In a paper of 1995 responding to the theme, 'The future of cinema', the philosopher Jean-Franyois Lyotard wrote under the title, 'The idea of a sovereign film', asking whether a film free from the constraints of rules of communication, a film that was the message itself, a film liberated from narrative, were possible. In the paper, be calls for the moment when the real is taken from reality 'without suggesting it be for anything but itself. Driven as it is by the flow of time, the object is expected to unfold, develop, change, engendering the first phases of narrative, with the inevitable result of dispelling this 'sovereign' extratemporal present. This 'sovereignty' of unconstraint, as Lyotard points out, is impossible for anything bounded, not open-ended, as film is. The 'pure' present unhindered by the ulterior motives of story, text and symbol, is nonetheless a yearning to which, says Lyotard, film constantly returns. I want to pursue this problem, or this aim, as Lyotard puts it, of an intensely engaging experience and perception, through two parallel bodies of work, the exhibition 'Morphologies' held at lvan Dougherty Gallery and Artspace in late 2001 , and the publication with DVD-ROM, disLOCATIONS. A pity the late Lyotard is not in a position to review his announcements in the light of today's developments, since his theory is based on a certain premise of a stillness whose fusion of time and space is oriented more toward painting.
The difficulty that many people have in both apprehending and indeed making (good) new media art is precisely the legacy of the quintessentially silent and spatial nature of painting and photography. Modes that involve time and sound must deal... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline