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Travelling Eye: the Elusive Digital Frame and the Elasticity of Time in Art

This article considers the author’s own video installations, 'Hold' (2006), 'An Occulting Light' (2007) and 'Lighter Darker' (2008), which were constructed as research into questions of temporality and affect, in the light of Victor Burgin’s idea of the ‘remembered film’, Benjamin’s ‘unconscious optics’ and Deleuze’s work on painting and cinema.

The video pieces which provide the focus of the article were made in a practice-led research context where writing is used to document, reflect and expand on working processes in painting and film and on spectator encounters and to draw inferences from practice about the potential connectivity between 'affect' and temporality. These works use of altered time bases, frame rates and exposures in order to explore the subjective perception of temporality as a key factor in the emotional 'affect' of art. The pieces here use re-filming techniques and experimental editing to explore ‘affect’ in the spaces between digital video frames where the image exceeds the original frame boundaries, oscillating between visible traces of time passing inscribed in the sequences of each work. This article documents and analyses these works within a framework provided by philosophical and psychoanalytic inflected art theory which engages with questions of temporality, perception, affect and film.

The article was written in the context of a body of practice-led research in art, seeking to contribute to our understanding of the perception of time and affect in art, exploring questions of emotional affect and subjective perceptual experiences of temporality in the encounter with both moving image works and painting, taking account of embodied spectatorship and reflecting on the nature of such unsettling encounters with art in the light of established theoretical discourses.