digital manifestations of persona, being and social consciousness, that take very original shapes and forms, images, colors and animations that merge into digital interpretations of self and the surrounding world revealing her creative imagination and sense of poetry used to convey new narratives embedded in her work and life (Fig. 19.1).
MA Thesis: Other spacetimes. The notions of time and space in new media art.
This thesis will explore the notion of spatiality and temporality in the relatively new field of new media art. It will argue that art produced by new media challenges the conventional understanding of time and space. On the examples of two artworks, Masaki Fujihata’s ‘FieldWorks’ (2002) and Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin’s ‘Listening Post’ (2001/2002), this paper will aim to demonstrate how new media art confronts the traditional perception of time and space and provides new opportunities for experiencing temporality as well as dimensionality that occurs simultaneously, i.e. that of the author, the viewer and the artwork. Furthermore, this thesis will argue that new media art generates its own micro-temporality and micro-spatiality, which coexist with their established traditional notions although at the same time remaining against them. Lastly, taking to account new media art’s relation to time and space, this thesis will investigate the capacity of new media art to be transformed – migrated, emulated, and reinstantiated – and it will delve into the possibility of preservation and curation of these media.
This exhibition focuses on distinct perceptions of time-phenomenological, empirical, political, and fictional. Contemporary artists from Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe map the show into five areas of multimedia installations that examine cultural differences in the construction of time.
Material Imagination: on the Avant-Gardes, Time and Computation
Fun and Software: On Pleasure, Pain and Paradox in Computing, ed. Olga Goriunova, London - New-York: Bloomsbury, 2014.
The future is our only goal Varvara Stepanova and Alexander Rodchenko Slogan from the newspaper Art of the Commune Those who flick through the pages of old magazines for long enough know that each epoch had its own future, similar to the 'Future in the Past' of English grammar: as if the people of the past extend themselves into infinitude along a straight line, drawn through their own time at a tangent to eternity. Such a future never comes, because humankind walks into the future along a complex and barely comprehensible trajectory …[in these magazines] people from yesterday's tomorrow … stand in their pumped up space suits next to the chubby rockets, and above them an arrow of a space shuttle blasting off glides in the pale zenith -a painfully beautiful Noon of humankind … Victor Pelevin, 'Soviet Requiem' in Pineapple Water for the Beautiful Lady (Moscow: Eksmo, 2011).
The Future is an Image: Unsustainability, Plasticity and the Design of Time (Atropos Press, 2015)
In a world unsustainable by design, we must rethink our relation to the image. To do so, I activate Malabou’s concept of plasticity to propose a materialist conception of the image as imago, which consists of the object in the world in interaction with the neural networks in the brain. Reviewing both a history of human unsustainability and a history of the idea of future, I then consider Derrida’s notion of time as trace and Malabou’s formulation of plasticity, the latter as derived from Hegel and as applied to the image. Finally, I consider the historical rift that developed between art and design at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and review its contemporary configuration in the work of Ranciére, Berardi and Groys. I then conclude by proposing a new model of image practice as arte-facture, the activity of making-wonder. Book is available from Amazon; the Introduction may be found below, as part of The Image in Plasticity
Time is of the essence: histories, bodies and art
Art History, 2002
Book reviews are always late. Rushing for the deadline, you are already behind time ± the book was conceived, written, designed, printed and published long before you reached it and whatever you write follows on, belatedly. Mieke Bal's Quoting Caravaggio first appeared in hardback in 1999 and so this review is particularly belated in one sense. Yet perhaps this is strangely fitting for a volume which counters any sense of self-assured linear chronology through a sustained engagement with time, quotation, duration and art. If, as Martin Davies argued, the end of the twentieth century was marked by a tragic, selfimposed lateness, a perpetual sense of coming after the event and being left in its wake, 1 Bal's volume provides a strategy for moving beyond belatedness towards a material encounter with history and cultural memory which thinks of temporality as the entanglement of subject and object. Reading this book, you are invited to participate in histories, to make present connections with the past, in and of the spatial and bodily movement of time. What is especially significant for art historians in this encounter is the fact that Quoting Caravaggio enables its readers to engage in its arguments by