STILLNESS AND MOVEMENT STUDIES:
PORTRAITURE, IDENTITY, TIME

By
Ross Birdwise
MAA in Media Arts, The Emily Carr University of Art and Design, 2008

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTERS OF APPLIED ART
in
Media Arts

EMILY CARR UNIVERSITY OF ART + DESIGN

2008

© Ross Birdwise, 2008

Abstract
This thesis discusses my video art practice in relation to the philosophers Henri Bergson
and Gilles Deleuze. Bergson and Deleuze have written extensively on time, consciousness,
matter, and the universe, holding that the only constant is change. What I find useful from the two
philosophers is their shared attempt to give materialist and immanent (not transcendent) accounts
of time, change, movement and representation. In my video art, I have been producing a kind of
extended portraiture that introduces time and change into what I think is usually a static form.
The works of Bergson, Deleuze and other philosophers/cultural theorists who write about
their work have helped me to develop and discuss what I see to be a different approach to
portraiture. My ‘video portraits’ approach questions of identity from the hypothesis that both the
self and representations of the self are expressions of material forces, temporality, and change.
This has many implications that are discussed in this paper. The most important implications are:
One, the self is treated less an unchanging essence and more as process occurring through time.
Two, representation, although it tries to delimit and fix a certain idea of the self, is still
nonetheless subject to the forces of change.
The thesis begins with a short autobiographical discussion and explanation of some
pertinent undergraduate work I did, putting it in Deleuzian/Bergsonian context. It then elaborates
two key notions for understanding my recent work: Bergson’s duration and Deleuze’s virtual.
Roughly speaking, these are concepts that treat time, consciousness and matter as being
continually shifting and indivisible. These concepts are used to explain some recent artistic
developments as well as contextualizing my work in a broader artistic context, linking it to
painting and music.

ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………….… ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS……………………………………………………………..…iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………..iv
DEDICATION…………………………………………………………………………. v

Introduction .……………………………………………………………………….……1
Autobiographical Statement ……………………………….…………………………....3
Bergsonian notions of Duration and the Whole…………………………………………7
Deleuze and the Art of the Virtual………………………………………………………14
Music………………………………………………………………………………….…15
Painting……………………………………………………………………………….….18
Self-Portrait………………………………………………………………………………21
Conclusion: Stillness and Movement Studies …………………………………………...27

WORKS CITED ………………………………………………………………………..32
VISUAL DOCUMENTATION………………………………………....see attached DVD

iii

I would like to acknowledge my thesis advisors, Jonathan Tyrell and Glen Lowry, as well
as my professors Fiona Bowie and Ron Burnett, for all of their assistance and support in
helping me to complete my Masters degree.

iv

Dedicated to my brother Scott.

v

STILLNESS AND MOVEMENT STUDIES:
PORTRAITURE, IDENTITY, TIME

there is for us nothing that is instantaneous. In all that goes by that name there is
already some work of our memory, and consequently, of our consciousness, which
prolongs into each other, an endless number of moments of an endlessly
indivisible time. (Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory 69-70)

In conventional photography and video art, the individual frame is often considered to
reflect an instant of time; movement is represented through static positions; ‘memory’
becomes the divisible totality of these positions, fixed in time through either chemical or
digital means. It is forgotten that each individual frame has a specific duration: onethousandth of a second, one-sixtieth of a second or an infinite set of times far longer or
shorter. The static image is a digital or chemical record that acts as a kind of
concentration of the time between the opening and closing of a film camera’s shutter. In
fact, the photographic image or frame itself is subject to duration and deteriorates in time.
Digital data is similarly volatile and must be protected from the forces of digital
corruption that occur through time. Furthermore, the context of reception changes the
image. In this sense, the popular conception of the timelessness of the image is an
illusion. The forces of time constantly change the image, causing it to continuously differ
from itself.
Drawing on Bergson’s thinking about duration, my research is concerned with the
relationships between portraiture, identity and time. To this end, I have been producing
video art that both utilizes and challenges the conventions of portraiture. These ‘video

Birdwise 2
portraits’ attempt to introduce aspects of time and motion into portraiture, breaking from
conventional ideas of the photographic image as a static form, the timeless essence of the
individual. I utilize time and motion for a number of reasons, including an exploration of
identity as something that becomes through time rather than remaining a fixed and
unchanging essence.
This paper contextualizes my research, artistic production, and personal interests in
relation to the work of philosopher Henri Bergson and, to a lesser extent, that of Gilles
Deleuze. In addition to Bergson and Deleuze, I also draw from secondary sources that
have inspired or assisted me along the way. In some cases, these secondary sources
helped me interpret some of the more difficult primary texts. For the purposes of this
paper, I will discuss my work in relation to Bergson’s notion of duration, which is,
broadly speaking, a philosophy of time, consciousness, matter, and the universe that
holds that the only constant is change, and that individuals are only able to grasp a small
part of a constantly changing reality. I will also look at Deleuze’s notions of the virtual
and cinema theory, both of which are strongly related to Bergson’s duration. What I find
useful from the two philosophers is their shared attempt to give materialist and immanent
(not transcendent) accounts of time, change, movement and representation. The works of
Bergson, Deleuze and other philosophers/cultural theorists who write about their work
have helped me to develop what I see to be a different approach to portraiture.
My portraits approach questions of identity from the hypothesis that the video
image is ultimately an expression of material forces, temporality, and change. I look at
representation along similar lines, treating it less as a ‘re-presentation’ or distortion of
reality, and more along the lines of a filtering process that is nonetheless connected to and
reflective of reality. I also try to look at the ways in which different artists have
2

Birdwise 3
represented newness, indeterminacy and becoming, in relation to a Bergsonian and
Deleuzian context, and to use this to frame my work. Finally, I link my academic
research to my most recent portrait works, Self-Portrait and Stillness and Movement
Studies, the latter of which was featured in my graduating show at Emily Carr University,
2008.

Autobiographical Statement
For many years, I have been interested in philosophy and theory in relation to
visual art, literature, and music. These interests are still very much alive in the present
moment and dovetail nicely with my creative output, which includes photography, video
art, and music. For a long time, I have been into questions concerning personal identity,
free will and determinism, epistemology, phenomenology and ontology. As teenagers,
my friends and I used to debate many topics (many of which we did not understand and
which I feel I still do not really understand), including determinism, reductionist accounts
of ‘hard’ science, whether or not we could see things in themselves, morality and
religion, mystical knowledge, and the ultimate nature of reality. In a sense, you could say
I never ceased in being interested in these types of questions and in trying to answer, or
simply learn more about them, I wound up becoming interested in other related and
possibly more nuanced lines of exploration as well.
After high school I drifted a bit, eventually completing a photography program at
a local community college. The program was really disappointing, because it was geared
towards technical training and commercially viable forms of photography (and related
practices) and tended to downplay or ignore the more critical and exploratory aspects of
photography. I felt this acutely in relation to the portraits we were taking of each other.
3

Birdwise 4
These portraits tended to be conservative, utilizing established formal vocabularies, often
reinforcing traditional gender roles, notions of beauty, as well as other cliché forms of
representation. I found the photographic conventions taught in college were extremely
rigid, and unimaginative. Many of the students and the professors had uncritical (and
possibly cynical) attitudes toward the photographic medium itself, its subject matter, and
the representations of that subject matter that we crafted. Feeling unsatisfied with this
training, not knowing what else to do with my life, I applied to art school in my last year
of college.
As an undergraduate visual arts student at the University of Ottawa, I took
philosophy and theory classes, including a course on contemporary continental
philosophy and several courses in analytic philosophy alongside courses on the
philosophy of art and art criticism.

My favorite subjects were phenomenology,

epistemology, ontology, the philosophy of mind, genealogy (Nietzsche and Foucault), as
well as theories of subjectivity and representation. These are topics seemed to be an
extension of what I was concerned with several years earlier in high school. Through my
reading I began cultivating an interest in Gilles Deleuze whose work led me to Henri
Bergson and a wide variety of topics covered in their work, including matter, the body,
sensation, ontology, representation and time. My interest in Deleuze complimented my
academic interests, my artistic practice, and my musical output.
As a Masters student at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, I have
continued a project I started as an undergraduate student at the University of Ottawa, an
exploration into portraiture and time. The first and only piece I completed for this project
while studying in Ottawa was called Videoportraits (see attached Visual Documentation
DVD for examples). For this piece, I was concerned with the tensions between still and
4

Birdwise 5
moving images as well as the tensions between memory and present time. In these short
videos, shown in the form of a multi-channel video installation with multi-channel sound,
we see a variety of people looking into the camera. Framed in head and shoulders shots,
the subjects stand out from their backgrounds (sometimes interiors, sometimes exteriors).
The middle ground and the background are often distinguishable as separate planes of
movement or stasis.

In the middle grounds and backgrounds we see incidental

movements and animated settings: motor vehicles and people passing by, leaves falling
off trees, gusts of wind passing through foliage, flickering computer screens, occupied
office spaces, parks, cityscapes and other such mundane spaces and movements.

I

deliberately chose this kind of framing because I felt that it obviously implied ‘portrait,’
and yet it could show things in the middle ground and the background moving in, within,
and out of the frame, at variable speeds to suggest the coexistence of several planes of
movement, each with objects moving within their own duration.
These video portraits introduce an aspect of time and motion that I felt was missing
from the still photography I was trained to do in college. Not only do these videos depict
movement, but they also loop and un-loop, creating alternating zones of stasis and
motion, of tension and release. In order to explain this dynamic more fully, I need to
explain how the video portraits were made: I gave my subjects minimal instructions,
telling them to simply try to stand still and maintain a ‘neutral’ or static expression for the
duration of the videotaping, anywhere from one to three minutes. During the course of
the individual shots, however, subjects would sometimes laugh, fidget nervously or
otherwise break out of their neutral demeanor. I would then take this footage and edit it
so that moments of neutrality or stasis would loop longer than the actual duration that
they occurred. For example: I would take what was a less than a second of footage, a
5

Birdwise 6
twelve-frame sequence (a micro-loop), and loop it for thirty seconds. The suspended
moments of stillness and neutrality sometimes take on a strange quality, suggesting a sort
of half-life suspended between mechanical stasis and organic movement. Periodically,
this looping instant of neutrality would be allowed to un-loop, letting the subjects flow in
an unsuspended time (relative to the loop), the frames of the video advancing well
beyond the artificial confines of the micro-loop. In some cases, I would loop the opposite
kind of moment, a peak of the action moment (like a fidget or a laugh) suspended in a
short loop, creating an effect akin to a skipping CD or a glitch in time. In both cases,
these looping moments of artificially enforced stasis (enforced by editing decisions in
Final Cut Pro) are representative of how I understood still photography (particularly
portraiture) to artificially fix and delimit the subject by abstracting it from time. The unlooping moments implied the opposite—they were supposed to represent the ‘after’ that a
photograph cannot capture, a kind of metaphor for what exists outside the frame, outside
representation, beyond past recollections, and outside of the present moment.
The concern with interpenetrating planes of movement, with objects having their
own durations, is related to my thinking about the relationship between stasis and motion.
I was viewing photography (and representation itself) as something that simultaneously
delimited, yet made experience possible.

I was trying to imply that beyond our

customary mode of apprehending things as being fixed in time and space that there is
something much richer actually going on, an infinite universe of objects moving at
differential speeds and forming constantly shifting relationships with other objects. At
the time that I made Videoportraits, this idea was more of a vaguely defined intuition
about reality rather than something coherent and conceptual.
Videoportraits, as I understand the piece, is concerned with two kinds of time: real6

Birdwise 7
time (living and present) and suspended time (a memory or a tracing of the past). These
different temporalities are also related to some notions of identity I was concerned with.
In this work, identity is not understood as a state of being, rather as a state of becoming—
perpetually evolving interactive process rather than an unchanging core. Intuitively, I felt
that conventional portraiture is concerned with static and fixed representations of
subjects, and that, as such, portraiture is often an accomplice in the drive to establish and
fix subject positions in society. I also felt there was an implicit essentialism in regards to
identity. Furthermore, I felt that this notion of a stable and fixed identity, the idea that one
could capture or accurately portray someone’s identity in film (as fixed or shifting) was
highly problematic. I saw my work as a furtive attempt to break the mold of stable or
recognizable subject positions by drawing attention to the image as social and
technological construction. I also saw my work as a critique of the fragmentary and
constructed perspective offered by a photograph, and by photographic viewing practices
in general—the range of emotional and intellectual habits and expectations that one
brings to viewing a photograph.

Bergsonian notions of Duration and the Whole
While I was working on Videoportraits, I was reading Deleuzian and Bergsonian
theory on questions of subjectivity, time and film-theory. This theory help to provide an
interpretative framework and source for further exploration in my creative work.
Bergson’s concept of duration was developed throughout his career. At first, it proposed
a theory of time. Later, his thinking on duration was extended to help explain the
workings of consciousness. Finally, Bergson extended the concept to matter and energy,
making duration to encompass the entirety of the universe (also referred to as the Whole).
7

Birdwise 8
The three aspects of Bergson’s work on duration express what he sees as a vital principle
(élan vital) of the universe, a principle of movement and change being the core of reality.
At the most general level, duration is a conception of time, consciousness and matter as
indivisible entities in a perpetual state of transformation or becoming. Duration questions
notions of essence, seeing the only constant being change itself.
According to Bergson “movement is reality itself” (The Creative Mind 169),
meaning that reality is fundamentally a continuous movement of time rather than a set of
fixed entities, states or instants; it is not a series of discrete steps, states, causes and
effects. For Bergson, reality is an indivisible, yet shifting Whole: the universe considered
in terms of becoming. The desire to break reality into discrete chunks is due to our
limited human perception and the categorizing tendencies of the human mind. Bergson
scholar Donato Totaro suggests that for Bergson, “The intellect is by nature a spatializing
mechanism, which means that to acquire knowledge it employs concepts, symbols,
abstraction, analysis, and fragmentation. Hence the intellect can only express movementreality itself in static terms” (Totaro np). As Bergson says, this thinking on reality
“substitutes for the continuous the discontinuous, for mobility stability…” (The Creative
Mind 222-223). In this sense, the intellectual activities of the mind can be compared to a
camera, breaking down what was once moving into a set of static representations,
discrete photographs or the individual frames of a filmstrip. This division, this
breakdown, is often referred to as spatialization, and as such, it is only one modality of
reality. Thus the durational is a different modality: one stripped of this intellectual
‘gridding’ (the spatialization of time) that helps us to understand reality not as an order or
succession of discrete moments but a continuous state of motion and becoming. This is
the key element of a Bergsonian notion of reality that I draw on in my work.
8

Birdwise 9
Another important aspect of Bergon’s philosophy is his conception of the Whole.
According Keith-Ansell Pearson, The Whole, “for Bergson is, in essence, ‘universal
mobility’ or the immanence of becoming (movement and change). As such it is never,
and can never be, given” (Pearson 59). The Whole is always in excess of anything that
tries to act as its representation, and is always in excess of itself. In this sense, the Whole
is unbounded. It always exceeds representation and actuality. Its nature is change. It is
that which differs from itself. In this sense, the Whole, never given, is a ‘virtual’ power,
as opposed to the actuality given in our perception of the world. In many ways, the
Whole is also related to the future, which although never completely ‘given’ (actual), is
continually passing into the present, and from the present into the past.
Our perception is only capable of grasping a tiny part of the Whole, or so Bergson
suggests. This is the given. We only grasp a small part of the whole due to our own
finitude and our body’s immediate need to act on the world for its continued survival. As
Bergson says about our grasping of the partial, it is “the double work of solidification and
division which we effect on the moving continuity of the real (The Whole) in order to
obtain there a fulcrum for our action, in order to fix within it starting points for our
operation, in short, to introduce into it real changes” (Matter and Memory 211). Our
practical, pragmatic forms of knowledge are born out of this limited perception and our
struggle to survive. In a sense, one can say that this is a relative kind of knowledge, a
knowledge tailored to our need to act upon the world and built out of our fragmentary
experience of the Whole.
I like this contrast between the Whole and the small parts of it we are able to grasp.
It implies many things for me: first, it suggests that representation delimits its subject,
and second, it seems to be a way to ground a practice of portraiture that rejects essences
9

Birdwise 10
and fixed identities. This harkens back to what I was saying about my undergraduate
piece Videoportraits, and my concern with there being something that was not given in
any representation, including photographic representations such as portraits. The Whole
would stand as a kind of ultimate ground for these kinds of speculations.
In contrast to the actual (the fragmented, the limited), Bergson argues that there is
another kind of knowledge, an absolute knowledge (Totaro np). This knowledge seeks to
join the Whole. Because the whole is not being, rather, it is becoming (change), this
absolute knowledge must also embody change in itself. According to Pearson, absolute
knowledge seeks to
cultivate fluid concepts that are “capable of following reality in all its windings and of
adopting the very movement of the inner life of things” (Bergson, The Creative Mind
190). To achieve this requires relinquishing the method of construction that leads
only to higher and higher generalities and thinking in terms of a concrete duration in
which a radical recasting of the Whole is always taking place. (Pearson 63)
In other words, the drive for absolute knowledge is a call to upset our normal
understanding of things. Normally, we favor generalizations and static conceptions of the
world over singularities and change. Absolute knowledge privileges the latter. Pearson
elaborates this notion beautifully:
The intellect selects in a given situation whatever is like something it already knows,
so as to fit it into a pre-existing mold or schema; in this way it applies the principle
that “like produces like.” It naturally rebels against the idea of an original and
unforeseeable creation of forms. Similarly, science focuses its attention on isolable or
closed systems, simply because anything that is irreducible and irreversible in the
successive moments of a history eludes it. (Pearson 64)
10

Birdwise 11
Pearson continues, explaining contemporary science’s tendency towards fluid concepts:
In cases of organic evolution, Bergson insists that foreseeing the form in advance is
not possible. This is not because there are no conditions or specific causes of
evolution, but rather is due to the fact that they are built into the particular form of
organic life, and peculiar to that phase of its history in which life finds itself at the
moment of producing the form.

