Steven Scott

My PhD research focuses on cycling patterns of simultaneity, or phasing, between two or more repeating images which I identify as a visual phenomenon in which reoccurrences over time divide between spatial positions. This subject has developed out of my studio practice and my experience of works from contemporary art practice that foreground durational and spatial concerns.

I refer to Henri Bergson’s theories of spatialised time to consider the means by which we apprehend the spatial presentation of moving images and identify degrees of awareness between the temporal and the spatial. I argue that the experience of the non-resolving patterns of behaviour perceived as image phasing extends a viewer’s awareness from the moment of apprehension towards possible future configurations. I consider the perception of possibility in terms that owe a debt to Bergsonian and Deleuzian thinking about the nature of divided time flow as a series points in space. I suggest that the experience of image phasing is one of alternating time apportioned as spatial units, and that this process of spatialisation is predicated upon an accumulating past that is recognised as a pattern for possible future configurations.

Extrapolating from this, I claim that we anticipate the future of multiple temporalities in terms of their relative positions in space and that possibility, the potential future states of the experience, is therefore perceived as separate positions rather than parallel successions.