Time before time

This digital film was produced as part of a body of work in the context of practice based PhD research through which aspects of time within painting were explored in a staged conversation between media. The research, entitled ‘A Fragment of Time in the Pure State; a mapping of Painting’s Time through Proust, Deleuze and the Digital Image’, explored notions of the actual/virtual, haptic/optic and the filmic time, through addressing a specific theoretical proposition. Central questions in the research concerned how an alignment with a Deleuzian and Proustian mapping of time via the digital, as opposed to a Freudian tracing via the photographic model, could enable painting to address our lived experience of time, and reveal ‘pure duration’. The film was produced as part of a 3 month residency at Milchhof e.V. in Berlin, and was exhibited at the end of the residency period in a solo exhibition at Gallery 33, Berlin. The exhibition presented images and texts in the form of paintings, video installations and drawings, worked and reworked through various processes to address research questions concerning the nature of time in painting, and it’s relationship to filmic time, a sense of folded time, and the notion of a plurality of possible worlds. This piece referenced Proust’s notion of ‘a fragment of time in the pure state’, a moment in which the past and present simultaneously exist as virtual and actual. The piece, along with other works from the PhD research were then presented in a solo exhibition at Winchester Gallery as part of the final submission.