time and audiovisual art
After working with sound for many years, and more recently with video, I’m finding myself needing to put my finger on the non-material I use every day in my work: time. At first I only want to think about time as it relates to the direct experience of audiovisual art: the immediate duration of the viewer/listener while in the presence of the audio/video work itself. I want to approach the situation of these media, not with the idea that they are adding the unprecedented fourth dimension of time to the experience of art. But rather that this dimension is already there, and always has been. It’s then a question of the ways in which media such as electronically produced video and audio relate to this time.
all art is experienced in time
No matter how much one wants to think of a painting or sculpture as a static thing, the first hand experience in front of an artwork is in constant flux before, during, and after the encounter. I would begin to describe the experience as chaotic, fragmentary, incomplete, tangential, interrupted, bound to all sorts of associations, triggering rational and irrational chains of thoughts and images, mental lapses, poetic inspiration, emotive and cathartic moments. And of course there are the other trains of thought and physical sensations that arrived with the viewer and are still in play: the mood they’re in, how crowded the gallery feels, physical fatigue. One needs only stop what one is doing, close one’s eyes, and try to think of nothing to experience the many thoughts that course through the mind that are entirely unrelated to the project at hand. The field of vision occupied by the art object is filtered through all of these things that are fluctuating at different intensities while one is in its presence. They occur in time or even several times flowing simultaneously and interrelatedly through the consciousness of the viewer. The unfolding of the viewer/artwork relationship over time is volatile.
It’s this volatility that provokes creativity in the viewer. Everyone’s situation is different, which leads to a different experience in front of the same object. That thoughts can move outwards and with invention. That the initial responses can connect with deeper or more tangential (or even submerged) thoughts and feelings and these too can continue to make connections. That openings can inspire openings. This is where art is a living a powerful force in the world, and it happens when the viewer is in possession of their own time.
the audiovisual timeline
My feeling is that if pre-recorded audio and video are carelessly applied to art, the duration before the plastic and immobile work which was open and commensurate with the viewer/listener’s individual situation is now closed and mechanically driven over a chronological timeline—a homogenous abstract line along the length of which the seconds and minutes are equidistant for everyone. The technology and inherent tendencies of the audiovisual media amounts to an extension of an approach to time that is fundamentally a numbing entertainment/control protocol. Whether audio or video or both, the convention is to create a work that occurs over a specific number of minutes and seconds, in front of which the viewer/listener is expected to remain in fixed perspective towards the work while being pulled through its timeline as if attached by a string. The relationship is by default one of domination, as the very evolution and existence of the media owes so much to manipulation and the need to totalize the viewer/listener experience, eradicating their potential for a creative temporal experience.
I think there is a misconception that with digital video and audio we’ve entered into a more sophisticated relationship to time. The overused and useless term, non-linear, only adds to this. It suggests that somehow we have broken with the tyranny of constricting and limiting linear structures, and that our vistas are now open to new and radical possibilities.
Not necessarily. The key word here is timeline. I think it would be useful to point out how most audio/video work is made, because this is more than just a technical issue. Digital media is created using software, and almost all have some sort of grid based timeline that is absolutely chronological (driven by the crystal oscillator in the CPU)—and that corresponds to a very 19th century scientific/economic view of time, a spatial and homogenized view of time—in fact it is visually spatialized across the screen. On the left side of the screen is 0’00” and on the right side of the screen is the end-time for the piece, which is equal to the chronological duration of the entire work in minutes and seconds. This number equates to the exact amount of chronological time that the viewer/listener is expected to be pulled along.
This timeline operates on the contrived idea that the time of creating an audiovisual work can somehow become commensurate with the time of the audience perceiving it. In fact these are very different times, with radically different durations. How can I as an artist, presumably being intimately familiar with the material I am using—perhaps having lived with these materials and techniques for years—circumscribe a temporal experience for a viewer/listener I don’t know? In fact for many different viewers and listeners, all with different aptitudes, different perspectives, different levels of awareness of my own vocabulary, different degrees of focus? This can only occur by some very indirect calculation and guessing.
And this indirect calculation and guessing amounts to the apparatus of compositional technique, which is a legacy of the age of prosceniums. The goal here being to ‘keep the attention’ of the audience over an arbitrary length of chronological time. Proscenium time operates according to a logic of tension and release—the manipulation of expectation. Literally the irking and teasing of the viewer/listener’s nervous system in such a way as to keep them constantly dependent on the timeline. Whether we are discussing a classical symphony or a Hollywood movie, the engine that pulls the viewer/listener is the feeling of expectation that they have of what will be coming up in the immediate future. In the visual gesture or the musical note there is already the expectation of what’s coming next. This leads either to a surprise when the unexpected happens or satisfaction at having predicted it—and the various shades in between. In any case these techniques keep the audience constantly in motion according the logic of a timeline external to their own singular experience of time.
