Eleanor Dare Nice New Blog: April 2011

According to Kierkegaard 'Time does not really exist without unrest' ; it does not exist for those who are 'absolutely without anxiety.' And yet I have personally experienced acute anxieties that have briefly negated or suspended time. In my mid 40's as I recovered from these anxieties I began to construct a time machine.

The events leading up to that construction began with an investigation into my childhood amnesia, this involved the creation of two artist's books and image manipulation software that used EEG readings from my brain to disintegrate an image of my grandmother.

Almost inevitably my investigation into amnesia spiralled into an exploration of time. Or rather the interdependencies of time and anxiety, which I am attempting to articulate in the absence of specific representations, caused by amnesia or specifically episodic memory loss.

But how, in a computational context can the non-symbolic be articulated – how in language, whether programming language or what computer scientists laughably call 'natural language'? Are time and memory only symbols? Or are they 'real'? Materials, objects, events, phenomena, biology?

Is there a physical material through which time and memory can be articulated? The thesis of this paper is that our bodies are that very material, that we have access to a performative, sub-symbolic articulation of these experiences. On some levels this is a proposition which even quite orthodox scientists can accommodate. Sean Carroll writes:

'As human beings we feel the passage of time. That’s because there are periodic processes occurring within our own metabolism—breaths, heartbeats, electrical pulses, digestion, rhythms of the central nervous system. We are a complicated, interconnected collection of clocks. Our internal rhythms are not as reliable as a pendulum or a quartz crystal; they can be affected by external conditions or our emotional states, leading to the impression that time is passing more quickly or more slowly. But the truly reliable clocks ticking away inside our bodies—vibrating molecules, individual chemical reactions—aren’t moving any faster or slower than usual.' (Sean carroll , 2010:34)

But the time machine I have recklessly concocted from wikipedia articles and electronic recipes of unknown provenance is not concerned with investigating the past so much as

understanding the distributions and qualities of the present. The machine is made from a hacked EEG headset and a Galvanic Skin Response toy called the 'Shocking Liar', it is also made from populist accounts of trauma and memory loss and is fuelled by sweat and anxiety. In this sense it has a visceral absence of glamour reminiscent of Chris Marker's time travelling mechanisms as featured in his film La Jetée, (1964), sometimes the machine hurts my head, and leaves a puncture wound like a bullet hole, or it makes me want to lie down and vomit or run away, at other times it makes me laugh quite hysterically.

Like Chris Marker's my own temporal investigations have tended to revolve around single memories and single images, in this case both an image of my grandmother and the memory of a multiple car crash I witnessed one night in the late 1990s.

This crash induced a state which J.G Ballard described (1996) as 'a subtle dislocation of ones normal processes of recognition and action during situations of extreme danger or hazard, like the suspended time of Warhol's Death and Disaster series' (Ballard, 1996:162) .

An attempt it would seem 'to 'hold' events in the camera of one's mind, in order to grasp the totality of the situation' (Ballard: 199:162).

I was with several friends who all reported afterwards, after we witnessed the accident, that, like me, their view of the events had unfolded in slow motion. That we had experienced a collective time-delay. As we witnessed one car somersaulting over another it felt as if we could have made phones calls, drank coffees or chatted about the weather before it finally landed and smashed into the other cars. An experience that illustrates the strangeness of both memory and time, and as I shall argue, the fact that they are both entangled with our collective biochemistry, implying a complex intersubjectivity of time and memory, that, in its embodied form, is, as Lisa Blackman states, a threat to canonical notions of epistemic veracity and subjective singularity:

'This felt body is one that is never singular and never bounded so that we clearly know where we end and another begins. This is a feeling body that presents a challenge to the kind of Cartesian dualism that produces the body as mere physical substance. The affective body is considered permeable to the ‘outside’ so that the very distinction between the inside and the outside as fixed and absolute is put into question.' (Blackman , :10)

The body in this configuration, within the circuits of my own machine, is not an inert mass in the service of a superior mind, to the essentialism of much bodily discourse, the (to quote Blackman) 'aspect of the body that Foucault disregarded or did not give thought to: what I term ‘the somatically felt body’. The somatically felt body has aliveness or vitality that is literally felt or sensed but cannot necessarily be articulated, reduced to physiological processes or to the effect of social structures. '(Blackman, :30).

