'eternity is the state of things at this very moment'
'eternity is the state of things at this very moment'
Crystalline-imaging — a decentralized approach to performance making
Chus Martinez in his essay ‘The Octopus in Love1’ writes that to present a rainforest inside a white cube is an impossibility. A rainforest is the radical other of a white cube: the opposite of culture, the opposite of an exhibit, the contrary of scale, the opposite of legibility, the opposite of ideology, order without subject matter—or rather, without any subject matter other than life in itself2.’ As Martinez asserts, the rainforest is becoming3-nature and nature is a hard thing to conclude. The irony of this endeavour is that the more I/we try to define and express the phenomenology of art=life=nature through singular modalities, the more distance it creates between us and the thing that we are trying to reach for. In our manufactured garden-metropolis, where the growth coordinates of all living thing have long been decided upon, the rainforest4 remains a mirage; a hallucination of dripping sensuality and lush overgrowth. Jiro only dreams of high-rises, extending quietly into the cosmos5.
Yet, in the pursuit of how one presents a rainforest or any other form of the infinite within an indurate container … a recurring question emerges:
How does one contain endlessness? How do we hold every grain of sand in the desert? Or count every star in the galaxy? How can we put an elephant in a refrigerator? A camel through the eye of a needle? How does one contain a total work of art? How can I trap time in the crystal? ∞ternity wants to be held tight as it struggles to break free from my/your/our embrace.
‘eternity’ is my epithet for Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art. ‘Total’ not as in absolute, but a complex whole. However, the institution or white cube, as regulatory bodies with their own abiding codes, are not pliant recipients nor hospitable receptacles for the entropic dynamism of the Ge$s@%mkun$twerk6.
<<Diamonds are formed under intense conditions>>
Although infuriating to manoeuvre, the institution provides a fascinating arena for this type of work to exist, for an stubborn container is perhaps where art can strive to be at its most effective, affective and vital; in defiance of recurring limitations and unnecessary precedents. By intervening within the institution, eternity becomes prolific, becomes adaptive. It adopts various guises in order to confront order and rationale, becoming-administration, becoming-effort, becoming-legislation, becoming-reasonable (but not too reasonable) and so it becomes becoming ...
The work endures valiantly/petulantly/reluctantly within the cube, fighting for its right to exist in all its moving parts. As an evolutionary (and revolutionary) process, the rainforest is driven to crystallization, fortifying into something armoured and reflective.
The Crystal-Image
The Deleuzian idea of the crystal-image7 is my open-ended proposition into a decentralized approach towards performance making, which I believe can expand the virtual/actual parameters of space and time, challenging the audience’s capacity for engaging with performance. I believe that ‘Live art’ is limiting when viewed or reliant upon a singular frame. The continuous unfolding of the present moment is more suited to multiple entry points. Reality in it’s duplicity cannot be expressed through art that is unidimensional in it’s approach. Through the construction of a crystal image, I am interested in designing an engine that explores the plurality of relations that exist within our ever fluid reality, the everything of it all.
Crystalline imaging is a theoretical function that I am using to investigate the metaphysics of eternity’, which to me represents a more loving form of art-making8. I am interested in art as a boundlessly creative and productive force that generates new forms, concepts, and possibilities of thought. My imaging methodology is prefaced on the Deleuzian concept of image9, which refers to 'a set of relations of time from which the variable present only flows10’. For Deleuze, life = imaging — an image exists because of the infinite perceptions that surround it and these perceptions are often indiscernible to the naked eye. My goal is to initiate and intensify these relations by constructing crystal-images through performative temporalities in the form of moving image works.
‘eternity is the state of things at this very moment’
‘eternity is the state of things at this very moment’ — a line borrowed from Clarice Lispector’s ‘The Hour of The Star’ is a time-crystal11 of my own design, an assemblage of images where present, past(s) and future(s) recur endlessly. The work is composed of heterogeneous elements made up of smaller artworks and functions as a boundless site of possibility on which affective gestures are simultaneously realized through nested planes of different temporal registers.
I chose to stage this piece within a V-shaped cavern of the Praxis Space Gallery at Lasalle College of The Arts as it has the perfect architectural configuration to (literally!) produce a crystalline image.
The crystal-image splits into two divergent streams of time that intersect with the present into past-present and present-future.