taking art, history and the histories of art seriously. Quoting Caravaggio focuses on the work of art, attending closely to what art does, rather than what it is. This subtle shift of emphasis has far-reaching ramifications both within the book and beyond its borders. For instance, Bal's volume is beautifully illustrated, yet it is not an illustrated history, if what is meant by that is a text-based thesis on space, time, subjects and objects, lavishly`decorated' by pictures, themselves reduced to texts and`read' in support of abstract arguments. Neither Bal's emphasis upon semiotics, nor her careful visual analysis, suggest that art might be subsumed by text; her argument is far more compelling, pointing towards a position beyond the binary logic which sets word and image apart, and calling for a fuller recognition of the knowledges which are produced by the materiality of art. This stronger position is mapped early in the work, when Bal argues that art works need to be understood as`theoretical objects':`I wish to suggest that such works can be construed as theoretical objects that``theorize'' cultural history. This theorizing makes them such instances of cultural philosophy that they deserve the name theoretical objects.' (p. 5) Quoting Caravaggio unfolds over eight chapters, each tackling a complex conceptual problem around histories, time and the meanings materialized by art. Throughout the volume, art works ± in the stronger sense of the term. Art is never the mute hand-maiden of theory, awaiting the voice of an empowered interpreter to bring it to life; in every configuration of ideas, images and texts, the material call to the sensory, corporeal roots of subjectivity and cognition are brought to bear upon the structure of the argument. Conceived as a theoretical object, art is demonstrated to have an extraordinary capacity to make ideas, and make them. Thinking through and with art renegotiates the parameters of meaning so that spatial embodiment in the world can be seen as a critical precondition of knowledge and the communication of ideas. As Bal writes in the fourth chapter of the volume, meaningful spatiality is intimately entwined with corporeality and location; the embodied subject of history and knowledge does not exist in an empty space, but in a meaningful world: REVIEWS
Algorithmic Art: Shuffling Space and Time, 2018.12.27 - 2019.01.10, 2019
"Object-Subjectivities: a Techno-art Saga" is a curatorial statement in the form of an artwork. It is an 8m long interactive digital chronology mapping all the14 artworks in the show Algorithmic Art: Shuffling Space and Time (27 Dec 2018 - 10 Jan 2019, City Hall Exhibition Hall, Hong Kong, curated by Linda Lai) onto a broader history of art and technology, based on assumptions in media archaeology. The making of this chronology adaptively combines Erkki Huhtoma’s topos study approach, and Siegfried Zielinski’s “deep time” perspective, built into Lai’s ongoing experiments with notation systems and chronological visualization. In Huhtoma’s terms, topos study emphasizes “cyclically repeated motifs and processes, but does not deny progress,” and each artwork in the show is the focal point of a topos, such a work can imaginably form a unique landscape with the individual artist’s ongoing practices. The varied assembled landscapes of the 14 artworks in this show together accumulate into a geography for topoi analysis, attending to recurring discursive concepts, visual or audio, that can be traced cross-historically and, to various extents, cross-culturally. Lai finds such a broad view emphasis compatible with what Zielinski would call “deep time,” which is a distributive model, looking at objects and events (i.e. “media attractions” as he calls it) that are plottable on a chronology system equally as much as the vast silences and blankness of what is in between points. The chronology presented here marks an initial step in examining the “dynamics between continuity and change” and attempts a deeper more interconnected understanding of past traces of media art situated in Hong Kong. Visitors can access the data nodes on the point-line graphical map using a wireless joystick set, and explore the links in whatever way their curiosity leads them.
At the beginning of the Twentieth century, individuals experience a neurotic acceleration of daily time, particularly in metropolitan areas, which reduces the capacity for reasoning and understanding approaching the loss of Denkraum – the space of thinking – theorized by Aby Warburg (1923). This anthropological transformation, economizing the time of reasoning, leads to a progressive acceleration in the ways of communicating and understanding the simple social messages of daily life. The result is a progressive osmosis between the structural acceleration of society and the common language by deleting all grammatical structures to speed up the communication parameters. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct how the avant-gardes (Cubism, Italian and Russian Futurism) respond to this metamorphosis, analysing through the writings of Roman Jakobson, published between 1919 and 1921, the new pathology of the metropolis in figurative and alphabetical languages at the beginning of the century.