It is clear that the tendency within contemporary

science – for example, the focus on open, dynamical systems – is to approach the real
in such terms. (Pearson 64)
This is not to say that contemporary science knows the Whole, rather that it has merely
expanded our horizons. The Whole stands as a kind of reminder to continually challenge
more limited conceptions of a self or a human centered ontology or epistemology
(Pearson 65-66). It is wise not to see contemporary science as ‘correcting’ earlier science.
Earlier science (and other disciplines and social practices) grasped and delimited the
Whole as well. Contemporary science, at best, has only extended that grasp. Science also
holds no privileged access to truth as compared to art and philosophy, or so Bergson
suggests. The different disciplines provide different manifestations of our spatializing
tendencies, but they also contain within themselves the possibility of reversal. For
Bergson, the most effective method of reversal is something called intuition (which is not
what is meant by the ordinary sense of the word), rather it is a method or practice. I will
discuss this idea in relation to my own work later on in this essay.
In Bergson’s writing, duration and the Whole are important aspects of
consciousness. We have already established that the intellect is a spatializing mechanism
that artificially divides the Whole. In the first instance, we focused for the most part on
the spatialization of time by the intellect. However, there is more to consciousness than
11

Birdwise 12
the intellect. Our consciousness, although capable of spatialization, is not inherently
spatial. We spatialize in order to meet the needs of our bodies, in order to survive. Our
consciousness, like real time, has a temporal and indivisible aspect. As Totaro explains,
“Our true inner self, our emotions, thoughts, and memories do not lie next to each other
like shirts on a clothesline but flow into one another, one sensation gnawing and
overlapping into another.” (Totaro np) This flow of our inner self is made constant by the
dual, intertwined workings of perception and memory. In consciousness “there is nothing
for us that is instantaneous. In all that goes by that name there is already some work of
memory, and consequently, of our consciousness, which prolongs into each other, an
endless number of moments of an indivisible time” (Bergson, Matter and Memory 6970)”. In the sense of it being rooted in an indivisible flow of becoming, the duration of
our consciousness (subjectivity) mirrors the absolute duration of time. Our memory
flows from a present moment that is always passing simultaneously into the past and into
the future.
Now, one might question this notion of an indivisible aspect of consciousness.
Questioning it, one might say that s/he is aware of discrete emotions and other states of
being, that s/he can conceptualize or compartmentalize the past into discrete sections,
instants and other such units.

I agree.

However, according to Bergson this

compartmentalization is something that is added onto a more primal and indivisible
psychological experience that is inseparable from the continuous flow of our perception
(which is connected to the sensible world). Bergson describes how our body’s survival
needs cause us to carve our selves and others out of the continuity of sensible reality:
Our needs are, then, so many searchlights which, directed upon the continuity of
sensible qualities, single out in it distinct bodies. They cannot satisfy themselves
12

Birdwise 13
except upon the condition that they carve out, within this continuity, a body which is
to be their own and then delimit other bodies with which the first can enter into
relation, as if with persons. To establish these special relations among portions thus
carved out from sensible reality is just what we call living. (Matter and Memory 262)
The same faculty that allows us to spatialize time also allows us to spatialize ourselves
and to discern other entities outside of us. We make ourselves and the world around us
into inert objects, cloaking the flow of becoming that underlies, supports, animates and
connects these otherwise discrete objects, which, in the final analysis, are not so much
objects as events occurring through time.
The third kind of duration developed by Bergson applies to matter.

In our very

materialistic times, matter is often taken as being all that there is. Bergson does not
disagree with this, but he contends that matter is far richer and complex than many
reductionist accounts would have of it. For Bergson, matter has a durational aspect. It is
not as immobile or static as we think. Totaro says that for Bergson matter is “best
conceived of as energy, and energy is the ultimate form of motion; thus the shapes of
material objects are not properties of the objects but are ‘snapshots taken by the mind of
the continuity of becoming’.” (Totaro np) Matter might just be the most stable and
enduring form of that energy, but in no way can it be its essence. In this sense,
individuated matter stands in the same relationship to the Whole as normal human
perception (spatialization, intellect). It is just a limited expression of the Whole.
According to Bergson, human beings, through a process of evolution, have a
natural tendency to geometrize space, experiencing it in a conceptual rather than
perceptual manner: “Unfortunately, evolution has exaggerated man’s intellectual
capacities to the point where consciousness is permeated by the tendency to geometrize”
13

Birdwise 14
(Antliff 344). This human space is contrasted with that of the animal: “space is (arguably)
not so homogeneous for the animal as for us, and that determinations of space or
directions do not assume for it a purely geometrical form” (Bergson qtd. in Antliff 344).
The implication seems to be that our basic, evolution-derived experience of geometric
space is reflective of the same faculties that allow us to spatialize time, consciousness and
matter.

It also seems to imply that our perception of space tends to be almost

automatic—given as geometrical and divisible space. For Bergson there are two kinds of
space, one quantitative, conceptual and geometrical, and the other qualitative and
perceptual. Qualitative and perceptual space is durational and experienced as continuous,
yet shifting.

Deleuze and the Art of the Virtual
The virtual, a key concept in the work of Gilles Deleuze, is strongly related to
Bergson’s notions of duration, the Whole, and spatialization. The virtual is difficult to
conceptualize and almost impossible to describe, because, like the Whole, it refers to
something that is fundamentally non-representational. The virtual is always richer than
the actual, much like the way in which the Bergsonian Whole is always in excess of our
spatialized existence, which necessarily reduces its object (Deleuze 41). In this sense
spatialization—the activity of the intellect—is comparable to actualization. If we
understand the order of actuality as an order of being, concepts, discrete entities and units
of space and time, and virtuality as an order of becoming, of an indivisible yet restless
multiplicity, then it is possible to link the virtual to many aspects of Bergson’s
philosophy, especially duration (in psychological and physical terms) and the Whole.

14

Birdwise 15
Since the virtual, like the Whole, is not divisible into concepts, cause and effect, and so
on, we might best posit it as the immanent ‘source’ of newness and indeterminacy, but
also the source of the only apparent determinacy we sometimes experience in parts of the
actual. The virtual would be the ‘cause’ or ground, if we can still speak of such a thing as
a cause, of the new, the unpredictable, the unknowable (Deleuze 41). The virtual would
not properly be a cause nor outside of reality—unlike some conceptions of God, rather it
would be inherent in everything at all times, like duration, which applies to sense
experience as much as it does to matter. The virtual is infinite, but it is not a numerical
(divisible) infinity (Deleuze 42-43). The actual, including our apprehension of causality,
would be nothing but a surface effect that fails to capture the immanent richness of the
virtual (Deleuze 41). Even our apprehensions of ourselves (our psychological reality),
and our bodies, would be mere surface effects and in no way partake of this impersonal
‘inner’ force, like trying to capture the violence of an explosion by presenting the
shrapnel.
As I have suggested the notions of duration and the virtual lend themselves to
thinking about contemporary artistic practices and digital modes of representation. These
concepts inform my work in key ways. To draw this out, I will look at their impact on
contemporary music and thinking about painting and on the work of artists whose work is
important my understanding of my own practice of portraiture.