‘eternity’ can be perceived from both sides of the looking glass, the glass panels in the space provide a two-way mirror whereby each sheet of the work can interact with one another within a depth of field. Overlapping reflective surfaces also provide hidden zones of virtuality which double both the interior and exterior environments.
The first strata, a wall by Singaporean graffiti artist nic.k FKA Kringe responds to the inflections of two time-images [A] ‘The Last Outpost’ and [B] ‘ihavethesefeelings’.
The skewed lines, diffused fields of colour and textures of varying opacities and densities create new dynamics within the work as they interact with time-images [A] and [B]. One of my favourite features of the space, is that due to its unusually narrow-width and converging design, viewers are inadvertently forced to view the entirety of the work from ‘outside’ of the gallery or through the glass if they want to get a full purview of everything, especially nic.k’s painting. The awkward and challenging configuration of the work hence compels the body towards new perceptual inventiveness.
Cinematic works, [A] ‘The Last Outpost’, [B] ‘ihavethesefeelings’ can be categorised as time-images, with no start or end point, existing in perpetuity as a series of juxtaposed “presents.” Every image-event is a unique instance of production with many active forces at play. The images are displayed on 2 screens installed on the surface of the wall, they loop constantly, fading to darkness after each durational cycle, transforming into black mirrors that reflect the spectator’s visage and vestiges of the space around.
These implementations within the space incorporate the surrounding milieu and impel the image to crystallise. Through the different layers of actual/virtual, the works sustain their own internal circuits but are infinitely referential, creating flows of desire. The work is not concerned with its own means nor ends but rather the production of difference, the thresholds of shifting relations between layers of the actual and virtual generate new possibilities which we can refer to as the persistent ‘state of things’.
The present moment trembles (with anticipation).
Time-Image [A]: The Last Outpost
Watch Here
Many of my works are auto-fictive, conceived out of an unfathomable but compulsive need to re-stage parts of my life as highly stylized performative assemblages. Recall and sentimentality are big instigators of my artistic practice, but not its final destination. By breaking down my personal attachments into source material, I create diverse components for my assemblages.
[A] ‘The Last Outpost’ is a Wong Kar Wai12 inspired meta-narrative, the atmospherics of which are loosely coloured by the existentialist ennui of popular cult anime ‘Cowboy Bebop13. The moving image works for ‘eitsotatvm’ were filmed at Wild Pearl, a tiny underground music haven that came into precious existence during the pandemic outbreak. The work exists as a loving tribute to Wild Pearl (which has since migrated to a new space), by reimagining it as the last remaining outpost at world’s end, inspired by a particularly transcendental night of dancing. The designation of an outpost seemed like a fitting analogy for Wild Pearl; notorious for its small size (reminiscent of a bunker) and its reputation as a hidden music-sanctum for an intimate community of revelers during the COVID-19 era.
The scenography for [A] ‘The Last Outpost’ is an intergalactic vessel adrift at the end of the world, whereby various characters inhabit their own lonely trajectories. The bodies of the performers are intentionally de-gendered, ethereal and out-of-time, becoming kinaesthetic elements within an assemblage14. This assemblage lives within the tight confines of a vertical frame. Although initially subject to a linear flow of time, the mise-en-scene of the three bodies slowly devolves into various overlays that obfuscate one another. The flow of time is also disrupted with intermittent jerks and tics discharged from the central body within the frame. As a time-image, the subjects are kept neutral and do not appear to experience themselves. Their actions are not causal but occur as a means in and of themselves.
For the scene, I stand in the middle of the frame, using my body as an inflection point, head and figure rotating slowly, gaze directed at the camera. My face is half obscured in shadow as disembodied limbs materialise in and out of the darkness, fragmenting into discrete parts and intersecting with the other travelling elements to create new formations. Like clockwork, the bodies move in a slow whirlpool formation. Scan lines flicker across the spectral figures churning within the enclosed space, which gives the illusion of the different surfaces as a single plane. An artificial overlay of orange floaters stream upwards like rain or a meteor shower in reverse, disrupting the pathway of left to right, creating a dispersed flow that activates in all directions including top to bottom. The meteor streaks create slippages with the bodies and the flickering scan lines oscillate at a much faster tempo. As the walls of the space are dark, the corners of the room are obscured and the individuals appear to be trapped in perpetuity in an any-space-whatever15. In the dark vacuum of [A] ‘The Last Outpost’, the viewer is made aware of the weight of time passing as the performers move at a dilatory pace, traversing the perimeter of the room. The original lighting fixtures of Wild Pearl were also rearranged to further play with the optics of the space, the reflective surfaces in the room, a glass panel on the left and a mirror on the right also double the bodies in passing.
