| Time in Animated Images - a semiotic approach | |
e-mail: laurentz@uol.com.br
This study makes an analysis of theoretical questions related to Time and Images based on Peircean thought, establising a dialogue with other authors and concepts.
The aim of this presentation is to talk about issues of sign systems that develop in the sequentiallity of time.
Actually, everything that has a concrete form in the world has some kind of space-time and this is its quality of being materialized in the world.
The focus of our study is specifically images. However, images can be defined in such generalized ways that one could not arrive at satisfactory elucidations of this concept.
Therefore, we should restrict our universe even more in order to make it accessible and functional. We will talk only about images that can be seen (and not merely envisioned), that have been man-made, and that are upheld by some form of support.
In this regard, Jacques Aumont gives us a first interesting approach to these images.
According to Aumont (Aumont,1993), there are images that are identical to themselves over time; and there are images that change over time, without the intervention of the spectator, and only by the mechanism that has produced and presented them.
This is an interesting point from which to enter our principal focus: the animated images.
An image put into the world already has these qualities mentioned by Aumont. Because a single image can undergo as much space-time transformation as can a sequence of images put side by side.
For example, a single image undergoes change due to the wearing away of its support.
In this way, a photograph that I took when I was a child is not the same now.
However, when we are referring to images placed side by side, we have to take into consideration the individual time and space of each one as well as the images all together forming a whole.
Therefore, a single frame alone has different temporal and spatial qualities to those it has when it is placed beside another frame.
This construction, this arrangement of frames, can be carried out in different ways:
This change may occur in a more or less smooth way, depending on the rate of change occurring between the first and the second frame;
By maneuvering these three possibilities we can construct an infinity of signs that will cause different sensations of rhythms and movements.
In the rhythm, for example, we can get structures of expansion and retraction. We can get an effect of tension and relaxation, of quickness and vagueness, and so on.
In the movement we can create several kinds of space variations so long as they belong to the limits of a screen.
What we can immediately perceive is that the limits of the movement and rhythm of an image do not have disjoined barriers.
One interferes in the other, that is, rough movements of a camera can offer accelerated rhythms of a scene with the same, or more, tension as a montage of different frames following one another in a stroboscopic sequence of images.
To illustrate this point, we can mention two great masters of current cinematography.
Win Wenders, in "Paris Texas", for example, works with wide and slow movements of the camera creating an astonishing vagueness.
On the other hand, Peter Greenaway works with an excess of information of the baroque structures (for example, in "The Prosperous Book") causing an illusion of "compression" by handling the time in a saturated space, and even so, he manages to create moments of relaxation and slowness in some parts of his movies.
Both of them are looking for other territories of the visual syntax.
Now we can already perceive three moments of time in the images: one time that is in the world and leaves marks on the concrete things of the world; and another time that is in the individual image and is able to create different rhythms, movements and sensations.
There is still another time that takes place in the relationship between one image and another one. This relationship between two images, that was not in these images when they were alone in the world, will generate other times, rhythms, movements.
Raymond Bellour, in his book "L’Entre-images" (Bellour, 1997) works exclusively with interrelationships of images which he calls ‘passages’. Passages "...between mobile and immobile, between photographic analogy and that which transforms it. Passages, corollaries which cross without entirely enclosing these ‘universals’ of the image; in this way a multiplicity of superpositions, unpredictable configurations, are produced within photograph, cinema and video".
With ability he navigates through this ethereal land, or rather he floats "between two photograms, likewise between two screens, between two thicknesses of matter, in the same way between two speeds..." (Bellour, 1997:15).
In regard to the three moments of images, Lucia Santaella has other view points which we could raise for discussion.
In her work entitled "Image" (Santaella & Nöth, in print), Lúcia establishes three kinds of time which would be closely linked to this issue of the images.
The first is the time that is intrinsic to the image, the second is the time that is extrinsic and the third is the interstitial time.
This latter is the time that is born from "the intercrossing of a percipient subject and a perceived object, that is to say, the time which is constructed in, and by, perception. In all its levels perception is made up of time".
Santaella further defines three types of time of perception: physiological time, biological time, and logical time.
