On cities, mapping, psychogeography and the experience of places.

‘Holding Time’ is a survey of still, object-based works derived out of ‘Time-based’ practices by artists. An opportunity to dialogue, debate and share how artists extend their practice from Performance, Moving Image and Time-based concerns into recording, documenting, interventions and object-making. The exhibition has been curated by Darshana Vora from an open call.

Participating Artists:
Arantxa Echarte, Beatrice Jarvis, Bettina John, Bill Leslie, Cinzia Cremona, Cos Ahmet, Daniel Somerville, Darshana Vora, David Theobald, Elaina Arkeooll &Tim Flitcroft, Ella Golt, Helena Eflerová, Herve Constant, Laura Davidson, Mat Chivers, Nicola Mccartney, Peter Nutley, Rachel Gomme, Sam Holden, Sebastian Edge, Daniel Belasco Rogers & Sophia New, Teresa Paiva, Tory Smith, Wiracha Daochai and Yaron Lapid.

Opening Preview: Thursday,  April 8, 2010. 6pm-8pm
Exhibition Dates: April 8-14, 11am-7pm.
Special Events: Sat & Sun, April 10 & 11, 3pm-5pm: Performances and artist’s talks

Online catalogue

Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, UK Centre
4a Castletown Road
London W14 9HE
United Kingdom

Tel: +44 207 381 3086/4608

http://www.bhavan.net

Birmingham timelapse from 7inch cinema on Vimeo.

Amateur photographer Derek Fairbrother has assembled photographs taken from the same spot in Birmingham’s Chamberlain square between 1963 and 1986, and compiled them into this intriguing timelapse sequence. The timelapses are displayed in an exhibition called Birmingham Seen which opens at BM&AG this weekend; other sequences include the Post Office tower and the Rotunda.

Implicitly, we think about the years of our lives in a linear fashion, e.g. in terms of decades: our twenties, thirties, etc. In this linear view, all our years are equal and time moves at a uniform pace.
This simple picture, however, doesn’t quite fit with our perceptions as we age: Where are the long, leisurely summers we knew as children? If it seemed forever to get through the fifth grade, what happened to last year?

The ‘logtime’ hypothesis is that we use our age to estimate the passage of time, resulting in a perceived shrinking of our years as we grow older, and giving a subjective scale of life very different from that of the calendar: In this view, the older we become, the faster we seem to age or, conversely, the shorter the years seem to be. Mathematically, this relationship is said to be either logarithmic or exponential, depending on which variable is used as the reference.

Starting with the premise that the human mind judges the length of a long period of time by comparing it with current age, the logarithmic nature subjective human temporal experiences can be easily rationalized: Hence a year adds 10% to the life of a ten-year-old, but only 5% to that of a twenty-year-old. For the twenty-year-old, two years are required to add 10%.
A consequence of the logarithmic function is that it is the ratio of the years defining an interval of time that we use to judge the duration of that interval, not the absolute magnitudes of those years. For example, the years from ages 10 to 20 seem to pass at the same rate as the years from 20 to 40, or 40 to 80 – they are all of equal subjective duration.

A logarithmic scale: stretched out at the low end and compressed at the high end.

However, the changing nature of our lives when we are young tends to obscure the shrinking years: the twenty-year-old rarely thinks about how life was at age 10; life at 20 is filled with different activities and concerns, and it is the future that dominates reverie.
It is only after life becomes more settled and routine that we become more retrospective, and only then do we have an easier basis for comparing the years.
This sense of elapsed time, narrowly dependent on memory, is also heavily reliant on psychological factors: Intervals of time may be judged differently in retrospect than while being experienced; they may seem longer if you feel you have accomplished much or had a memorable experience.
In great part at least, the foreshortening of the years as we grow older is due to the monotony of memory’s content and the consequent simplification of the backward-glancing view. In youth, new experiences are pretty common and regular, apprehension is vivid, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous, and long-drawn-out. But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse.

William James (1890): The Principles of Psychology. New York: Henry Holt.

Link to the original article on Logtime by James Main Kenney

The retrospective of arguably the best-known contemporary British artist/walker concludes this weekend at the Tate Britain. Richard Long’s practice has consistently placed primitive mark-making at the centre of the work, exploring relationships between time, distance, geography and measurement in the simplest way: by instigating walking as a means of marking, sensing and measuring the vastness and eternity of the world. Long explains with disarming simplicity:

“my work really is just about being a human being living on this planet and using nature at its source. [...] It’s about the intellectual pleasure of original ideas and the physical pleasure of realising them. I enjoy the simple pleasures of wellbeing, independence, eating, dreaming, and sometimes leaving (memorable) traces.”

Long instituted walking as an act of mark-making on possibly the vastest scale possible, freeing sculpture from the constraints of exhibition: the only remains of the artist’s peregrinations in the land are those pictures and diagrams, strangely similar to strategy maps: photographs of deserted landscapes or plans printed with geometrical figures showing the whereabouts of the artist/walker. His trajectory and purpose are often driven by natural forces: gravity, wind, water flow, magnetism, geology – or by his interest in transference (physics) – the idea of a certain equivalence of places and events on different sides of the world.