[A] ‘The Last Outpost’ is a reassemblage — the existing configuration of the space was rearranged to create new associations. Along with its counterpart [B] ‘ihavethesefeelings’, the videos interact with the painted wall and reflective panels to create new successions of images.
Time-Image [B]: ‘ihavethesefeelings’
The image [B] ‘ihavethesefeelings’ begins with a reflection, frozen in time, but the figures in the mirror begin to shift imperceptibly. If one is not paying attention, these aberrations of movement might appear as a trick of the light. After a certain duration, the image begins to vibrate, coloured strings of luminescence begin to glow and flicker across the chest and torso area of the figures, converging into each other. This image largely features the body in post production16, each crop of the frame fragments the image further, slicing into time. The mirror works as an additional surface that the image can map itself onto. An echo-filter has been placed upon the footage to create a motion-trail effect on the bodies, the figures begin to decompose over time. Sound has been included in both videos posthumously. As both works [A] and [B] occur in space concurrently but at different speeds, audio-visual disjunctions are provoked. The mass of rainbow lines gradually increasing in density, paralleling a mounting tangle of emotions of which their originators do not acknowledge, expressing our abject alienation from our own bodies.
Traversing the chaosmos(!) — Activations
Through ‘eitsotatvm’ I am interested in creating a loving economy through the ‘sharing, exchanging, and happening in-between bodies17’. By bodies, I am referring to the time-image works [A] and [B], the massive spray-painted wall, the complex substratum of the glass and the bodies of myself and my second performer. All coming together in an unpredictable interplay of affective exchanges. To further complexify the piece, I choreographed two movement passages. The moving bodies serve as emissaries for others to travel inside, outside and beyond the crystal by circulating the gaze. There is no linear narrative here, the bodies are merely redistributed into spatial arrays, creating themselves to their own ends. ‘Every image’, Sartre said, ‘is surrounded by an atmosphere of world.’ … dance is no longer simply movement of world, but passage from one world to another, entry into another world, breaking in and exploring18’. The bodies in motion function as a locus of transaction through their migratory flows within the assemblage superstructure. Motion-tracking initiates new lines of creation.
The first performance ‘ihavethesefeelings’ plays with the dialectics of the word ‘blue’. For the sound that accompanies the piece, I commissioned two strangers on the online marketplace Fiverr to remix the popular 90s eurodance cult hit ‘Blue (Da Ba Dee)19’, modifying the pitch of the songs to avoid copyright infringement. I spliced my counterfeits with a ‘Blue Tara Mantra’ that I found on the internet finding it to be a good complement, as both songs have a hypnotic and repetitious quality, creating sonic blend of the secular and the divine. I also wanted to integrate glimmers of the sacred as a counterpoint to a prevailing sense of existential despair, evoked by the cultural ennui of the ‘Blue (Da Ba Dee) track.
An anthem of the 90s, ‘Blue (Da Ba Dee)’ completely embodies the doomer attitudes prevalent in my generation’s zeitgeist. The lyrics although presumably about depression, also convey verbatim, the concept of the crystal-image, as the vocalist references ‘blue’ as not only a colour but also as an ‘inside/outside’ and everywhere condition. The song's upbeat melody is intended to be ironically chipper, contrasting with lyrics that convey 'feeling blue' as a state of disconnection from the world.
Yo, listen up here's a story
About a little guy
That lives in a blue world
And all day and all night
And everything he sees is just blue
Like him inside and outsideBlue (Da Ba Dee) lyrics, Eiffel65
The ‘blue’ passage begins with my performer 'Jack' and I crouched at the far end of the communal space outside of the gallery, holding onto wireless JBL speakers. Our faces are painted blue, in a droll and absurd gesture. As the music begins, we orbit slowly across the space before devolving into shakes and jerks, moving in and out of time and against the relentless tempo of the techno mash-up. As the lyrics continue to repeat themselves, ‘blue’ becomes deterritorialized through repetition and loses its meaning. The sound also becomes displaced as we rotate around the open foyer holding the low-tech audio-ware.