Physiological time is the one within the interior of the perceiver; biological time, a time external to the perceiver; and logical time would be a synthesis of this perception, of this event.
In this way, logical time is the one which takes place in the relationship between the images and their receiver. From the point of view of the images, they have temporal qualities which can be perceived so long as they meet with an interpreter in conditions to perceive them, given that, from the point of view of the receiver, the latter has qualities of reception that are able to perceive the qualities of the images, but only of those images which would be possible through the receiver’s qualities of perception.
Thus, there is a time in the world, there is a time of the image, which is in this world; there is a time of the spectator, who observes the image and who is also in the world; and there is a synthetic time of the relationship between these last two. It is in this synthesis that the recognition of time takes place, and this recognition of time can pertain to different levels, as we shall see in some authors.
Actually, the theme of a time of the spectator which interrelates with the time of the image which has been perceived, has been widely developed.
Jean-Marie Schaeffer, in "L’Image précaire" (Schaeffer, 1996), highlighted that quality of an image which does not exist on its own, but is capable of transmission, for the spectator places in this image something which is his own, and adds something to it.
Schaeffer explains this "arché" of photography; "a photograph functions like an indicial image so long as one is aware that it concerns a photograph and what this fact implies" (Schaeffer, 1996: 38).
In other words, in reference to photography, but also able to be extended to other media, for example, one must understand all the conventional aspects of photography in order for it to function as an indicator of the real.
That is, a photograph represents by means of a norm which must be interpreted. And this interpretation is a synthesis of two distinct moments in time.
Jacques Aumont, in his book, "The Image" (Aumont, 1993), raises the issue that this something more, which is not in the image, but which is capable of projecting to the spectator, is a knowledge about the generation of the image, about its mode of production. The image contains a mode of usage which its spectator supposedly knows.
This is also true in reference to the temporality of this image. If now we were to think of cinematography, many conventions have been created by this means which could be interpreted in terms of duration, sensation of time, or even, a representation of time.
There are images which last, montages and collages, sequences and intervals, metaphors and metonimies, these, without take into consideration the cultural time which the different cinematographical styles denote, in that we can differentiate a German expressionist cinema from a Russian constructivist one, from a French "nouvelle vague".
Going a bit further , but still in reference to the relationship between image and receiver, Deleuze, in his book, "Image - Time" (Deleuze, 1990), exposes the concept of crystal-image. This notion of crystal-image designates the coexistence of current image and a virtual image. The current one, which extends in the present, is updated in the lived present, and the virtual one, which lives in the past, coexists in the image in the present; it is the past in the present.
According to Deleuze, the very notion of time was altered by cinematography.
The primordial factor pointed out by Deleuze is irreducibility of this aspect of the image, where the current image and the virtual image form an indivisible unity.
We could say, if we wish to extend this notion of Deleuze’s, that the current is the objective, while the virtual would be the subjective of the image. And this subjectivity to which we refer is not our psychological subjectivity; it lies in the same territory of time to which is being referred. A time which exists in the purest virtuality.
Another issue is raised by Arlindo Machado in "Cinema and virtuality" (Machado, 1996). Ever since cinematography began to use the subjective camera excessively we have been able to observe a growing ‘hyperbole of the subject’. The subjective camera is "a type of cinematographical constructivism in which there is an overlapping between the vision given by the camera to the spectator and the vision of a particular character. In other words, the I (spectator) see in a screen exactly what the character sees in his visual field" (Machado, 1996:173), where the subject inserts ‘himself’ into the film. With this supremacy of the subject there is an overvaluation of the subject’s time in detriment to the time of the images.
In interactive games like videogames, this becomes more evident. "In some cases, such as in simulations of automobile races or plane flights, this insertion takes place, such as in cinematography, by means of the classic modality of the subjective camera, with the player taking the pilot’s seat and observing the course in the video screen which he himself determines by means of the maneuvering of flight instruments, with the images always projected from his own point of view" (Machado, 1996: 174).
The subject, who is ‘playing’ those images, controls the action of the events. The immersion takes place to such an extent that the user even confuses the barriers between those images and his own person. One’s time almost touches the other’s. To the extent of not distinguishing for a few instants, where which one’s time begins.
