Deep Time
In his book Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (2006), German scholar Siegfried Zielinski evokes the concept of deep time, which he borrows from the field of geology. This concept offers a new perspective on the evolution of media technologies, contrary to that of a linear progress whereby existing technology is superseded by the next. If we extend the range of time in which we examine the history of media, new technology in one period could in fact be the reappearance of a previous format. By looking back at outdated media and re-examining it archeologically, we might be able to catch a glimpse of the future media to come. Here, the crucial point is to expand the range of time in our scope of research and examination to a duration longer than the expected lifespan of a human being. Another scholar, Jussi Parikka, also addresses the importance of media materiality and specificity in the study of media archaeology. [1]
If deep time is a metaphorical term, in this essay I would like to imagine what it means to edit a time-based artwork with material originating from a time span that is much longer than the usual duration of time it takes to create a work. By taking this creative strategy, in line with the spirit of media archeology, what is invoked?
Tornado
In his solo exhibition La dépense in the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai in 2018, Francis Alÿs showed Tornado, a video work which is presented with a precisely installed sound environment. Within a period of ten years, Alÿs shot and collected video clips of him chasing tornadoes in the southeast Mexican Highlands. He then edited this footage into a 39-minute moving image work. In an immense black box, Tornado was projected onto a large screen. Viewers could view the work sitting or lying down on cushions scattered on the floor. The images on the screen record the numerous instances in which the artist has passed through or entered the tornado, accompanied by the high-quality sound produced by the speakers — the heavy breath of Alÿs running, his fast-paced steps, the whirling sound of the tornado, as well as the near absolute silence in between his chases. On his website, unlike many of Alÿs’ works which are shown in full, Tornado can only be viewed in excerpts. Alÿs has specified that the viewer has to experience the work with its intended, precise soundscape.
This gesture renders Tornado unassessable under the traditional methodology of moving image analysis. The spatial sound environment with its particular effect is a crucial element of the work. As an audio-visual work, we are urged to consider the mantra of media study, “the medium is the message”: what is the message that Tornado wants to deliver?
Materiality
The narrative of Tornado is not complicated. The artist repeatedly attempts to enter the eyes of tornadoes, whose occurrences in the highlands of southeast Mexico are limited to a certain season each year. The captured sequences usually begin with the appearance of a tornado seen through the camera. Then the artist would head towards the tornado. Sometimes the audience can see the artist’s body in the video, other times they can only follow what the artist sees through the lens. Visually the work is slightly plain — the yellow dirt on the highland under a sky of grey-blue tones. Most of the time, the shots depict the artist’s view within the tornado — the swirling yellow and grey dust and dirt. There are a few flashes of video glitching due to the strong wind or the artist dropping the camera to the ground, and the image gets more distorted and grainy.
Tornado was not shown in High Definition resolution, and it is unusual that the excerpts accumulated over ten years do not show any trace of technology upgrades. The materiality of the image, here referring to the video resolution, was made uniform throughout this work. This act of flattening is almost as if to imagine that from the first iPhone to the iPhone 7, for example, the camera’s image quality does not improve. Of course, the development of the hand-held camera, as Alÿs has used here from 2000 to 2010, with the evolution of the mobile phone are not exactly comparable. Nevertheless, seeing the work in the gallery, the audience can hardly notice that it is a work compiled over a decade, on account of the image resolution. The sense of time is compressed by first editing the ten years of video clips into a 39-minute long work, then it is distorted further through making the differences in resolution indistinguishable.
Tornado is not a video work driven by its spectacular visual effect, but by its 5.1 surround sound system and design, creating the perfect auditory environment that Alÿs insists upon. At several moments in the work, when the image is filled by pixels of sandy color, viewers are reminded by the incessant blustering sound that they are indeed in the center of a storm . Similarly, the body of the artist is shown only in a few wide shots. Most of the time, it is the gasps and footsteps over the various channels of sound that acknowledge the artist’s presence. The artist’s body ‘appears’ in the work through its sound (noting that we cannot avoid alluding to the visual even in the concept ‘to appear’). It is through the materiality of the sound that the action of going into the center of the tornado becomes tangible. The drab visuals paired with this multilayered acoustic experience is an alternative strategy that immerses the audience into the audio-visual complex, an embodiment of the artist’s repetitive attempts to enter the eye of the tornado.
Attention Economy
According to media archaeology, the content of a medium can turn into another medium. The Internet, for example, has become a hybrid medium of image, moving image and sound streams. Tornado is not only a cool medium with its time-based, audio-visual structure, [2] but also has a compelling method in delivering its message. It is difficult to imagine any audience would watch all 39 minutes of the work, apart from other artists, curators, critics and administrators who make their living from art. When attention is monetized and has become a scarcity in the late-capitalist world, Alÿs’s gesture of creating a long work seems at odds with the many audio and/or video files competing for attention on the internet. Alÿs is especially requesting his viewers to watch Tornado in its complete version only in the exhibition, as it is the only work in Alÿs’s oeuvre that is not uploaded to the internet in its entirety. That is to say, Tornado does not contest for the audience’s attention with the other videos in the vastness of the internet.
Instead, its intention is not expressed through merely visuals and sound, but through immersion in the audio-visual environment controlled by the artist. Moving image and sound are combined in strategic design, enabling the viewing space to evoke a sensory experience in the audience. [3] In drawing their full attention in the gallery, the audience becomes further consumed by the apparently purposeless repetition of observing, waiting, and entering into the tornado. The materiality of the sound in the space turns the audience into the man with the camera, making the same action over and over again. The flattened temporal scale created by the smoothened resolution also reinforces this repetitious, useless action, and it is in this space of ‘purgatory’ that the seemingly empty process of entering a tornado slowly gains meaning. Maybe it’s similar to the limbo in the action-thriller film Inception. When we can only sense the passing of time through our own aging, then the things we place our attention on and the actions we make, in fact, become time — and this is existence itself.
“Artistic praxis in media worlds is a matter of extravagant expenditure.” [4] Zielinski claimed that in the future, art would consist of numerous failures in the laboratory, which also coincides with the title of Alÿs’s exhibition, La dépense, meaning ‘consumption’ . The fifteen hours of raw video material that was collected over a decade has been edited into a work that makes it seem as if several tornadoes had been captured in one afternoon. Perhaps it is only through such useless repetition that we can find a crack to break through the accelerated linear progress of the status quo.
[1] Jussi Parikka, What is Media Archaeology ?, (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012), 63.
[2] Boris Groys, “Comrades of Time,” e-flux, December 2009, accessed September 20, 2019, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/11/61345/comrades-of-time/. Boris Groys mentions in his conclusion that time-based art shown in exhibition spaces is a cool medium.
[3] Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, The MIT Press, 2001, 282.
[4] Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means, The MIT Press, 2006, 276。
Image Credit: Francis Alÿs, Tornado.