It is this felt body that has become the medium for my investigations. The felt body and felt software. Code that is permeable to the outside, that flows through me as I flow back through it.

But although the EEG headset goes around my face this is not the face as an interface (as Blackman writes), but the frequencies that emanate from it and from my body, my hands, my epidermis, my sweat. Sweat conducts anxiety, the memory of disaster. I've long realised that large parts of my own anxiety may belong to others, biochemically. that they are rooted elsewhere, for example, in the second world war, when my mother's infant ovaries (where in some sense I was housed between 1935 and 1965) were flooded by stress hormones as the Luftwaffe did battle over her childhood home. She still cannot fly (at least without tranquillisers) because she saw men on fire falling from aeroplanes. I share this anxiety but recklessly override it – or rather I ride through it and out the other side, like a white-water rafter – I let it exhilarate me so I can ride her bio-chemical flood.

But I'm jumping ahead in time, as Borges observed in order to refute time once more it is necessary to commit a contradicto inadjecto, a contradiction in terms¹, Like Borge's New Refutation of Time. So I will contradict my own hypothesis and first go back in time to my earlier work with amnesia.

Before the age of nine my childhood memories are largely without detail. By and large those years may therefore be described (at least by convention) as ‘lost’. As a visual artist and artist-programmer the notion of such an aporia or cognitive deficit is particularly problematic. In the absence of representation what, if anything, can be retrieved, and what exactly can be communicated to others? In a wider philosophical sense such questions of representation and stable meaning have a high degree of cultural urgency. Marita Sturken (1999) urges us to examine the ‘cultural encoding of forgetting as a loss or negation of experience’ (1999: 252). Her question ‘what is an experience that is not remembered?’ (234) is one of the fundamental riddles of my own childhood. Sturken asks us to question the presumption that unmemorised experiences should be framed as a ‘loss of self’, and a ‘loss of subjectivity’ (243). These are critical questions in the context of my own research into amnesia.

Lost Memories and embodied traces attempted to establish a theoretical framework for embodied autobiography, communicating auto-biographical content via sensory technologies. I should emphasise that although my own memories (and one particular family photograph) are the focus for this work, it us not a discourse on individualism, exorcism or ahistoricsm.

My work with biosensors aims to explore a more process based conception of memory, and to test the distributions of agencies that relate to the way we remember what we call the ‘past’ through what we call the ‘present’ through the body. I propose that the body is always entangled with the past, and is in fact in both places at once – the past and the present. The Marriage of Eliza Dagworthy, 1915 has become the focus for my work with biosensors and image manipulation techniques. But of course an image is not a memory or a fixed reality and to treat is as such is to enter perilous theoretical territory.

Through this photograph I investigate the ontological integrity of both memory and photographic images, enabling me to test their distributions within both cultural and non-cultural dimensions. The image is particularly significant in light of Marianne Hirsch’s (1997) concept of post-memory, or ‘the experience of those who grew up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth’ (Hirsch, 1997:23). My paternal grandparents, and to a slightly lesser extent, my own parent’s lives were temporally and experientially anchored to the second world war, events were defined as having taken place before, during or after it. The war was their compass point, indeed, I think of my own birth date as ’20 years after the end of the war’, something my grandparents must have instilled in me by example.

