<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr">Kate: "What fascinates me here is the intersection of multiple temporal vectors: A personal, phenomenological experience of passage, a continuous reassessment of authoritative historical narratives and momentous encounters with seemingly universal timescales that go beyond human experience. Works of art allow us viewers to variously “inhabit” these temporal vectors by focusing experience on a specific set of aesthetic conditions."<br><br>Yes, I'm very interested in the multiple temporalities intertwined within cinematic duration. What does this mean for the relation between the duration of the film and that of the world? In my current book project, "Luminous Flesh, Haunted Futures: The Visible and Invisible World of Chinese Cinemas," I argue that in <i>The Visible and the Invisible,</i> Merleau-Ponty extends his charismatic intertwining of the flesh of the world to the duration of time. In the unfinished work, there's a line "past and present are Ineinander [intertwining], each enveloping enveloped, and that itself is the flesh." Merleau-Ponty gives multiple references to the duration of the past, expressed in terms of light and world, for example, the enigmatic note "Rays of Past/ of world." I extend Merleau-Ponty's question "Where are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world is flesh?" to the perforated limits between the flesh of the world and the cinematic flash of the world. Rather than cinema being a delayed representation of a past moment or a given reality, it can then be read as a virtualisation of time that is not any less real. <br><br>I'm inspired by the scene from Tsai Ming Liang's <i>Goodbye, Dragon Inn </i>(2003) </div><div dir="ltr"><br><div><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHMxMJ6qkOU">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHMxMJ6qkOU</a> (43 second mark here)<br><br>In the scene of the rays and shadows of the cinematic world of King Hu's <i>Dragon Inn </i>(1967)<i> </i> falling on the skin of the Ticket Lady that forms the cinematic world enacted within Fuhe Grand Theater, that is then screened for the audience of <i>Goodbye, Dragon In</i>n, who are themselves embedded within the flesh of the world—what we see then is an amplification of not only philosophy in motion but also the materialisation of a fleshly duration.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr">On Thu, Nov 8, 2018 at 8:56 PM Kate Brettkelly <<a href="mailto:kate.brettkelly@gmail.com">kate.brettkelly@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default"><div class="gmail_default">1.<span style="white-space:pre-wrap"> </span>Maybe there is also such a thing as mountain time that's inhabited and experienced differently by people attracted to mountains for the sublime/universal time or as in Chiang's film, for the duration of survival</div><div class="gmail_default">2.<span style="white-space:pre-wrap"> </span>In this case, duration itself might be running still and flowing deep but not in the sense of 'movement' or 'perspectival depth.' </div><div class="gmail_default"><br></div><div class="gmail_default">With respect to Liz’s contributions, I’m so pleased this conversation has touched on the work of Hou Hsiao Hsien - a filmmaker whose lengthy, durational scenes has inspired my own research.</div><div class="gmail_default"><br></div><div class="gmail_default">What fascinates me here is the intersection of multiple temporal vectors: A personal, phenomenological experience of passage, a continuous reassessment of authoritative historical narratives and momentous encounters with seemingly universal timescales that go beyond human experience. Works of art allow us viewers to variously “inhabit” these temporal vectors by focusing experience on a specific set of aesthetic conditions. </div><div class="gmail_default"><br></div><div class="gmail_default">The NZ-based art collective Local Time have achieve this by focusing aesthetic experience on the act of drinking water. They serve exhibition visitors glasses of fresh spring water drawn from the Horotiu stream – a significant historical resource for indigenous Maori peoples of Auckland – that has been paved over and now runs beneath the roads of Auckland’s central business district. Local Time approach this as a gesture of hospitality, but I’m wondering if visual arts such as this offer a special means of implicating viewers/experiencers in durational passages that are ‘unknown’ to them. Is there such thing as subversive experience of duration? How might this relate to the survival of subjugated histories and natural phenomena that have been “paved over” by dominant ideologies? So many thoughts!</div><div style="font-size:small"> </div><div style="font-size:small">- Kate</div></div></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr">On Thu, 8 Nov 2018 at 15:00, Timothy Conway Murray <<a href="mailto:tcm1@cornell.edu" target="_blank">tcm1@cornell.edu</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<br>
Elizabeth Wijaya wrote "On Kate's point on deep time and the danger of obscuring/forgetting<br>
historical subjugation and social inequality, maybe there is also such a<br>
thing as mountain time that's inhabited and experienced differently by<br>
people attracted to mountains for the sublime/universal time or as in<br>
Chiang's film, for the duration of survival."<br>
<br>
Something I've been discussing with artists and students over the past couple of months are the traversals and transversals of duration as cross-inhabited by differing populations and by differing epistemologies. While nature frequently has been figured vis à vis the "sublime" or the "universal," its understanding remains contingent on the populations inhabiting it. Just as "understanding" itself carries the footprint of historically fraught philosophical traditions. For Liz's cinematic characters, habitation runs contrary to the inhibitions of constrained passage and labor. Flight itself is both liberatory and terroristic depending on whether the look goes backward or forward. But in this case, the artistic engine still might remain to be tied to "projection" in relation to "distance" or "distancing." I'm wondering whether this isn't a peculiarly cinematic condition, one that signals the historical discussion of the gaze in all of its complexities. Might Chiang's cinematography and still off something different? <br>
<br>
Along the lines of plastic arts, I'm also wondering whether the counter-to-deep time of indigenous art might not signal something different both in apparatus and epistemology? In this case, duration itself might be running still and flowing deep but not in the sense of 'movement' or 'perspectival depth.' Just a thought provoked by Kate and Liz's posts.<br>
<br>
Tim<br>
<br>
Timothy Murray<br>
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, CCA Biennial<br>
<a href="http://cca.cornell.edu" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://cca.cornell.edu</a><br>
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art <br>
<a href="http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu</a> <<a href="http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/</a>><br>
Professor of Comparative Literature and English<br>
<br>
B-1 West Sibley Hall<br>
Cornell University<br>
Ithaca, New York 14853<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
On 11/7/18, 1:16 PM, "<a href="mailto:empyre-bounces@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au" target="_blank">empyre-bounces@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au</a> on behalf of Elizabeth Wijaya" <<a href="mailto:empyre-bounces@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au" target="_blank">empyre-bounces@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au</a> on behalf of <a href="mailto:ew388@cornell.edu" target="_blank">ew388@cornell.edu</a>> wrote:<br>
<br>
----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<br>
<br>
_______________________________________________<br>
empyre forum<br>
<a href="mailto:empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au" target="_blank">empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au</a><br>
<a href="http://empyre.library.cornell.edu" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://empyre.library.cornell.edu</a></blockquote></div>
_______________________________________________<br>
empyre forum<br>
<a href="mailto:empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au" target="_blank">empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au</a><br>
<a href="http://empyre.library.cornell.edu" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://empyre.library.cornell.edu</a></blockquote></div>