“I suggest that our belief in time and a past arises
solely because our entire experience comes to us through the medium of static
arrangements of matter, in Nows, that create the appearance of time and
change…
My basic idea is that time as such does not exist. There is no invisible
river of time. But there are things that you could call instants of time,
or 'Nows'. As we live, we seem to move through a succession of Nows, and
the question is, what are they? They are arrangements of everything in the
universe relative to each other in any moment, for example, now…
We have the strong impression that you and I are sitting opposite each other,
that there's a bunch of flowers on the table, that there's a chair there
and things like that — they are there in definite positions relative
to each other. I aim to abstract away everything we cannot see (directly
or indirectly) and simply keep this idea of many different things coexisting
at once in a definite mutual relationship. The interconnected totality becomes
my basic thing, a Now. There are many such Nows, all different from each
other. That's my ontology of the universe — there are Nows, nothing
more, nothing less.”
--Julian Barbour
My work as an artist is first and foremost a process. I begin with the
urge to mold some vague hint of an idea into a tangible form. Almost compulsively,
everything in my perception becomes understood in relation to this snippet
of thought. Eventually the doodles and snapshots that fill my notebooks
begin to take a single form around the developing idea, and these evolve
into a composition. In the fall of 2001 I came across an article about
the British physicist, Julian Barbour. His claim, as a physicist, that
time is illusory, and that this idea should make logical sense simultaneously
excited and bewildered me. But more importantly, it stuck in my head.
My current hypothesis: that time, memory, and narrative are analogous
concepts in that each is derived from discrete components which are static
and meaningless outside their relationships relative to each other. Just
as time can only be understood as a sequence of events, memory is created
through the assembly of sensory fragments, and narrative through the juxtaposition
of visual ideas. Any single moment of time, fragment of memory, or object
of a narrative, is, by itself, devoid of content and context. It is only
through the juxtaposition of these fragments that a meaningful idea is
derived.
Corollary to this hypothesis is the idea that each of these concepts,
by virtue of their parallel natures, can be used to imply the others.
So narrative depends on a conception of time, which requires the construction
of memories, etc.
Implicit in the nature of photographic imagery (aka: photography, film,
and video art) are the concepts of time, authenticity, and materiality.
In my current work, I use the interaction between these issues to explore
the above hypothesis. Through the process of constructing photographic
composites and video projections, and later the visual reconstruction
of narratives by the viewer, I hope to explore different modes of understanding
these three inter-related ideas.
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