The Wedding of Eliza Dagworthy 1915, was taken one year into another defining war, and arguably represents the entangled nature of the personal and the historical, family history and national history. Within my practice this photograph also relates to the performativity and dynamism of documenting events and to the embodied nature of both photography and memory. Peter Fritzsche writes that the:

capacity to picture oneself recapitulates the method of historicism in which the specificity of the case is associated with the strictures of periodicity. In other words, the remembering self should be regarded as a historical rather than a transcendental subject, if it is an entity formed by the practices of social life and does not stand ready-made on its outskirts’ (Fritzsche, 2001).

The Wedding of Eliza Dagworthy apparently presents a hackneyed trope of yokels in their best clothes standing outside their family farm in South Devon, it is superficially reminiscent of Lark Rise to Candleford (1945) or Cider with Rosie (1959). A quick troll through the world-wide-web will reveal many such images of wedding groups standing stiffly outside English farms. However on close examination only one or two members of the Dagworthy wedding party can bring themselves to present full smiles. Perhaps the subjects are bored or aching, having stayed in the same stiff postures for several minutes? Everyone has long sleeves and the flowers are restricted to white roses or carnations, an indication that it is early spring and that there is an uncomfortable chill in the air? Or perhaps there is a deeper reason for their half smiles. The clothes are not fashionable, the ugly outsized hats are from an earlier era and the women’s dresses are also unfashionably long, indicative of both the economic situation of the family and the fact that the war has been going on now for a year.

We can see then that the counter-narrative of this image is rapidly emerging, and is quite separate from the ostensible theme of a happy rural marriage. As Roland Barthes writes, it presents ‘an altogether different ‘script’ from the one of shots, sequences and syntagms’ (Barthes, 1988:57). But the punctum of this image (that which both wounds me and connects me to it, as opposed to the studium or intellectual content) is not the economic restraint of the situation or the stereotypically unfashionable dress of rural families. It is historical and personal, the knowledge that many of the young men in the villages of Woodbury and Woodbury Salterton are away at war. Those with the Devonshire regiment are stationed in India, Egypt, Iraq and Italy, undoubtedly their first trips abroad. Perhaps even their first time out of the county of Devon. An additional punctum or piercing element in this image is also represented by the absence of my great grandfather who died one year earlier at the age of 38, and by the forlorn presence of my own three year old grandmother, Amelia Dagworthy, who will one day have to look after myself and my siblings after we are suddenly abandoned by our own mother. She is standing unsteadily at the front of the group, frowning at the photographer, her reputedly affectionless mother sitting sternly beside her.

This impression of loss is at odds with the national image of its time, of necessary sacrifice and patriotic fervor. It is at odds with a telelogical picturing of history, as a path towards progress despite wars and premature, violent deaths. As Peter Fritzsche (2001) writes, ‘the power of national memory is indisputable and is manifest again and again in its ability to keep other pasts and other renditions from articulating themselves’ (Fritzsche, 2001). But are these false divisions –between the punctum and the studium, the pain of the punctum is informed by my socio-historical and cultural knowledge of what this image represents. I am not convinced the division is real, nor am I yet to be convinced that they meet in a via media such as Bergson’s conception of intuition.

Aside from Barthes’s division of images, this image is also representative of gaps between local memory and national memory, and ‘it is precisely the instability of memory forms’ their fragmented, interiorized nature, that allows for renewal and redemption’ and resists official accounts’ according to Fritzsche (2001). In other words, localised memory might generate counter narratives that are at odds with idealised nationalistic histories. But to make greater truth claims for family histories and family photographs is also to deny the presence of constrained memories within those families, indeed ‘the subjective capacity ensures confusion because it makes human beings doubly historical. It engages them simultaneously in the socio-historical process and narrative constructions about that process’ (Michel-Rolph Trouillat, 1995). As Annette Kuhn writes of her own family images, they do not represent a transcendental reading, but a ‘timefull, contingent, and historically situated reading’ (Fritzsche citing Kuhn, 2001).