Using his foot as instrument for art, expressive and perceptive, the footprint as a testimony of his journey and presence in time and space, Long’s walks become an act of inscription; a reminder that the verb “to write” originates from the practice of incising, as in the inscription of running letters in stone or the furrowing of a track.

Richard Long – Heaven And Earth at Tate Britain until 6th September 2009.

In his classic book Memory, first published in 1957 by Penguin Books, Ian M. L. Hunter made some interesting attempts at characterising the processes at work in memory and remembering. He defined and analysed them in those terms:

recalling: reproducing in the present some event from the past. While a person is recalling, they are essentially engaged in selectively constructing the salient characteristics of the original event. This highlights the constructive and selective nature of learning as an active process of registration, in which coordinating relationships are elaborated between old and new. These relationships play a role in subsequent recall.

recognizing: identifying some present event as being familiar from the past.

We sometimes become aware of our attempts at characterising and constructing a framework for remembering past events, using devices like associations of sounds, rhythm, or the context of encounter. By constructing a historical context for the event, we can also localise it in our personal past.

Recollecting constitutes a particularly rich form of recalling, when the warm intimacy of past personal experience is suddenly brought to the surface of the present – see Proust’s madeleine and the idea of involontary memory.

Imaging: experiencing sensory qualities in the absence of appropriate sensory stimulation. Much of our remembering takes the form of imaging, i.e. re-living past complex experiences in vivid sensory terms. We recall the past by reconstructing its sensory characteristics, thus giving us the illusion of going back in time.

The cumulative effects of past experience

The Bartlett experiments¹ have highlighted the gradual and ongoing process of filtering / transformation / degradation occuring with memorised events. The retained effects of past experience form an organised system, progressively elaborated into inter-related systems and sub-systems, where events are selected / re-ordered according to their mutual relevance, which in turn informs the way present circumstances are perceived. A person’s memory is a permanently self-modifying system, their cumulative past constantly enriched and updated by the present.

¹ Frederic Bartlett was a british psychologist famous for his experiments related to the formation of memory. He conducted a series of studies where subjects were told a story, then asked to recall it after various intervals of time.

La fenêtre du train comme appareil de vision en mouvement

Chemin de fer et photographie sont deux inventions pratiquement iso-chroniques, qui semblent intrinsèquement liées : Le train, véritable machine à voir le spectacle du monde en mouvement, pourrait s’inscrire dans la lignée des dispositifs optiques qui se sont succès jusqu’à la naissance du cinéma. Il est pour ainsi dire un instrument de vision plutôt que de locomotion¹ ; La fenêtre du train encadre et délimite le champ de vision ; Le déplacement rapide entraîne une nouvelle appréhension de la profondeur de champ, où la vitesse crée un étagement hiérarchisé du paysage. L’obstruction possible du paysage donne lieu a une vision fragmentaire, instantanée.

Le compartiment du wagon et la chambre noire ont la même capacité à isoler l’observateur dans un espace de vision cloisonné² où seule la vue est sollicitée. Le voyageur agit comme le photographe : le regard vif et encadré, il attend que « les plus riches scènes du paysage viennent se photographier sur la vitre du wagon » (Benjamin Gastineau)³.

Les modifications de perspective, la mobilité glissante du point de vue annoncent la vision dynamique d’un travelling et l’essence cinématique du voyage. Les premiers films étaient d’ailleurs souvent caractérisés par de longues prises de vues ininterrompues de l’espace, réalisées depuis des véhicules en mouvement.⁴
Dès 1898, le catalogue des frères Lumière comportaient ainsi une trentaine de films tournés depuis des véhicules en mouvement, donnant naissance au panoramique, ou travelling, techniques devenues aujourd’hui tellement communes qu’elles en sont invisible.

Le paysage vu par la fenêtre du train, ainsi soumis au temps et au mouvement, est transformé : L’oeil reconstruit le rapport fuyant entre choses fixes dans une perspective anamorphosée. La notion de perspective unique a été profondément modifiée par l’irruption du chemin de fer et la mobilité du point de vue.⁵

Premiers voyages, premières peurs

Tout comme les premières projections de films (Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat), les premiers voyages en train laissèrent une forte impression sur l’imaginaire populaire: des peurs irrationnelles causées par le passage dans les tunnels à la transition soudaine de l’obscurité à la lumière – Les guides touristiques de l’époque recommandaient aux voyageurs de « fermer les yeux aussitôt qu’ils commencent à voir de la lumière, et de ne les ouvrir que très progressivement après en être ressorti. »⁶

Le déplacement mécanisé permet de se déplacer à des vitesses jusqu’alors inégalées, à laquelle la vue a du mal à s’accommoder : « Tous les objets disparaissent avant qu’on ait pu les fixer ». En premier lieu, si l’on était pas déjà mort dans l’explosion d’une locomotive ou écrasé par un wagon, on craignait que regarder le paysage défiler à de telles vitesses pouvait endommager la vue. Ces premières inquiétudes dissipées,
on se mit à apprécier le paysage qui, en défilant, se résume a des larges bandes colorées. On pensait alors qu’en allant encore plus vite, on obtiendrait du blanc selon le principe du disque de Newton⁷.

