there, then...
2020
Endless (loop) multi-channel installation.
Jameson unravels a schizophrenia largely described by Lacan which, at its core, is an inability to—fully or partially—enter the realm of speech and language. Hence, the schizophrenic can never sense the passage of time, since linguistic past, present, and future are that which grant us an awareness of the experience of temporality. In that sense, the schizophrenic is also deprived of any movement, since every space is eternally the present space without the notion of any other.
Thereby, in that lack of a notion of time and space, the schizophrenic has no sense of self or personal identity. The absence of a continual collation of spatial experience and being-through-time to fall back on, leaves nothing but an incoherent and disjointed perpetual present . A present which is impossible to recollect an experience of. The schizophrenic is then always still and sterile, deprived of the concept of difference. Therefore, material never becomes object, space never becomes place or home, existence is never experience for the schizophrenic.1
there, then… is an attempt to put my feelings of displacement at ease by shifting my focus away from imaginary land limits and towards the most immediate of things: the current instant.
The work is rooted in an immediate phenomenological application of Derrida’s (non-)concept of différance. It proposes the present instant-in-space as arbitrary and comparatively differential in its continuous plenitude: one knows, through comparison, that the immediate now is not then, and the current here is not there. Hence, a past instant-in-space is always carried into the present one, and will, in time, be carried into a future one, as a comparative trace (or anti-trace). Conscious experience then requires gaps or space in-between instants in order to differ from the current instant—something which Derrida calls the ‘becoming time/space of time’.
there, then... proposes that this ‘becoming time/space of time’— theconscious recollection and distinction of instants-in-space via their différance—is the process by which the creation and re-affirmation of the self take place. And in turn, invites contemplation of one’s constantly present existence in time and space as the single unit of meaning in one’s self-perception. To do so, the work presents a series of still frames, ‘instants’, to be recollected under this basis. Hypnotising imagery that oscillates between moving image and time exposure stills as they illuminate one’s gaze, synthesizing the feeling of an extended present moment or event.
1. The bulk of this understanding of Lacan’s schizophrenia can be found in pages 116-119 of: Jameson, F. (1985). Postmodernism and Consumer Society. In Foster, H. (Ed.) Postmodern Culture (pp. 111-125). Pluto Press