The photograph of Eliza Dagworthy’s wedding is ambivalent, withdrawing and denying an umbilical nexus, in this case, with the past. However, despite its ambivalence and the generality of its composition, I still recognize myself in the image of my great aunt Eliza’s marriage, and also likenesses to my father, my uncles, my younger half brother, my sisters, and my grandmother. But should I ask myself as Barthes does, ‘who is like what?‘ (Barthes, 2000:100). Am I imagining an identity in these fragments of myself and my living relatives - scrying a ‘truth of lineage’ as Barthes calls it (103), a generalised ‘persistence of the species’(105), an identity that is at odds with reality of this image? For, in addition to my own memories the photograph, like all photographs, in its ‘seizing of a moment always, even in that very moment, assures loss’ (Kuhn, 2002).

And yet my own reactions to this image fluctuate; I observe that they are in process. Do these fluctuations point to the contingency of memory itself or the subject who ‘holds’ these memories, if they are even separable? I suspect the obvious answer is that it points to the contingency of them both, that, like the body, emory and subjectivity are lived, not locked in fixed representations. One day while looking at this image I felt a kick in my stomach, a moment of visceral shock. It was not a moment of logical analysis. I realised that we were both, in a sense, abandoned and betrayed by our parents at about the same age, the age my grandmother is in that photograph. So much made sense to me after I felt this, perhaps even my choice to work with this image out of all the many images I had amassed for this project.

What else might my body tell me? Was I remembering or reconstructing? Was this deductive logic, embodied knowledge, or Bergsonian intuition? More importantly, what might my body tell you about my memories and about the nature of memory itself? In other words, what is there beyond a textual reading of this image, beyond my previous exegesis? I wonder if there are other responses that might disrupt my own narratives of family history as reflected in this photograph from nearly a century ago? What is there now, or indeed, is there only the now in which to articulate memory?

Conclusion: Point-Instant, sensing and making memory traces

In keeping with Plato’s Pharmakon my work with images and memory supports the idea that symbolic representations of memory are at once both poison and remedy. At the same time, I would like to test the notion that memory has neither meaning nor autonomy outside of the present. Of course I am not alone in questioning the tensedness of time, belief in the totality of the present moment as Michael Eido Luetchford explains (2004) is a core tenet of Buddhist philosophy:

According to Buddhist thought, the past is not real, because it no longer exists, and the future is not real because it has not yet come into existence. Only the present moment is real existence. Early Buddhist philosophers developed a theory of existence as a point-instant

(Michael Eido Luetchford, 2004).

This is supported to some extent by Bergson’s resistance to the mathematical reducibility of time as an experience, but to instead a non-linear and flowing, mathematically unbounded experience of time or duration. However, Bergson clearly does believe in the past (as well as the future) but it is one that is activated as memory by action in the present. Memory in Bergsonian terms is a strange agent. Grosz writes of the Bergsonian assertion that ‘memory returns to objects the rich potential they have for functioning outside their familiar use; it returns to them the qualities, properties, contexts that perception must eliminate in order to act on the object. Perception can never be free of memory and is thus never completely embedded in the present, but always retains a reservoir of connections with the past as well as close anticipation of the imminent future. The present is extended through memory into the past and through anticipation into the near future’ (Grosz, 2004:173). Yet, at least since St Augustine wrote the Confessions in the 4th century AD, the idea of such temporal divisions as the past, present and future has been contested. St Augustine proposed that time only exists as a subjective quality, engendered within individuals by memory.[5]

Again this notion of memory accords it an agency, but can it really hold such power and if it does, is amnesia also agential? My use of biosensors, in the form of EEG and GSR sensors enables me to perform the dynamism of my relationship to my own memories and my embodied responses to the photograph of my Grandmother and her family. I propose that the photograph has the potential to be both symbolic and sub-symbolic, offering a complex complementarity, in this case, that they are both culturally and biologically received and conceived, signifying absence and presence, that like memory they are embodied and dynamic, indexical and generative. As my relationship to this image unfolds the image itself is transformed, when the GSR sensor detects a significant drop in resistance I am shocked, and at the same time the software generates a new image of Eliza Dagworthy’s wedding photo.

