Nora Duggan
Quad (20-minute video)
Year: 2014
Keywords:
art, Gilles Deleuze, movement, time, video art
Information:
Institution:
Huston School of Film & Digital Media, Galway
(at time of presentation)
DAH (Digital Arts & Humanities) PhD researcher.
My research investigates contemporary images that combine stillness and movement. Such works challenge traditional readings of temporal relations in photographic and cinematic imagery.
I suggest that digital technologies facilitate the coalescence of still and moving imagery in such a way that, while retaining their individual specificities, bring to the surface the complex overlapping temporal relations at play within such imagery. There is potential here for a third image to emerge, an image that suggests multiple temporalities running concurrently. Drawing from my own art practice, the film philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, and a history of image making that engages with simultaneous presentation of stillness and movement, I argue that this third image could further challenge our understanding of the relationship between time and the image.
Publication:
n/a
See also:
n/a
Abstract:
The 20-minute single channel video projection titled Quad (2013) investigates temporal relations between stillness and movement which constantly drive Nora Duggan's art practice. Taking the original Quadrangle building of NUI Galway as her subject, Nora compiled a series of digital photographs and videos over twelve months, recording the movement of light around the building. These images were then reconfigured, manipulated, cut and collaged together in order to construct the video. The images slide from stillness to movement and back again with no discernible separation point between the two states. The imagery cannot be read as entirely 'photographic' or 'cinematic', rather they stand on a precipice between the two. In this way the work attempts to engage with a relationship between past, present and future that can be read as an ever expanding and contracting series of temporal relations. As she reaches the mid-point of her practice-based PhD, Nora looks to Quad for evidence of how her research has progressed to date, but also to inform her future direction. The work questions how our experience of time can be informed and influenced through combined stillness and movement in digital imagery. Here, linear and chronological time are abandoned, and replaced by the possibilities suggested when time is understood as a multitude of simultaneous temporal relations that expand and contract, existing not merely as past, present and future but as future pasts, present futures, and so on...