Anticipated retrospection: manifesting pastness in moving image, an art practice enquiry

This thesis addresses temporal experience in moving image from the perspective of artists’ film and video and asks: "if material qualities are implicated in memory as pastness, how can this be made apperceptible using art practice?” The study contributes to the understanding of temporal and material experience in contemporary art practice, finding that materiality is entwined with pastness dynamically. In disrupting anticipated temporal and material flow, conflicting temporalities are exposed as present and apperception made possible.

The moving image is a growing part of visual culture and with increasing access to both current and historical material there is a vast reserve to draw from. Early film and its reception, in particular the Rough Sea film, is a pivotal component in this research both as a means to consider how experiences of moving image materiality were shaped but also as reference points for later experimental approaches to making and viewing.

Reflexive spectatorial and archival research is interwoven with critical, theoretical and philosophical review. The active viewer of structural/materialist discourse is recuperated as a basis for a contemporary critical position on materiality and moving image spectatorship. Selected works by artist-filmmakers are analysed as forms of practice research that inform the investigation.

Material qualities such as interval and colour are examined as familiar and habitual aspects of moving image with involvement in senses of past. The limitations of isolating them are addressed through the two works. One, a video work created from appropriated archival film footage of sea questions temporality sequentially within the spatial mnemonics of the cinema. The other, a multi-screen film and video installation, explores temporality in a non- cinematic space through the concurrent and disruptive. Both works show that experience of the material conditions of moving image has significance in memory and are therefore crucial to an examination of pastness.

The original hardcopy of this thesis includes two DVDs with documentation of two moving image artworks made for exhibition, Sea c.1897-2011 and Sea breaking, which constitute part of the research described in the thesis. These may be accessed in person along with the bound copy of the thesis at Falmouth University Library.