#temporal illusions

Slum Clearance (2017), by Michael C Coldwell

This new music video for CC is also part of my ongoing project: The Remote Viewer

The experimental film features archive photographs of Quarry Hill in Leeds, and is the latest test output in my research project into rephotography and hauntology. The fieldwork for my PhD is now complete- the result has been a large corpus of impossible rephotographs, all depicting urban landscapes which no longer exist. 

My problem now is how to present these images in ways which communicate this thwarted rephotographic process, investigate the haunting/affecting qualities of the photographic artefacts themselves and continue to pose those crucial temporal and ontological questions of the medium. 

Here I try to evoke the experience of searching for these lost spaces, the absence of them - the images drift on top of each other, unresolved, unreconciled - though the photographs have been returned to where they came from, they can find no foothold, they are forever in limbo...

The science behind making your holiday last longer

Ever noticed how a week spent in repose on a sandy beach seems to fly by, but seven days beavering away at the office drags on forever? It’s a tragedy. If only there were a way we could change that, making our holidays last longer and our labours fly by.

Well, a growing body of evidence suggests this is possible. Sure, an hour is an hour, a day a day, but the mind, claim scientists, can be tricked into thinking otherwise. You just have to know how.  

“Time perception, just like vision, is a construction of the brain – and shockingly easy to manipulate,” wrote David Eagleman, a US neuroscientist and best-selling author, in an essay titled Brain Time.

“We all know about optical illusions, in which things appear different from how they really are; less well known is the world of temporal illusions.”

Temporal illusions are things that distort our perception of time. They can be triggered by all sorts of experiences: sport, sex, sightseeing, even psychedelic drugs. Especially psychedelic drugs.

Michael Coldwell - This Will Be No Longer There (2016)

“Death as eidos of the photograph then begins to take on a particularly interesting character as Barthes relates it to temporality, the temporal paradox of the photograph which he first describes as “a perverse confusion” of the Real and the Live: “by attesting that the object has been real [the certification of past-presence], the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive [a delusion of present-presence], because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolutely superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past (“this-has-been”), the photograph suggests that it is already dead” (CL 79). Barthes later reformulates this temporal character of the photograph as the simultaneous experience/perception in reading of the “this will be” and the “this has been.” This temporal paradox is the strange, almost hallucinatory, experience of the future anterior “of which death is the stake.”” 

Lori Wike, Photographs and Signatures: Absence, Presence, and Temporality in Barthes and Derrida, 2000 InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture

Michael Coldwell - Under The Stones At Kirkstall Bridge (2016)

The Forest of Leeds

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II The Time Image (Preface)