Unfolding time : a projective model for the moving image

Abstract

Humanity's desire to record events happening in time has spawned a lineage of moving-image transcription systems, from early cinematographs to contemporary digital camcorder equipment. These technologies have arisen, however, amongst a setting of concentrated discourse surrounding the nature of what it means to exist as a durational being, also happening in time. This thesis will argue that the depiction of events as captured by these technologies is constricting, limited to conveying a strict sequencing of moments through a narrow spatial window, and so wholly inadequate to reflect a nuanced dialogue. I propose a new visual model, one that can assist in conceptualizing the complexity of concurrent remembering, perceiving, and anticipating. Through a combination of my research into existing discourses and the creation of new models of reading the moving image, I have come to the fold (with deep indebtedness to the thinkers and writers who have proffered this model) as an aesthetic structure capable of visualizing, or diagramming, some of the afore-mentioned strata of complexity resistant to the hegemony of linear temporality. To model the fold, I centrally engage the act of reading the moving image, as a definitive temporal act. I redirect the movement and orientation of the eye as it spans the moving image, to make way for new methods of reading, thinking, and being. Digital manipulation and merging of moving video images comprises the material for these models. Finally, this thesis will examine popular practices of how durational events are recorded, stored, shared in the digital environment, and subsequent implications for the writing of historical narrative, where vast and dispersed authorship can contribute to the emergence of conversant modes of being: potential for redemption in the chaotic.