An impossible present : the indivisible time of video feedback art

Abstract

An Impossible Present: The Indivisible Time of Video Feedback Art is a practice-based research project that investigates the capacity of artists to impact our understanding of the thing around which much of our conscious experience is structured yet which cannot be grasped: time. It consists of the iterative creation of four artworks along with a written thesis examining historic and contemporary artistic practices, including my own, that employ video feedback. I interrogate artists’ conceptual preoccupations, the processes they use and their aesthetic outcomes using novel applications of philosopher Henri Bergson’s philosophy of consciousness and time to provide new understandings of their work. Bergson argues that conscious existence can be understood as the indivisible continuity of change, which he calls duration, and yet we divide all things as a means of control over the material world, including time. I argue that specific artworks that utilise video feedback provoke a certain way of thinking about, or indeed experiencing time contrary to the usual way that video is used to divide it. I make use of three interpretations of Bergson’s philosophy, media theorist Mark B. N. Hansen’s reformulation of Bergson’s thinking to account for digital video technology, transdisciplinary critical philosopher David Kreps’ alignment of Bergson’s theory of evolution with developments in evolutionary biology, and philosopher Michel Serres’ extension of Bergson’s theory of time as indivisible to an understanding of time as manifold. Each interpretation is brought into relation with one of the artworks I produced as part of this research along with the artworks of others. In the hands of the artists discussed throughout this thesis, the video feedback loop becomes a metaphor for human consciousness and through the shaping of these loops, they create artworks that move toward restoring the quality of indivisibility to the concept, and indeed experience, of time.