The shock to my body triggers a re-imaging and dissolution of Eliza’s wedding, one that is ontologically entangled with its own documentation. Phillip Ausslander highlights the paradox at play in two notable and even more extreme works of performance documentation, Chris Burden’s Shoot (1971), a ‘notorious’ work in which the artist enlisted a friend to shoot him (with a gun) in a gallery setting, and Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void (1960), in which the artist appears to be flinging himself out of a window. My work with Biosensors and photography aims to similarly destabilize the originary event while questioning and inverting the status of documentation and the conventional notion that an event precedes and authorizes its documentation. As Ausslander points out, our perception of these processes is taken for granted:

the presumption of an ontological relationship between performance and document in this first model is ideological. The idea of the documentary photograph as a means of accessing the reality of the performance derives from the general ideology of photography, as described by Helen Gilbert, glossing Roland Barthes and Don Slater: “Through its trivial realism, photography creates the illusion of such exact correspondence between the signifier and the signified that it appears to be the perfect instance of Barthes’s ‘message without a code.’ The sense of the photograph as not only representationally accurate but ontologically connected to the real world allows it to be treated as a piece of the real world, then as a substitute for it.’”

(Ausslander, 2006).

At the same time, the vulnerability of biosensor technology (even medical grade EEG sensors) to environmental noise and false readings adds another element of ontological doubt to the technologies of representation at play in this work and arguably blurs the boundaries between subjects and objects, originary and documenting events. Leading to, as Amelia Jones (1998) frames it:

an expansion of the phenomenological relation to a technophenomenological relation that intertwines intersubjectivity with interobjectivity: we are enworlded via the envelopment of our bodies in space, the touch of the keyboard, the stroke of our gaze on the video screen. Seemingly paradoxical, given the conventional association of technology with disembodiment and disengagement from the world, recent body-oriented practices have increasingly mobilized and highlighted this reversibility, using the artists’ own body/self as both subject and object, as multiplicitous, particular, and unfixable, and engaging with audiences in increasingly interactive ways (Jones, 1998).

The roboticist Rodney Brooks wrote ‘In AI, abstraction is usually used to factor out all aspects of perception and motor skills…When we examine very simple level intelligence we find that explicit representations and models of the world simply get in the way. It turns out to be better to use the world as its own model’ (Brooks, 1987). But what happens if you try to factor out abstraction and leave only perception and motor skills in a computational arts context? Not at the level of Brook’s very simple situated robots, but at the level of human interaction?

This is the core methodological framework for my project.To reduce the symbolic and harness processes instead, to establish both a biological and psychogenic calculus of my unfolding experience of memories. The shocks I receive when I am anxious also trigger and impact on the documentation and reconfiguration of Eliza’s wedding photograph, or in the case of my work with the car-crash memory, a palpable slowing and contortion of time.

In effect I would argue that this is a type of sub-symbolic time machine in keeping with a detensed and embodied temporality. At the same time the project seeks to explore Maria Sturken’s question (1999) ‘what does the act of forgetting produce?’(243). The project acknowledges the possibility that forgetting is, to quote Sturken, a ‘primary means through which subjectivity is shaped and produced’ (243).

I would also suggest that amnesia has the creative potential to erode conventional notions of the ontological split between ourselves, others and our experiences, and that, like the body, our lives should be lived not locked in rigid representation. That there is scope for a configuration of time as bio-social, bio-mediated, a time machine of drips and feeds containing leptin, food, trauma. My time machine is powered by anxiety, by stress hormones and sweat, which lowers conductivity in biosensors and by particle shifts in my frontal lobes this is mind as material, a socio-material in which my anxieties are not separable from the world. For I have shared these experiences with others, these embodied, bio-mediated and sometimes life-saving time delays.

1 "the characteristic that is denoted by the adjective stands in contrast to the noun.".