Christian Marclay’s "The Clock" and James Richards’s "Active Negative Programme"

Media As Mimetic Storyworld

Proposed to the conference:

Storyworlds across Media Mediality – Multimodality – Transmediality

June 30th – July 2nd, 2011 at Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz

Christian Marclay’s The Clock and James Richards’s Active Negative Programme both mash-up mainstream audiovisual material from film/television and organize it across time and glance— respectively—for their cohesion. What happens when images are lifted from their storyworlds and fit into plain mimesis with the movements and rhythm of lived experience? A parallel media-world begins to open up. The otherwise isolated storyworlds unlock from their authors and turn to face one another, and in so doing they become plain semiotic signs, historical facts, and part of a virtual narrative that depends on the real narrative of living to complete its circuit.

Consider Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze:

The cut image is in stasis. Detached from author, narrative and intent, it is a semiotic sign available for arrangement with other signs. The crisis of authorship is thus deflected onto source points diverse enough to represent an omniscient view, although this ‘omniscience’ is medially confined. The audiovisual archive takes on the same fluidity described for language in “The Death of the Author,” where [film] exists and is merely ‘held together’ by the subject who enunciates it.

Using the audiovisual as a source recasts its stories as objects outside the distinction between fiction and non-fiction. A lens of archeological authenticity is activated where facts about a story become more knowable and stable by repetition. A snippet plumbed from the mine of time is thus received by the compilationist as a historically material fact.

The central structure of a film is a pair of mutually dependent images— a real and a virtual— as with flashbacks and perspectives. When this correspondence is cut the image is locked in the virtual and seeks a real to reflect. It telescopes across media, memory and into lived experience to consummate its pairing with the real.