Overview
The central component of The Timed Body is an interactive sampling of the performance, web and video project, Four Acts of Violence Leading Up to Now (Ellis, Corbet & Leach, 2006). The project, which premiered in Melbourne in September 2006, considers personal and glancing perspectives on the microtraumatic impacts of time.
This account of Four Acts in The Timed Body incorporates animated, aural and videographic components of the project, whilst talking to conceptual concerns for Henri Bergson’s la durée. In it I attempt to sidestep the spatialised (mapped) body in which humans act as containers for memory, and instead offer a consideration and performed articulation of a temporality of remembering.
Although memory is conventionally linked with time, for Henri Bergson, time “is the spatialized, measurable counterpart of space, the other of space” (Grosz, 2004 p.279) that is already marked by the penetration of space. In Bergson’s efforts to distil or untangle time and space he proposes ‘the data of consciousness’ as being temporal, in other words duration (la durée). Duration incorporates, by definition, newness and creativity and it is where “our memories are forged” (Cariou, 1999 p.102).
Simon Ellis
1 May 2008