1.) MUSIC
I believe that certain artistic practices have the potential to put is in touch with the
virtual. Composer and performer, David Tudor’s comments on playing John Cage’s
indeterminate pieces for piano is telling:
15

Birdwise 16
When I play a piece which is notated, even though I may have freedom of choice –
for instance in Stockhausen – I feel it’s a curious sensation I’m trying to describe, but
the whole thing is, whatever you do, is like a stream of consciousness. And if I play
something which is so notated, I notice now, after having done it for several years,
that it has a tendency to put me to sleep. And it wants, all the time, to recede into an
area where my feelings are called upon more and more. And all the features which
seem to be so striking when the works we first composed now become much less
striking. They don’t seem important and so the whole thing recedes into a stream
which is mainly a feeling. Whereas if I play music which doesn’t have any such
requirement, but where I’m called upon to make actions and especially if the actions
are undetermined as to their content or, let’s say, at least undetermined as to what
they’re going to produce, then I feel that I’m alive in every part of my consciousness.
(Tudor np)
When he speaks of playing these indeterminate scores, Tudor says they make him “feel
alive in every part of my consciousness”. I believe this is because the indeterminacy of
what he plays makes him alert and does not readily allow him to fall into accustomed
habits of listening or performing. In this sense, the score might act as a stand in for the
Whole or for the virtual, which is never given. The score, being indeterminate, is never
given.

The indeterminate score is completely self-differentiating in its successive

actualizations (performances). This could provide a kind of ultimate or absolute
explanation for the feeling of being alive that he felt: the shock of the new actualized
forms emerging from the living, breathing score. This feeling of newness would be in
contrast to the habituated and largely unconscious feelings generated by the rigidly
notated (although with sections a performer can choose to play, not play, or play in a
16

Birdwise 17
uncertain order), ready-made, repeatable and quantized scores of Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Even though Stockhausen’s scores allow some choice on the composer’s part, arguably
nothing new is created in successive performances. When one finally learns how to play
one of these Stockhausen pieces, one can more or less let habit take over, whereas ideally
with a Cage score one must expect the unexpected.
It is also worth noting that John Cage often used chance procedures (such as
rolling dice or consulting the I Ching) in order to derive the notation of many of his
scores, and in some cases calling for the use of chance techniques during the performance
of his scores as well. For Cage, this was about removing himself from the compositional
process. It is interesting to consider this in light of the virtual. By surrendering one’s self
to chance, to pre-personal and pre-individual inorganic forces, and using these undefined
and random forces to create the work, one is able to actualize something, a score, an
action, a performance with many potential outcomes.

This surrender to chance, to

impersonal (inorganic) forces could be seen as a way of actualizing the virtual in such a
way that respects its indeterminacy. It is a kind of work that respects something of the
virtual’s spirit, even if the openness of the work pales in comparison to the massive and
radical openness of the virtual.
The work of John Cage and David Tudor is related to the work of Gerard Grisey,
a spectral composer.

Broadly speaking, spectral music claims to base its musical

modalities less on tradition and more on the physical and perceptual qualities of sound.
Furthermore, being sound-based rather than being note-based, spectral music tends to
treat sound less as an immobile structure, grouping of pitches, or some other atomized
formation, and more as a living entity shifting through time. This is why the music is
referred to as spectral, because it is concerned with or draws inspiration from the physical
17

Birdwise 18
spectrum of sound and its behavior through time. In one his pieces, Partiels, Grisey has a
group of eighteen musicians playing a variety of instruments ranging from brass to
strings. The instrumentation is unconventional by new music standards (a fairly standard
orchestral grouping with no electronics, or unusual or modified instruments) yet the
music opens onto a new harmonic and timbral world. Furthermore, the music is less
defined by discrete events such as melodies and individual notes than it is by the
continual shifting and blurring that occurs between elements such as harmony, texture,
timbre, rhythm and between the playing of one instrument and another. Often the form
of the piece seems to be in perpetual transition, without a return to identical parts. One is
less inclined to hear motifs, melodies and individual instruments playing in counterpoint,
as they are to hear a perpetually evolving sound mass that varies in ways far more
qualitative than quantitative. As Grisey remarks, “the way in which the work is organized
corresponds with the way it is produced within its length.” (Dufourt 293) In this way,
spectral music is durational and suggests a relationship between performance strategies
and the virtual. The music as a whole, with its shifting timbres and inward agitation, is
best described as a kind of mega-gesture that encompasses and subsumes all of its micromovements. In other words, it pushes the listener towards grasping the piece as a shifting
and continuous whole than as a series of discrete parts woven together.

2.) PAINTING
According to Slavoj Zizek, Jackson Pollock is a painter of the virtual. Pollock is
the
“ultimate Deleuzian painter”: does his action-painting not directly render this flow of
pure becoming, the impersonal-unconscious life energy, the encompassing field of
18

Birdwise 19
virtuality out of which determinate paintings can actualize themselves, this field of
pure intensities with no meaning to be unearthed by interpretation? (Zizek 5)
While Zizek is engaging in hyperbole, his description of Pollock’s process is useful.
Pollock’s paintings can be interpreted as an analogy or metaphor for the virtual. One
cannot truly render the virtual, even in a purportedly non-representational painting, but
one can hopefully instill a less habitual state of perception (a perception that rigidly fixes
or spatializes forms) in the viewer of the work. This less habitual state might help the
viewer to break away from commonsense notions of the real. How might this state
function? The intense, abstract play of splattered paint might cause one to momentarily
experience the space of the painting not in a geometric and spatialized way, but rather in
a qualitative and indivisibly shifting way that does away with ideas of figure and ground
and of fixed forms and positive and negative spaces within the painting. This process
would occur through time: the complex play of the paint causing mirages of form to
emerge, dissipate and transform as the viewer views the work through time. This in turn
brings one closer to a durational experience of space, time and consciousness in general
and grants one an intuition of the ever-changing or becoming Whole. The painting might
then be seen as a metaphor for the virtual or the Whole, because one would experience a
little bit of the virtual through relating to it, intensifying one’s experience of the Whole.
One might be able to see, at least in theory, how the experience of the intensity of the
painting might be extended to realms outside of the world created in the painting.
Another painter whom I consider to be closely related to my thinking about the
virtual is Francis Bacon. Bacon’s paintings depict bodies (and to a lesser extent spaces) in
a state of becoming. Gestures, bodies, perspectives even, seem to be only partially
formed and in flux, a state of simultaneous making and unmaking. It should also be
19

