Clare Thornton and I presented The Italic I as part
of The Alternative Document Exhibition / Text / Publication (curated by Ang Bartram) begins February 2016
The
Italic I: Between Live-ness and the Lens
The Italic I is an artistic collaboration
exploring the different states of potential made possible through purposefully
surrendering to a repeated fall. The fall is encountered almost exclusively
through its photographic document, considered less as a pale imitation of
live-ness but rather as a means through which to ‘see it again’, differently.
Photography repeats the live event, yet the intent is not to reproduce or
re-present, as present an alternative perspective (through the camera’s
capacity for ‘seeing’ faster or slower than the eye). The live performance of
falling is mediated through the lens, slowing and extending its different
episodes, yet, the intent is not to capture what a fall looks like, but rather
to reflect on its interiority (its ‘inner movement’ as lived experience). We
seek a visual vocabulary for the invisible register of intensity or sensation
within falling, the force of what-cannot-always-be-seen. Our documents make
tangible an experience not actually visible in the live event; paradoxically,
the document is somehow closer to the live(d) experience than the encounter
with the performance itself. Moreover, the document itself is performed live,
ephemeral. Staged as an ever-changing permutational flow, the cross-fading of
non-consecutive images generates a virtual performance (a fall) that did not
exist in reality, but which perhaps comes closer to the feeling-of-the-fall.
The work explores
how lens technologies
might have the capacity to evoke a quality of live-ness not simply the visual
document of life, addressing those expanded modalities of performance and
performativity - those emergent temporalities and subjectivities - produced at
the threshold where live and lens meet. A version of our paper can be read below, and the three component video work can be viewed here.