Still Searching…

<p>We would like to continue a conversation we began last year with Mario Garcia Torres, a conversation about the temporality of photographic images. <br />Our idea, our attempt then was to get beyond the statement that, because they are recordings, photographic images institute a past. Of course, when a photographic image reaches us, we never fully forget that it was previously recorded by someone. Someone decided on this moment and transformed it, with the help of the camera, into a past moment.</p>

<p>In analyzing contemporaneity with the present, the past, or the future, we refer to pictorial practices, spatial design, and architecture from a poetic perspective. Our goal is always the creation (<em>poiesis</em>) of a space where real shifts can operate. Our supposition concerning pictorial media, for example, is that they serve a function for visuality that resembles the function the twentieth-century present tense novel served for language: novels in the present tense endow this tense with a new quality, namely the capacity for shifting positions of the self in space and time, which the present tense does not possess in everyday usage.</p>

<p>One question that returns in the digital age is that of the correlation of subjects and their bodies to their sense objects: how do we, as subjects, relate to images we see and things we touch? It is very tempting to posit a mythic immediacy that has at some point been lost or been undermined by media and technology. And in that case, the only choice is to make the journey back, the same journey back to the time that is past.</p>

<p>We are interested in how temporal and subjective asynchronies enter into relationships.</p> <p>A photograph says <em>I am</em> in a mysterious way. There is an I that we usually regard as the first I of a photograph. A photographer presses the shutter release and leaves a photographic trace. He is invisible in the image. Someone or something other is in the image. The picture may have been developed much later, may have been seen much later.</p>

<p>A chronological image of time is the ideal image of a contemporaneity that implies all three time aspects and relates them to each other in a seamless form. In a chronological time image, <em>the present was futural, is present, and will be past</em>. This image of time privileges a <em>present that is present</em>, that in the future will have been, and that has yet to arrive in the past. </p>