La mémoire du voyage comme expérience cinématique

Par son rythme, le chemin de fer en appelle constamment à la mémoire des espaces parcourus. Il produit une superposition, une stratification des paysages entrevus. Chaque trajet multiplie les perspectives, re-dessine le paysage, à la fois original et procèdant des précédents. Le voyage, comme le cinématographe, lie irrémédiablement l’espace et le temps dans un continuum.

” D’innombrables images séparées, saisies pendant des heures de contemplation, se sont fondues et rejointes dans mon esprit pour former, dans ma mémoire, comme une seule unité. “

Aldous Huxley, Le monde en passant. Journal de voyage [1926], Paris, Vernal-Ph.

Voici ce qu’il reste a posteriori d’un voyage en train : des bribes de paysage, des impression fugitives qui viennent s’enfiler a la suite la unes des autres en une synthèse qui combine les fragments d’autres trajets précèdents. Séquence panoramique : juxtaposition côte à côte d’images prises a des instants différents, plus a même d’exprimer le mouvement, en adéquation avec la nature du déplacement en train.

Cette représentation emblèmatique et schématique du voyage ressemblerait au panorama de la gare de Lyon, qui juxtapose de façon continue les villes les plus significatives du parcours du PLM, chacune représentée par leur monument. Ces points de vue qui sont normalement échelonnés dans l’espace et le temps y sont condensés, annonçant comme la synthsèe d’un voyage qui n’a pas encore été effectué.

La recomposition de l’espace du voyage

Le chemin de fer agit sur le temps et le paysage en les condensant. Ce que recherchait les peintures de panoramas, décomposant le paysage en fragments significatifs pour le recomposer en un tout cohérent.
Les moving panoramas étaient d’ailleurs tout simplement sensés simuler l’expérience d’un voyage en train, au moyen d’une longue toile peinte qui défilait latéralement entre deux rouleaux de part et d’autre de la scène⁸. Les spectateurs étaient parfois repartis dans des wagons factices. Le dernier grand panorama (le Transsibérien, qui présentait sur un décor défilant a quatre profondeurs défilant plus ou moins rapidement selon leur degré d’éloignement les étapes de Moscou à Pékin) fut installé pour l’exposition universelle de 1900, victime du succès du cinématographe.

¹ Clément Chéroux, ” Vues du train “, études photographiques, 1 | Novembre 1996, [En ligne], mis en ligne le 18 novembre 2002. URL : http://etudesphotographiques.revues.org/index101.html. Consulté le 26 décembre 2008.

² à ce sujet, voir le texte Naval et Carcéral, de Michel de Certeau

³ La vie en chemin de fer, Paris, Dentu, 1861, p.35.

⁴ Why Did Early Films Move? Discussion au British Film Institute, Samedi 1er Décembre 2007.

⁵ René Thom, ” Par les fenêtres du train : la notion de référentiel appliquée a l’art de voyager par le train “, François Beguin, ” Paysages vus du train : littérature et géographie “, Revue d’histoire des chemins de fer, n 10-11, printemps-automne 1994, p.19-33 et p.34-38.

⁶ Christian Barman, Early British Railways, Penguin Books, 1950.

⁷ Voir Claude Pichois, Vitesse et vision du monde, Neuchâtel, La Baconniere, 1973, p. 56

⁸ Bernard Comment, Le Moving Panorama, Le XIXe siecle des panoramas, Paris, Adam Biro, 1993, p.34-37.

The Monument Project (Si Monumentum Requiris Circumspice), a new digital video installation by Chris Meigh-Andrews commissioned by Julian Harrap Architects on behalf of the City of London Corporation opens on the 21th of March at the Nunnery gallery, Bow.

The installation, which produces a continuous stream of ambient responsive panoramic images from the top of the Monument in the City of London, 24 hours a day, 7 days per week for 3 years, can be accessed at http://www.themonumentview.net/

The launch event will take place at The Nunnery Gallery, Bow Arts Trust, 183 Bow Road, London E3 2SJ, from 6:00 PM to 8:30 PM, Friday, March 20^th, 2009.

http://turbulence.org/works/garden

[meme.garden] is an Internet service that blends software art and search tool to visualize participants’ interests in prevalent streams of information, encouraging browsing and interaction between users in real time, through time. Utilizing the WordNet lexical reference system from Princeton University, [meme.garden] introduces concepts of temporality, space, and empathy into a network-oriented search tool. Participants search for words which expand contextually through the use of a lexical database. English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organized into floating synonym “seeds,” each representing one underlying lexical concept. When participants “plant” their interests, each becomes a tree that “grows” over time. Each organism’s leaves are linked to related streaming RSS feeds, and by interacting with their own and other participants’ trees, participants create a contextual timescape in which interests can be seen growing and changing within an environment that endures.

The [meme.garden] software was created by an eclectic team of artists and scientists: Mary Flanagan, Daniel Howe, Chris Egert, Junming Mei, and Kay Chang.

[meme.garden] is a 2005 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional support from the PSC-CUNY research fund.