Extract from an Essay by Ann Finegan For ArtLink 2009
As artificial pulse rates have accelerated, timekeeping mechanisms have continued to shrink. Today, the gigahertz, crystal oscillator hearts of tiny computer chips are embedded everywhere. Electronic vibrations subdivide seconds into billions of parts… measure and commodify both human and machine work, and precisely construct the accelerating tempos and rhythms of the digital era – coordinated, where necessary, by a central atomic clock. (William J. Mitchell. Me++ The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, 11)
To our everyday senses we might still inhabit what Deleuze and Guattari called a molar world1 – molar entities being those visible to human sight, and audible to human ears – but the reality is that much of our world is now micromanaged at the molecular order of the atomic clock. Digital artists David Haines, Jon Hunter and Pete Newman have responded to this very particlar imaginary of the atomic clock. Whether we realise it or not we are now living inside a mode of time, in which time itself has vastly expanded, inwardly, into micro divisions which seemingly open up time from the smallest units of its own interior. Attentive to the minute electronic vibrations of smallest particle of matter, the world now beats to an atomic, rather than human, pulse.
David Haines’ video, Atomic , foregrounds this a notion of an atomic time beyond geological and even human time in a work which shifts between these three modes: the atomic, signified by the crazy motions of an atomic clock speeding through centuries with the accuracy of a millesecond; the geological, represented by thrusting mountains under the glitching sparkle of a perpetual snowstorm; and, lastly a ‘scratch’ movie of blacked out ghosts retaining the everyday rhythms of time lived at the human scale.
Atomic is a remix work, sequentially cutting between these modes. The atomic clock’s whirring numbers emerge from the black hole of no ground. This is the time of the cosmos, of particle-vibration and electron dust. It knows no people and its measure is machinic, posthuman, like so many calculations no gross human perception could ever actually measure. This stark image then cuts to the mountains, gloriously in colour (digitally rendered). Their majesty recalls how, down through the centuries, poets have celebrated the endurance of mountains in contra distinction to more empheral timespans of human presences on earth. Last in the mix is a reworked 1940s black and white movie, Black Narcissus, an old Deborah Kerr favourite set in a monstary in the Shangri-la of the Himalayas. Haines has scratched out the sound and every white nun’s habit to a ghosly black shape. The story line, characterisation and dialogue thus erased, these fluttering ghosts exist only to retain a human rhythm inside the delicate architecture of Mogalesque latticework. In other words, a human time maintains its measure inside the to-ings and fro-ings of the blobby black ghosts as they go about their business in shadow of the Himalayas.
One memorable scene is full of birdcages, a temporal indicator of caged spirits and the pulse of natural time. Remember The Sound of Music and Maria running across the mountain tops scattering a flock of soaring birds? Hollywood has given us a collective movie memory within which Black Narcissus equally resonates: mountains, nuns and birds form a train of associations through which to frame the aspirations of a purified human spirit. The restlessness of human time, unable to quite still itself to the contemplative, exhibits itself in the movements of the ghostly forms of Haines’ scratched out frames.
The visuals are, however, but part of the work; a glitching soundtrack from the electronic noisefloor underpins the work’s progression across more than forty centuries of the atomic clock from pre-medieval fourth and fifth centuries to the years of the forty-fifth century. The twentieth century spins by on the atomic counter in a blip from one snowscene to the next. Monastery-time, paradoxically, holds a timeground of ninety minutes of Hollywood filmic duration. Ironically filmtime fixes us experientially in the present. This is the time which we, as humans, relate to, while cosmic, atomic time, and even eternal mountain time, belong to the conceptual order of symbolic represetation we never directly experience. Cosmic time moves too fast; geological time moves too slow.
Notes:
1. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. (Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
2. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 344.
3.Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 345.
4.Kim, Cascone. “The Aesthetics of Failure.”