Birdwise 20
noted that Bacon would sometimes attack his canvasses with paint and other implements,
using these chance-derived, indeterminate markings as non-representational sources of
imagery for paintings that walked the line between abstraction and figuration, planning
and indeterminacy, stillness and movement. Indeed, the smears not only help in the
generative process of the paintings completion, they also act as living elements in the
viewer’s construction/destruction of the paintings. Even though a Bacon painting is static,
it nonetheless preserves something of movement. Philosopher Jennifer Dyer described
this movement as a “serially iterative process.” She describes how the paintings work in
this process:
They tell the viewer where to look and how to look, directing the viewer towards the
figure’s activity of actualization. There the viewer is presented with the juxtaposition
of realist representation and destructive marks and smears which involve the viewer
in constructively relating them in order to actualize the figure. Participation in the
activity of the figure is a constructive process of relating one part to another, yet each
relational construction both changes or destroys previous constructions and leads to
further constructions. Thus the figure’s activity of actualization is a serially iterative
process of continual becoming and continual dissolution in which the viewer
participates. (Dyer np)
Thus, Bacon’s paintings might be seen to exist in a space between being and becoming.
The paintings are always in the process of being actualized but also passing once again
into the virtual. This kind of ‘double-movement’ is something that I am striving for in
some of my own work.

20

Birdwise 21
3.) Self-Portrait
In an essay called “Notes on Gesture,” Giorgio Agamben writes,
Every image, in fact, is animated by an antinomic polarity: on the one hand, images
are the reification of the gesture (it is the imago as death mask or symbol); on the
other hand, they preserve the dynamis intact (as in Muybridge’s snapshots or in any
sports photograph). The former corresponds to the recollection seized by voluntary
memory, while the latter corresponds to the image flashing in the epiphany of
involuntary memory. And while the former lives in magical isolation, the latter refers
beyond itself to a whole of which it is a part. (55)
This passage, which summarizes my interest in time, change, and still and moving
images, has a distinctly Bergsonian tone, especially in reference to the image’s “whole of
which it is a part” (55). In my own work, starting with Videoportraits, and continuing
today (many pieces are still in process and as yet untitled), I am trying to embody this
‘antinomic polarity’. I am also trying to introduce those aspects of surprise, continuity,
rupture, construction and destruction that I feel are present in some of the artist’s work
described in preceding paragraphs.
In order to explain how this functions, I will begin discussion of my work by
focusing on a piece titled Self-Portrait. Self-Portrait is featured on 3 television monitors,
each with their own soundtrack (on 3 pairs of headphones). The monitors are displayed
left to right in a form resembling a triptych. (Documentation of Self-Portrait can be
found on the attached Visual Documentation DVD, each monitor can be viewed
separately.)

21

Birdwise 22
Left monitor: a video showing a series of over 2000 still images of me taken at different
times and places during an 8 month period. The individual images are shown for the
duration of exactly one frame, that being .033 milliseconds. The video is constantly
pulsing, jump-cutting and changing at high speed. The non-diegtic soundtrack is a series
of electronic pulses moving in and out of phase, at the rates of .033 and .032 milliseconds
respectively, tuned in a ratio of 32/33, and layered overtop of each other in 3 octaves.
The sound is very intense, further enhancing (and doubling) the sense of enormous speed
of the ‘granular movement’ (a kind of hyperactive montage) of the still images.

Middle monitor: a video-image of myself looking at my reflection in a mirror. At first
glance, nothing seems to be happening, I am just leaning towards the mirror, almost
motionless, looking intently at my reflection, but closer inspection reveals that my mirror
image eventually goes out of phase with the main subject, so that my reflection appears to
be either running faster or slower than my self, depending on the viewer’s interpretation.
As this is happening, a minimal electronic tone (made from sine waves) gradually
increases in volume, and becomes slightly dissonant (in a binaural and microtonally
‘beating’ way, one of the waveforms detuning less than a quartertone in relation to the
other one which remains stable) when I begin to slide out of phase with myself.

Right monitor: another video-image of me. The vantage point of the camera is in constant
motion, but my image (in this case my head and shoulders) is always centered in the ‘eye
of the storm’ of this roving perspective, as if a camera was placed on the edge of a giant
turntable, lens facing inwards, my image rotating at the center of that turntable as the
camera rotates with it. The background blurs and shifts behind me in a peculiar way, and
22

Birdwise 23
my face seems to be traversed by all kinds of distortions, similar to the background but
less intense. The image is a composite of many semi-transparent layers of the same
footage (created by reducing the opacity of the footage), running at different speeds and
slightly staggered in time (somewhat like an uneven staircase). I shot this footage with
the video camera in my extended hand, the lens pointing backwards towards me, as I
turned in a circle, centrifugally, in my bedroom. Even though I was constantly moving, I
tried to keep my face and camera-arm as stable as possible (in relation to my face), to
keep a constant kind of framing of myself in the mobile composition, and to minimize the
shifting motion of my face relative to the shifts of the room. Each moment (each frame)
of the completed video can be said to interpenetrate or co-exist with other moments both
before and after it. Linear time is out phase with itself. The room visually blurs, shifts
and overlaps with itself more obviously than my face (my face is always central but the
room is always peripheral). I am a relatively stable center in relation to the room. The
soundtrack is only the layering of the diegetic sound (room tone, traffic in the distance,
my footsteps), equally out of phase and co-extensive with itself in time. I feel that this
commingling of what are usually regarded as separate image frames and samples of
sound and movement is comparable to the blurredness of a Francis Bacon painting or
shifting continuity of spectral music.
The entire installation loops continuously, but each monitor (video) of the triptych
has its own duration. In this sense, the installation is out of phase with itself, or rather
there is no ideal relation in terms of beginning, ending or middle between the videos.
There is nothing in the sense of a normal narrative either, no particular way to watch or
relate the videos (although I am sure it is more likely to generate some kind of meaning,
feeling and affect more than others). The installation is serial as well: it has many
23

