IN CLASS
Discussion of Viewing Experience.
Discussion and viewing of Stream Exercise.
VIEWING EXPERIENCE
Half of the class will watch James Benning’s Nightfall (2012), a film that lasts one hour and thirty-eight minutes.
The other half will watch Benning’s Ruhr (2009), which lasts one-hour.
Devise a timeline on which you will note your impressions.
Notate the changes that occur in your stream-of-consciousness over the duration of the piece on the timeline. It’s important that you notate the elements of your stream-of-consciousness AS THEY OCCUR (and not after the piece is done).
- Pay attention to your attention, how you drift in and out.
- How does your sense of time change as the experience evolves? (e.g. You can use a curve to indicate whether time is passing in a solid (slow), viscous (medium) or gaseous (rapid) state.)
- When do you start to form hypotheses about the video, intuit anticipations, what’s coming next?
- What role does memory play as the piece extends forward in time?
- When did a sense of the piece’s structure begin to occur to you?
- How did your bodily state evolve over this one hour? Did your bodily condition influence your ability to focus on your stream of consciousness?
- Random thoughts that have nothing to do with the video will pop into your head. Write them down, no matter how embarrassing. It’s all part of the strange game of attention. (PS: paying attention to paying attention is difficult! You might get into a feedback loop. Do your best.)
NIGHTFALL: Kile, Alessandro, Yaxuan, Matthew, Daveanand, Xin, Zoe, John, Katrina, Ran
RUHR: Artur, Sophia, Benjamin, Abbigale, Noora, Xinyi, Michelle, Miguel, Rhea, Sabrina, Junjie
UPLOAD a picture or scan of your timeline to the WEEK2_TIMELINE folder in YOUR WORK.
EXERCISE: STREAM
You will stream for three continuous hours via Twitter, while one of your classmates views your stream privately and anonymously (there may be other “accidental” viewers tuning in).
The content of your streaming should reflect the passing of time somehow (i.e. not a shot of a wall under artificial lighting), without it being a shot of a clock.
PART 1: streaming for your partner
1. Download Twitter (X) and set up an account. Email me your username.
2. Determine an activity / setting for the stream. The camera can be still or in motion, can involve sound or not. Think of your stream as a window into your space, a window into another world for your viewer, a parallel timeline for them to experience alongside their own.
Keep the content relatively simple.
What do you want to reveal about your world to an outside viewer?
Avoid imposing a narrative. Think more along the lines of an ambiance, a feeling, rather than a story.
3. Coordinate a time for the 3-hour stream with your assigned partner over email.
4. Begin streaming at the appointed date/time.
Streaming instructions. (Twitter’s instructions)
Your partner should be watching as you’re streaming. (e.g. not watching a recording of the stream)
NOTE: Your stream will be automatically recorded and posted as a video tweet. Instructions for saving to camera roll (under “Can I Save My Live Video?”)
5. Take notes. What is it like to organize an experience over a long duration, when you don’t know who is watching? How do you orient yourself? How are you thinking about your viewer in this intimate setting?
6. Upload the recorded stream into the WEEK2_STREAM folder in YOUR WORK.
7. Email me the tweet link for your stream.
PART 2: tuning into your partner’s stream
1. You will tune into a different classmate (not the one viewing your stream) at a different time.
2. Take notes. What is it like to inhabit another space, another set of rhythms, as a parallel to the space you’re currently physically present in? What is it like to watch a video that isn’t about making a narrative point?
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TIME THEORY
“LIVE” TIME
Apollo 11 (1969)
- feel of liveness, but nothing is happening
- interesting to consider in light of Warhol’s long films (Sleep, Empire 1963 etc)
- synchronized viewing – a planetary media situation
What kinds of perceptual experiences emerge during the viewing of long durations in which nothing seems to be happening?
Gillette & Schneider—Wipe Cycle (1969)
- multiple times coexisting: mixes live CCTV feeds with manufactured (network television) time and prerecorded tapes
- visitors become part of the information
Oswald Store—November 22 1963 12:30 5:30 PM CST ABC WFAA CBS NBC (JFK) (1971)
- synchronization of three streams of live coverage following the shooting of John F. Kennedy (1963)
- the “tactility of time”: the perception of time passing is modulated by anticipation, dread, trauma, inertia: it becomes akin to a physical substance
Wolfgang Staehle—untitled (9/11) (2001): When art and event intersect.
