With the Internet, we now live in the age of the instant. New media technologies and their effects on globalization continue to accelerate our ability to send and receive information and as these technologies advance our sense of time only continues to compress. Bill Viola, the contemporary video artist, explores what happens when slowing down videos reverses this paradigm.
Viola’s Quintet Series from 2000 is a set of four videos that feature five actors who are each expressing their own reactions to various emotions (e.g. astonishment, remembrance, etc.). However, the videos are extremely slowed down to the point where every detail of the actors’ changing expressions can be detected. The audience is placed into a position of feeling accelerated in a sense; a very particular affect that forces one to reconsider how we think about time and emotion.
The irony surrounding Viola’s slow motion videos is that it is a challenge for the audience to watch the entire video, as the Quintet Series videos are all fifteen-minute loops. In a period of instantaneous gratification it is difficult to experience the whole thing. However, this irony only makes the feeling of acceleration stronger. Perhaps we don’t need H.G. Wells’ New Accelerator, just the Internet.
No comments:
Post a Comment