Birdwise 24
different permutations, even though the ‘content’ (in the sense of the videos shown) is
fixed, much like the different permutations of the 12 notes of the chromatic scale used in
the 12-tone method of some serialist music.
My work tries to facilitate what Bergson calls intuition. This is not intuition in the
normal sense of intuition. Because duration is not spatial, it is not fully graspable or
capable of being directly experienced by (human) consciousness, which tends towards
spatialization, although we can expand our consciousness to appreciate something closer
to the full duration (Deleuze 33). The closest that one can get to grasping duration in its
non-conceptual, non-signifying quality is by what Bergson refers to as intuition.
According to Totaro, in Bergson’s epistemological system, “…Intuition is the process
used to understand the flux of reality, while the intellect gives us a necessary, pragmatic
grasp of reality.” (Totaro np) Intuition is best described as a special kind of concentration
or thought, detached from pragmatic ends. It is the kind of thought least inclined towards
fragmentation or any kind of spatialization (Totaro np).

One might consider it as

‘thinking in duration’. Deleuze gives the example of watching a sugar cube slowly
dissolving in a cup of tea:
Take a lump of sugar: It has a spatial configuration. But if we approach it from that
angle, all we will ever grasp are differences in degree between that sugar and any
other thing. But it also has duration, a rhythm of duration, a way of being in time that
is at least partially revealed in the process of its dissolving, and that shows how this
sugar differs in kind not only from other things, but first and foremost from itself.
(Deleuze 31-32)
When you grasp the changing of the sugar in terms of duration, you can extend the idea
of duration to other objects, realizing that they too are not static entities but processes
24

Birdwise 25
(Deleuze 33).
In my work, I try to depict my subjects in a non-static way, to encourage the viewer
to think in duration. I depict my subjects using multiple perspectives (such as multiple
monitors and multiple images taken over a period of time), multiple points of view,
motion, and various image distortions including layering. I do this to imply multiple
states of becoming. I also portray the portrayal of my subjects through the use of selfreflexive strategies that make one aware of the subject as representation, the subject as
spatialization.
In the right monitor of Self-Portrait I am exploring temporality and intuition in at
least two ways. One of these ways is temporality considered not as a series of discrete
states but as an interpenetrating, qualitative and shifting multiplicity. My exploration
again involves taking multiple transparencies of the same footage (I reduced the opacity
of each clip) and overlaying them one on top of the other, slightly out of phase both in
terms of start and end points, and also in terms of speed. Some clips are playing slower
or faster than others even though they are from the same shot (there are no cuts). In a
literal sense I am commingling the past, present and future at any given moment (or
frame) of the video. Each moment is haunted by both its ‘before’ and its ‘after’, at once
ethereal and concrete.
In the right monitor, there is a relative stability of my own image next to its
shifting background, implying differential speeds and relative degrees of rest and motion,
perhaps implying different time spans with faster or slower rates of change or stability
within the subject matter (the entire milieu or mise en scene) of the image. From a
Deleuzian or Bergsonian perspective it could be a regarded as a metaphor for the
emergence of a subject or image from a larger aggregate of all images (duration), as a
25

Birdwise 26
metaphor for the fluidity of the transformations of a subject’s interior or exterior life or as
a metaphor for how in Bergson’s system there are no actual entities, only events and
processes, ‘becomings’ if you will.
The middle monitor has a minimal soundtrack that increases in tension. The
soundtrack’s tension is the result of two sinewaves tuned to the same pitch gradually
diverging in pitch over time. As they depart, one hears difference tones. These tones are
caused by the relationship between the two pitches and the perceiver’s brain, in this sense
being the result of a process-based feedback loop where the whole is greater than the sum
of its parts. Concurrent with this psychoacoustic phenomenon we see the reflected image
of myself in the mirror depart in frequency from my observing image. The image of
myself, like the two tones, comes to differ from itself through time. In this sense, one can
see how I am playing with the idea of the self as being that which differs from itself
through time. Furthermore, the reflected image, normally identified with the self, comes
to differ from the self. In this sense, it could be construed as a metaphor for how we
delimit our true, ineffable self through representation.
The left monitor is the most animated of the three, with its propulsive series of still
images shown in rapid succession. It is ironic that there is no continuity between the
frames, yet in spite of, and likely because of this, it has the greatest sense of motion, of
speed and change. Multiple, possibly unrelated images of myself proliferate at hyperspeed. The frames are shown in a deliberately random order and make no attempt to
create anything like a natural movement or gesture. In a sense, one could say that this
monitor depicts me in a hyper-spatialized way, but in pushing this logic to the extreme, it
contains the possibility of reversal. Because of the excessive and random divisions of its
subject matter, it challenges rather than compliments our customary way of viewing a
26

Birdwise 27
subject in time (and space), that is, from the sensory-motor perspective of our own body
(the habituated perspective dictated by our survival needs).

Conclusion: Stillness and Movement Studies
By way of a conclusion, I would like to consider Deleuze’s notion of a time-image
and how it relates to my current body of work, Stillness and Movement Studies. This
work is a video installation installed in a very dark room, about twelve by twenty feet
wide. The video is a single channel projection displayed on a large (one and a half by
two meters wide) screen made out of very smooth, painted wood, approximately two
inches in relief of the rear wall. The screen was set off because I wanted to imply a
subtle physicality to the image, making it more like an object in the sense that a
traditional framed portrait, painting or photograph is an object—that is, a material object
as well as an image. The gallery walls were painted dark grey to minimize the light
reflected in the room and to create a mysterious and contemplative atmosphere.
Stillness and Movement Studies presents a series of faces in close-up, each one shown
one at a time. The faces stare at the camera, and move in slow motion, but this is not all
that happens. Over time, the viewer witnesses each of the five faces transforming as it is
traversed by subtle blurs, distortions, changes in mood (facial expression) and shifts in
lighting. The lighting effect was produced by movements of the main light source (a
lamp) during the recording. The combined effect is, and aimed to be, uncanny. In
addition to moving a light on my subject as I filmed them, I slowed the footage down
during editing and created transparent layers (or doubles of the same footage) that could
be placed on top of each other. By adjusting opacity levels of the layers in Final Cut Pro
successive versions of the same take were made to fade in and out of intensity, and by
27