Blue are the people here
That walk around
Blue like my corvette, its in and outside
Blue are the words I say
And what I think
Blue are the feelings
That live inside meBlue (Da Ba Dee) lyrics, Eiffel65
As the passage comes to an end, a musical sample of ‘Hide and Seek’ by Imogen Heap begins to seep into the space. The lines ‘Where are we? What the hell is going on?20’ jolts the characters back into a fleeting moment of comic self-awareness, before they begin a choreographed sequence where they move in mirror image, yet are separated through the glass. The glass divider a stray metaphor for our struggle to connect, conveying perhaps a sense of the ‘infinite’ or impossibility inherent in the piece. This choreography, set to one of my favourite songs on earth, embodies the human condition of reaching for that which is constantly beyond our reach; our insatiable desires, our longing for attachment, intimacy and above all, love.
Hide and seek
Trains and sewing machines
All those years
They were here first
Oily marks appear on walls
Where pleasure moments hung before
The takeover
The sweeping insensitivity of this
Still lifeHide and Seek lyrics, Imogen Heap
To further supplement or tap into this feeling of estrangement, I have written a poem to accompany [A] ‘The Last Outpost’ in the style of a love letter to an anonymous recipient. The poem is imbued in the work as a spoken-word recording in the second part of the performance. The overall soundtrack for the piece is also spliced with field recordings from my Iphone, taken during my travels around Southeast Asia. The monologue is distorted and delayed to create repetitions, echoes and sonancies.
Throughout the performance Jack and I also wear construction headlamps on our heads. The lamplights bounce off the opaque wall and onto the glass, creating deflections across the different planes. The light becomes a reactant for unearthing more surfaces of relations, every panel within the glass also becomes its own autonomous zone as our bodies intersect with the reflections of audience members and the surrounding environment.
The interlude into the second passage is prefaced by a brief period of silence for contrast, whereby the bodies continue to move within the glass enclosure at a glacial pace, sometimes stopping to interact with each other or the surrounding environment, the movement is reminiscent of the weightlessness of zero-gravity or floating in a fish tank. Through the deliberate manoeuvrings of the bodies, the audience is able to perceive the transference of time within the crystal. The series of exchanges with bodies, spectators and the visible environment, generates an elaborate milieu of unceasing transformation that amplifies the artwork’s resonance.
Listen to ‘The Last Outpost’ here (15:41 Mins):
Everything Everywhere All at Once
Around the period that 'eitsotatvm' was in the works, I managed to watch the hit Sci-fi movie ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ in which Evelyn, the main character played by Malaysian actress Michelle Yeoh is able to time-travel across multiple dimensions through a process called ‘verse-jumping’. In the film, repeated verse-jumping can cause the human mind to splinter as it is unable to handle the cognitive overload of experiencing everything at once. Evelyn after encountering every alternate version of herself across all dimensions is actually driven to nihilism, but eventually chooses love over despair. The main characters return back to their regular lives at the end of the movie and are once again content to operate across a singular timeline.
However, this movie made me think that if I were to compare the capacities and consequences of the characters who had to experience ‘Everything Everything All at Once’ … I question whether a Singaporean audience could perceive of or comprehend the unstable totalities of the crystal-image. Would they find meaning or nothingness within the infinite as it is revealed to them?
No matter what, I still want to be here with you.
I will always, always, want to be here with you.
Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), Evelyn chooses love.
Escaping the Crystal
In a segment that I have omitted from the current iteration of this piece of writing, I reference Yayoi Kusama’s infinity rooms and their operations as time-crystals. Her kaleidoscopic universes, although breathtakingly beautiful, are too programmatically perfect, possessing a type of liminality which renders them impotent. Yayoi, in her troubled life, might have sought to cultivate her absolute halcyon, to make peace with the unending chaos of this world.
In contrast, the crystal that I am trying to form is more of an impure gem, a relaxed apparatus of capture. In the activations, the dancing human bodies, sweating and liquefying against the glass, allow for intrusions and blemishes, deterritorializing the image. The crystal in ‘eitsotitvm’ is only capable of catching whatever it can reflect within its stratum, while the shifting-actuals of all that exist outside of its purview, are relegated to the virtual.
Once we allow our eyes to glaze over, something slips through the cracks, falls into shadow, disappears into the light.