Proscenium time involves not only the contrived synchronization of the times of the artist and viewer, but the vertical synchronization of the internal elements of the work. This is the idea of ensemble—that all of the elements in a piece are vertically aligned and dispatched in a way as to emphasize the experience of the single mechanical time. In classical orchestration the principle is to maximize the efficiency and power of each instrument so that each gesture works towards single unified moments on the timeline. It is the vertical synchronization that gives the piece its impact—its largeness—its ‘intoxicating’ quality. Its Wagnerian quality. The instruments are vertically aligned so as to emphasize the striated uniformity of time. Everyone is in step. This in-stepness is a force which pulls the audience in and keeps them there.
Electronically produced video and audio are basically an extension of this proscenium sensibility, but due to their absolute mechanical repeatability and the sheer intensity with which they assault the retina and ears they represent a new and improved capacity to dominate the timeline. Proscenium time is now the state of the tractor beam. The darkest development of the tractor beam over the proscenium is that now there is absolutely no aleatory experience. There are no digressions, no contingencies. The timeline simply executes, repeatedly. Forgetting about the history of direct exploitation of the media by political machines, whether Eisenstein dialectical montage or Hitler’s sound systems, our own broadcast and advertising media is so closely attuned to both the power of the timeline to goad emotions, to keep people out of touch with themselves, that to use these same tactics as an artist seems not only to sleep with the enemy, but to lose the character of art itself. Instead of taking these mechanisms for granted, or falsely believing that these tendencies can be used for the purpose of art I hope rather that art will destabilize this regime.
no timelines
Though I use electronically produced audio and video I want to retain the creative temporal experience for the viewer/listener that I described above in the contemplation of the immobile art object, and add to it the experience of an environment in transformation. To do this I have rejected the timeline as a structuring principle and rather create environments in which many different durations coexist in flux with each other. The viewer/listener can contemplate this environment without becoming subservient to a single timeline. Though instead of the idea of contemplation I prefer the idea of cotemporalization, or the notion that the time of the viewer/listener coexists and intersects with an environment in motion without becoming dominated by it.
My recent installations have involved multiple sources of sound (between six and sixteen speakers) and I am starting to use multiple video screens. These sources are separated in space in such a way that there is no suggestion of a fixed point perspective. In fact it’s impossible to even see or hear all of the sources from any given location. Each source is completely independent of the others, and renders different aural or visual events. There is no master timeline to synchronize the various locations, which frees people to move around and experience different perspectives. The separate sources also do not have timelines, since they deliver sounds according to probabilistic procedures on the fly. The overall texture of the piece is the arbitrary aggregate of multiple entities which are spatially separated and performing different (though related) sonic and visual operations.
There is never any prescribed duration that the viewer/listener is given on entering my installation. It is a process in motion that someone can enter at any time and stay as long as they wish. They may want to spend hours and probe the depths of the specific language I have set up for the work, and to absorb all of the materials. Or they may want to focus on one region for a while and then leave. The viewer/listener slips in and out a varying levels of awareness of what it is to be in and out of various times, including their own. Their time then intersects with the many operating durations in the piece, but because there are no timelines and because it is spread out in space, and because I have removed all vestiges of vertical alignment, the field opens up infinite possible perspectives. And because the sound structures never repeat, but constantly recontextualize, there is an open feeling in relation to the different times of the environment.
If this all sounds abstract, here is an example. republic is a sound installation that explores a peculiar cross-section of America. Limiting my scope to six small U.S. towns named Republic, I mined textual artifacts from the internet that included ghost sightings in Ohio, a witch persecution in Missouri, minutes from a town meeting in Washington, freak accidents in Pennsylvania, nuclear defense installations in Michigan, and a gun store in Kansas. These texts were recorded by New York actors, and are played back from six different speakers (each one playing back texts from a different state) spread out through the installation area. When a speaker has finished with one text, it goes on to another randomly selected text.
Since all of the speakers are active simultaneously there is no one focus. In fact if one were to stand at a point in the space where all the speakers are equally audible one hears a dense drone of pulverized speech through which maybe a word or two will be made out. The audience is encouraged to find their own line through the piece, and approach each speaker individually. Or to stand between two speakers. Or even to stay and listen to the composite drone. In any case the audience makes their own line through the piece and can make their own associations knowing that they are not going to miss anything. Or because the structure is predicated on missing most of it they can respond in their own time to this environment, and the ideas it triggers without feeling that there is a specific agenda at work. Without a timeline being fed to them, the audience is allowed to explore this microcosm of America, and in fact to become included in it. In fact when there are several people in the installation, there is an awareness that each person is experiencing the piece in their own time, and the microcosm of America expands to include these individual times as well.
Maybe the experience of cotemporalizing will allow for a new and open relationship to the work. The flux of the listener cotemporalizes with the flux of the environment as both move through time. Perhaps even the relationship between listener and art-object does not need to be so defined. The various times of the listener might intersect and coordinate with any of the various times operating within the piece. Both entities are multiple to begin with, and by cotemporalizing these durations can maybe traverse the arbitrary border of human skin. I prefer a more organic relationship between the two parties. In fact, my real goal is that there are not two bodies of listener and music, but that they both intertwine and continue to evolve with each other. That the never repeating states of consciousness of the listener are continually stimulated by the never repeating structure of the installation.
Joe Diebes, 2005