Birdwise 28
remapping the frame rate (speed), I was able to get the various layers to move in and out
of phase with one another, in a temporal sense. The overall intention of these studies is to
explore a kind of physical and temporal collision, with the video blurring past, present,
and future. In this sense, I consider the work to be what Deleuze would describe as a
time-image.
Totaro, paraphrasing Deleuze, discusses how a ‘non-rational’ image (a time-image),
of the kind I have produced, can actually break away from our habitual sensory-motor
perspective:
the rational sensory motor link is broken down and replaced by the 'noncommensurable' edit characteristic of the time-image. With the breakdown of the
sensory motor mechanism the temporal relationship between shots becomes 'nonrational' and 'non-commensurable’…dislodging the edit from the hierarchy of action
and movement, it erases the link that acts as a divisible, spatializing element of
time…This is what Deleuze means when he says that in the movement-image time is
at the service of movement. By not relying on these sensory motor edits the film
opens itself up to the whole (duration) and the time-image becomes possible. (Totaro
np)
The time-image is not always the image that seems to flow the most smoothly, rather, by
breaking away from a ‘perceptually natural’ or normal flow of time and space, it can
bring us closer to an intuition of duration.
Stillness and Movement Studies returns to the Deleuzian equation of unedited or
rationally cut series of images with a sensory-motor spatialization of time that
subordinates it to an interested perspective and body movement—that is, to an individual
body with its own needs and habits. In this work, the flow of images seems smooth at
28

Birdwise 29
first but more careful concentration on the video reveals subtle and uncanny disjunctions.
The work takes some of the techniques developed in Self-Portrait, most notably the
layering of successive instances of time, and pushes them further, refining them
aesthetically and incorporating a highly controlled use of light.

The temporal

disjunctions and confusions alluded to by a time-image are present in the piece, but they
are so in a manner that is more subtle that abrupt, which creates something almost
naturalistic about the portraits. This subtle tension in the work gives it a quality that is at
once ethereal and concrete. It is as if each of the portraits/studies is poised between a
state of virtuality and actuality. The effect of these studies is much like the left monitor of
Self-Portrait, but it is considerably subtler. Because the work is installed in a darkened
space and because the editing and post-production approach is more seamless, the focus
is allowed to shift from the constructed nature of the image toward the continual
becoming of the self. The face moves in slow motion, granting an indefinite quality to its
expressions, as they exist in several layers of dilated time, all slowed down and all
interpenetrating. The faces are illuminated by a moving light source that causes each
face to take on alternately sculptural, painterly, and ethereal qualities. These qualities
reference conventional photographic lighting techniques such as Rembrandt lighting and
chiaroscuro, as well as more indeterminate states of illumination. The work is a deliberate
attempt on my part to create an image with variable (and possibly indiscernible)
expressive qualities, as well as a variable ‘lighting context’, as one of my professors used
to say in college.
Illumination is often equated with knowledge and truth. In my recent pieces, the
relationship with the light reveals but also delimits and distorts the subject. If there is too
much or too little light, we see only a patch of blinding light or utter darkness. Between
29

Birdwise 30
these two extremes there are multiple potentials and actualizations—both subject and
light (context) move and change through time. In this sense, the truth of the situation is
defined by the relationship between all of the parts, but these parts themselves are not
fixed nor wholes in themselves. The parts are processes occurring through time,
processes which subsume other processes occurring inside them. "The truth" in the sense
of the conventional photographic moment or essential (transcending time and space)
image of the face is never completely given, but is the greater process that exceeds the
continually shifting relationships between the parts, and it exists within the parts
themselves. This is a key principle that I have attempted to develop through my various
Stillness and Movement Studies.
Stillness and Movement Studies is part of an ongoing series of works that
concern themselves with the virtual and duration. In the future, I want to continue to
refine my technique of moving light, in some cases appropriating other lighting situations
derived from the history of painting and photography. I would also appropriate some of
the accoutrements, gestures and expressions seen in the history of portraiture, and also
those accoutrements, gestures and expressions attributed to the various cultures and
subcultures we see in our streets and the surrounding world. My aim is to put these
things into motion, to reduce them to becomings, rather than as idealized states,
quantifiable frames of movement, or teleological goals or ideals. I see myself
experimenting again with backgrounds constituted by several distinct planes of
movement, applying the layering and moving light technique that I developed in my
Graduation project. I look forward to creating new situations where the sense of distinct
planes is transient, where one plane, perhaps through movement and lighting, might
appear to pass into or become another, in both temporal and spatial terms. These new
30

Birdwise 31
situations will continue to explore Bergson’s notion that “there is for us nothing that is
instantaneous.”

31

Birdwise 32
WORKS CITED
Agamben, Giorgio. Means without End: Notes on Politics. Trans. Vincenzo Binetti and
Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Antliff, Robert Mark. “Bergson and Cubism: A Reassessment”. Art Journal, Vol. 47, No.
4, Revising Cubism (Winter, 1988).
Bergson, Henri. The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics. New York:
Kensington Publishing Corp., 1946.
Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer.
New York: Zone Books, 2002.
Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness.
London: George Allen and Unwin, 1910.
Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New
York: Zone Books, 1991.
Dufourt, Hugues. “Musique Spectrale” (1979). Reprinted in Musique, pouvoir, écriture.
Paris: Editions Christian Bourgois, pp.289-294, 1991.
Dyer, Jenniffer. “Paint And Suffering: Series And Community In Francis Bacon's
Paintings.” Animus: A Philosophical Journal for our Time. Vol. 8 (2003):
Aesthetics.10

March

2008.

<http://www2.swgc.mun.ca/animus/2003vol8/Dyer8.htm>
Pearson, Keith-Ansell. “Beyond the Human Condition: An Introduction to Deleuze’s
Lecture Course 1.” SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism. #114,
Vol. 36, no. 3, 2007. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007.
Totaro, Donato. “Time, Bergson, and the Cinematographical Mechanism.” Offscreen
(www.offscreen.com). Montreal. Volume 5, Issue 1 January 2001. 10 March
32

Birdwise 33
2008. <http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/Bergson_film.html>
Tudor, David. “David Tudor O-Ton” (David Tudor and John Cage interviewed by
Mogens Andersen in a broadcast of Danmarks radio on June 3rd, 1963.) David
Tudor: Music for Piano, CD. Edition RZ, 2007.
Zizek, Slavoj. Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences. New York:
Routledge, 2004.

33