The system of virtual reality promises to extrapolate all these barriers when we ‘dive’ into the virtual images and sounds generated by the computer.
For Prigogine, an eminent contemporary physicist, the discovery of irreversibility of some phenomena places us before the perspective of the progressive evolution of the universe. In his opinion, there is a current of irreversibility which is one of the constitutive elements of the universe. In this sense the universe is an irreversible evolution.
"Einstein had already explicitly recognized that the problems of space-time and matter were linked. Nowadays we must go further, we must understand that space-time structure is linked to irreversibility..." (Prigogine, 1990:73).
"The evolution of the universe did not take place in the direction of downgrading, but of increase in complexity, with structures that appear progressively on all levels, from the stars and the galaxies to the biological systems" (Prigogine, 1990:74).
Prigogine concludes that time is neither an illusion nor a dissipation, but it is creation.
Here Prigogine brings as close as to the Peircian thinking. Time, being a creation approaches the Peircian semiosis, as Santaella well expresses: "Time is synonymous of semiosis or the action of the sign; where there is time, there is action of the sign. The action of the sign is to generate an interpreter and this action evolves in time".
The semiosis is the action in a continuum of the sign, and for Peirce, continuity is time: "The whole conception of time belongs to genuine thirdness"(CP 1.384).
Time, for Peirce, is a variation of space where things occur or last, therefore, the linear and chronological representation is a merely precarious form of representing it. Lucia Santaella has two papers which refer exclusively to these issues about Peirce’s notion of time: "Time as the Logical Process of the Sign" (Santaella, 1992:309-326) and "Sign and Time in the Semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce" (Santaella, in print).
Commenting on signs in this continuity of time - and time here becomes synonymous with continuity, mind, life, intelligence - Santaella says that, "All actualized signs are mixtures of continuity and discontinuity, because pure continuity or time is an abstraction, not an empty abstraction, but an abstraction that guides the action of signs when and wherever they are actualized".
After all these theoretical facts we reach the reason for this paper of mine. We have been through these issues to finally ask ourselves, how does the notion of time relate to the new technologies, to the new electronical media? As Deleuze stated about cinematography having changed our notion of time, can we say the same thing now about the electronic media?
Does this immersion of the computer in visual space modify our notion of time and space?
The computer can generate the movement of an object taking off from mathematical parameters, and no longer taking off from frames placed side by side, as is the case with traditional animation.
It also allows us to participate in the decisions about the events which take place in this virtual universe. Is this already sufficient to provoke changes in our perception of space-time relationships of the images?
Further more, does not navigating through Internet already dismantle all the expectations we had about great distances? And if they change ours spatial expectations, don’t they consequently change our temporal expectations?
I am not yet thinking about answers, rather, I am here to raise questions.
Aumont, J. 1993. A Imagem, Ed. Papirus, São Paulo, Brasil. (Original title in French: "L’Image", Éditions Nathan, 1990).
Bellour, R. 1997. Entre-Imagens - Foto, Cinema, Video, Ed. Papirus, São Paulo, Brasil. (Original title in French: "L’Entre-images - Photo, Cinema, Vidéo", E.L.A/La Difference, 1990).
Deleuze, G. 1990. A Imagem-Tempo, Ed. Braziliense, São Paulo, Brasil. (Original title in French: L’Image-temps, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1985).
Machado, A. 1996. "Cinema e Virtualidade" , Cinema no Século, org. Ismail Xavier, Ed. Imago, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil.
Prigogine, I. 1990. O Nascimento do Tempo, Edições 70, RJ, Brasil. (Original title: La Nascita del Tempo, Edizione Theoria s.r.l., Roma, 1988).
Santaella, L. 1992. "Time as the Logical Process of the Sign", Semiotica 88 - ¾ : 309-326, Berlim.
Santaella, L. "Sign and Time in the Semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce", in print.
Santaella, L. & Nöth, W. Imagem, in print.
Schaeffer, J. 1996. A Imagem Precária - Sobre o dispositivo fotográfico, Ed. Papirus, São Paulo, Brasil. (Original title in French: L’Image Précaire - Du dispositif photographique, Éditions du Seil, 1987).
