The Time-Image and Video Data in Research Creation

• In Event: Video Data and the Time-Image: Cinematic Methodologies in Education Research

Abstract

Objectives:

Deleuze’s books on Cinema provide us with the theories to think about research methodologies and video data liberated from a sequencing of images attached to a single observer, to a presentation of affects, intensities, and ‘any point whatever.’ In this paper I engage with particular concepts in relation to video data collected in a large research study on artistic interventions in public schools. In particular, I’ll discuss the movement-image and the time-image and their relationship to faciality.
Theoretical Framework:
As opposed to organizing perception from our own interests and embodied locations, cinema, Deleuze argues, presents us with indirect and direct images of time. The movement-image produces indirect images of time. In the movement-image the camera moves, as a body moves, while the camera also produces other moving bodies. With the time-image we get a direct image of time where movement becomes aberrant and irrational. In the time-image it is not movement that happens to objects. Rather, according to Deleuze, life is movement from which distinct things are then actualized.
In the time-image we can begin to experience another kind of time, one not bound to linearity or narrative unity. Colebrook (2002) writes: “Visual images are composed and ordered, not to form moving things or ordered wholes, but images as such – not images of some world from some point of view” (p. 33). Thus, movement is not contained within a particular body with a particular point of view, rather movement is transversal becomings from which we compose and re-compose the world.
Methods:
Cinema, Deleuze suggests, enables us to think about mobile sections and the process of montage. Using concepts like montage, time-image, movement, and affect I examine a series of video pieces collected during a large research study on artistic interventions in schools. Rather than examining the data as a part within a whole, I approach the video as singularities, as time-images where “[t]he set cannot divide into parts without qualitatively changing each time: it is neither divisible nor indivisible, but ‘dividual’” (Deleuze, 1986, p. 14). This is absolute movement where “singularities are distributed in a properly problematic field as topological events to which no direction is attached (Deleuze, 1990, p. 104).
Significance:
As aberrant movement data becomes: “machinic montages that bring into conjunctions semiotic chains and an intercrossing of material and social fluxes” (Guattari in Manning, 2013, p. 52). Rather than thinking of video data as a whole we need to think about it as singularities; as an Open whole: “if the whole is not giveable, it is because it is the Open, and because its nature is to change constantly, or to give rise to something new, in short, to endure” (Deleuze, 1986, p. 9). This is crucial because the time-image as difference exceeds the present that enables the moving video data to become inventive, no longer conditioned by an image of what is worth learning (Pinar, 2004).

Author

• Stephanie Springgay, OISE/University of Toronto