Animal cams: Jelly Cam (and not JenniCam); Lion Cam; Giraffe Cam; Great Horned Owl Cam
Ferguson split-screens (2015)
SPATIAL TIME VS. DURATION
SPATIAL TIME = CLOCK time = QUANTITATIVE, MEASURABLE, HOMOGENEOUS, REGULAR. Think of temporal divisions (seconds, milliseconds, any division) like pearls on a string—each one occupying a discrete position, a separation that makes COMPARISON and ANALYSIS possible.
RATIONAL / ADMINISTRATED TIME: Melting of bells in Revolutionary France
—->COORDINATION, SYNCHRONIZATION (trains!), TRANSPORT, TRADE
e.g. the spatialized timelines of non-linear editing systems
DIVIDING TIME—Etienne-Jules Marey chronophotography – Muybridge
Time and Motion Studies (Fordism)
Q: Do you regularly wake up just before your alarm? (clock time is already ALIEN TIME)
DURATION = QUALITATIVE, CONTINUOUS, FLUX, NON-MEASURABLE, PROCESS, grasped through INTUITION.
Lived, experienced, embodied time.
Time stretches and compacts itself as a result of the interaction of external stimuli with internal states. As we have all experienced, time passes differently when in action than in repose.
In Bergson’s conception of time, nothing retains self-identity over time. Life is change itself. Due to the continuous INTERPENETRATION of temporal layers, it is impossible to nail down (spatialize) the boundaries of any particular duration.
MOVEMENT IMAGE vs. TIME IMAGE (Deleuze)
Christian Marclay—The Clock (2010)
another kind of real-time – clock time mirrored on screen through fictional materials
PARADOX: Submitting cinematic time to regulatory clock time.
PHENOMENAL TIME
Bruce Nauman—Elke, Allowing the Floor to Rise Up over Her, Face Up (1973) (TIME)
documenting processes, inertial activities where nothing is happening
the affordability of video makes conceptual experimentation possible
Bruce Nauman—Stamping in the Studio (1969) (MOVEMENT)
everyday activity
documenting a process / notebook
duration of shot = length of tape (1 hour) (materially constrained, like the Lumière’s early films)
Terry Fox—Children’s Tapes (1974)
INHUMAN TIME: DILATION
How does the perception of inhuman time warp the brain?
Douglas Gordon—24-hr psycho (1993)
appropriation: warps preexisting expectations – narrative dissolves in visual minutiae
Douglas Gordon – 5-Year Drive By (1995) = The Searchers stretched to the actual duration of the narrative (5 years it took for the protagonist to find his daughter).
Sharon Lockhart—Lunch Break (2008)
materiality of video becomes manifest
distance between still image and moving image — re. persistence of vision
each frame copied 8 times (from 24 frames/second to 3 frames/second), making the film essentially a succession of stills, with digitally smoothed over transitions between each “frame”: 14400 frames
Television Recuperation Unit (TRU)—ATPM TEST (1980s, realized 2016)
stretching time without altering pitch
NTSC (30 fps) —> PAL (25 fps) = 4% speedup
see also Drunk Trump compilation (2016)
INHUMAN TIME: COMPRESSION
Bill Viola—Ancient of Days (1979-81)
Multiple times coexisting: superimposed rates of change.
The Matrix: Bullet Time
A move from temporal to spatial logic.
Digitization collapses sound and visual material into information, with plastic potential.
stills converted into movie frames: the filmmakers are able, as Alexander Galloway puts it, “to freeze and rotate a scene within the stream of time,” and to view the scene, at each moment, from any desired angle
BUT, the bullet time of this scene is still inscribed into a linear, temporal narrative
Massive Attack / Édouard Salier—Splitting the Atom (2010)
doesn’t employ montage (moving the camera and fixing the world – the entire space is given in advance)
like the smooth space of the computer game in some way – though the music temporalizes it
Tony Scott—Domino (Bullet Time)
CSI “Demo” Time
The Pirate Cinema (Torrent Time)
the time of High Frequency Trading, algorithmic processes operating at speeds beyond human grasp
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