LABS

MUTATIONS OF PASTNESS By Jenna Pei-Suin Ng

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Leonardo Abstract Services (LABS) 2008-2009
Mutations of Pastness: Time, Cinema, Ontology

The thesis investigates how recent digital technologies of cinema—digital video, CGI, virtual cinematography and motion capture—reconfigure the nature (and, in turn, temporalities) of the moving image. Its objectives are to rework the ontology of the image, revisit the meaning of time in relation to the image and re-evaluate the significance of cinema for ourselves and our consciousness of time. The thesis revolves around the central premise of the photographic image’s (Peircian) indexicality—the imprint of light on film/celluloid—whereby the referent “adheres” to the photograph through existential, causal and physical connection. It argues that this connection transmits not only reality but also time, specifically pastness. By virtue of this, we may analyse the photographic image as a trace not only of an object but also of time past. Extending this premise of ontology and pastness from still photography to cinema, the thesis investigates how this temporality of pastness mutates in cinema’s digital transformations. Chapter One deals with pastness in the indexicality of the photographic image in relation to its presentness qua moving image, i.e. as cinema unreels before us in our viewing of it. Chapter Two explores how computer code inherent in the technologies of DV, CGI and virtual cinematography revises the nature of the image so as to generate its own form of timelessness. Chapter Three examines the novel manner in which motion capture technologies create cinematic imagery by recording invisible movement rather than visible light, in turn transfiguring time in the image as space and temporal between-ness. Studying cinema as an object of time rather than as an object of reality, the thesis suggests how cinema might exist—in all its transformations, in all its different ways—in distinctive temporalities.
Degree: PhD
Year: 2009
Pages: 343
University: University College London (UCL)
Supervisor: Professor David Forgacs
Email:
Language: English
Dept: Italian/Film Studies
Copyright: Jenna Pei-Suin Ng
Lang_author: English, Mandarin
Url:
Email: ng.jenna@gmail.com
Keywords: digital theory, digital effects, film theory, time, duration, indexicality, ontology, movement, motion capture

LEONARDO ABSTRACTS SERVICE (LABS) is a comprehensive collection of Ph.D., Masters and MFA thesis abstracts on topics in the emerging intersection between art, science and technology.

If you are interested you can submit your abstract to the English LABS, Spanish LABS, Chinese LABS and French LABS international Peer Review Panels for inclusion in their respective databases. The authors of abstracts most highly ranked by the panel will also be invited to submit an article for consideration for publication in the refereed journal Leonardo.

Lanfranco Aceti is known for his social activism and extensive career as artist, curator, and academic. He is a research affiliate and visiting professor at ACT @ Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the Arts Administration Program at Boston University. He is also the Editor in Chief of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac, The MIT Press. He has exhibited numerous personal projects including Car Park, a public performance in the UK at the John Hansard Gallery; Who The People?, an installation artwork acquired in its entirety by the Chetham’s Library and Museum in Manchester; Sowing and Reaping, installation artworks acquired in their entirety by the National Museum of Contemporary Art of Cyprus; and Hope Coming On, a site-specific choral performance he designed for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, with the collaboration of the Boston Children’s Chorus, and realized in front of Turner’s Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On). In 2017, Aceti prepared a series of new artworks for an exhibition entitled Shimmer and curated by Irini Papadimitriou (V&A) at the Tobazi Mansion in Hydra, a new large choral performance titled Accursed for the Thessaloniki Biennial in Greece; and Knock, Knock, Knocking a public space installation in the Mediterranean Garden Pavilion of the New Sea Waterfront of Thessaloniki.