Glossary (ChatGPT Assisted Definitions)
Assemblage
A Deleuzian definition of the assemblage is a dynamic and non-hierarchical network of heterogeneous elements, both human and non-human, that come together in a specific configuration or arrangement. These elements can include individuals, ideas, objects, practices, and more. Assemblages are characterised by their fluidity, constant transformation, and a lack of fixed or predefined boundaries. They are not static structures but rather ongoing processes. I am interested in Manuel DeLanda’s expansion on the definition of the assemblage where he argues that ‘argue that assemblages and their components possess mind-independent agency, thus the assemblage consists of a collection of interacting, semi-autonomous entities or components that come together to form a higher-level system.
Deterritorialization/Reterritorialization
In critical theory, deterritorialization is the process by which a social relation, called a territory, has its current organisation and context altered, mutated or destroyed. The components then constitute a new territory, which is reterritorialization.
Becoming
Deleuze uses the term ‘becoming’ (devenir) to describe the continual production (or ‘return’) of difference immanent within the constitution of events, whether physical or otherwise. Becoming is the pure movement evident in changes between particular events. Rather than a product, final or interim, becoming is the very dynamism of change, situated between heterogeneous terms and tending towards no particular goal or end-state.
Time-Image
David N. Rodowick sums up the time-image as one that fluctuates between actual and virtual, that records or deals with memory, confuses mental and physical time, actual and virtual, and is sometimes marked by incommensurable spatial and temporal links between shots (Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997, 79-118).
Crystal-Image
Introduced in Deleuze’s book “Cinema 2: The Time-Image.” The crystal-image is a subsidiary and not well-defined concept within the time-image but represents a shift in Deleuze’s understanding of cinema away from traditional narrative and toward a more fragmented and complex form of cinematic storytelling. I am using Deleuze’s cinematic concept of the crystal-image to apply to a more all-encompassing and proliferative form of art-making. The crystal-image ‘is a shot that fuses the pastness of the recorded event with the presentness of its viewing21.’
Actual/Virtual
In Deleuze, the virtual refers to the realm of potentiality and the actual refers to the realm of manifestation.
Note: This is the fifth version of this essay that I have written and hopefully the last.
Components/Credits
[A] ‘The Last Outpost’
1 Channel Video File
8 Mins 56 Secs
[B] ‘ihavethesefeelings’
1 Channel Video File
4 Mins 47 Secs
’eternity is the state of things at this very moment’
Performance Activation
30 Minutes
Created At
Lasalle College Of The Arts (Mcnally Campus)
Wild Pearl Music
Performed/Installed
Lasalle College Of The Arts (Praxis Space)
School/Gallery
Collaborators
Loy (Movement)
Jack (Movement)
Marvyn (Videography)
Nick (Painting)
Wild Pearl (Location)
Jonathan Tan (Photography)
Special Thank You
To the artists Ashley Ho and Domenik Naue, your performance I witnessed at Dance Nucleus in March 2023 was a huge reference point for this work and helped me resolve certain ideas I was grappling with at the time.
Eflux, ‘What’s Love (or Care, Intimacy, Warmth, Affection) Got to Do with It?’, Sternberg Press, 2017 p.275
Eflux, ‘What’s Love (or Care, Intimacy, Warmth, Affection) Got to Do with It?’, Sternberg Press, 2017 p.278
Becoming: See Glossary of Deleuzian Terms
The rainforest is the sales pitch they give to Western expatriates looking to move to Singapore, Asia's premier metropolis.
‘Jiro Dreams of Sushi’, a 2011 documentary
The total work of art
crystal-image: See Glossary of Deleuzian Terms
Unconditional, enduring and generative
Image: See Glossary of Deleuzian Terms
Rodowick David, Gille Deleuze’s Time Machine, Duke University Press, 1997 p.07
Time-Crystal: See Glossary of Deleuzian Terms
Famous Hong Kong Director, Directed ‘In The Mood for Love’, ‘Chungking Express’, ‘2046’
A Japanese neo-noir science fiction anime television series
Assemblage: See Glossary of Deleuzian Terms
Not an actual space but indeterminate space
Steyerl Hito, The Wretched Of The Screen, Sternberg Press, 2012 p.179
Steyerl Hito, The Wretched Of The Screen, Sternberg Press, 2012 p.188
Deleuze, Gilles , Cinema 2: The Time Image, The University of Minnesota Press, 1987 p.63
Harrison Angus, Considering the Eternal Significance of Eiffel 65’s “Blue (Da Ba Dee)”, 09 February, 2016, https://www.vice.com/en/article/ez7vqp/considering-the-eternal-significance-of-eiffel-65s-blue-da-ba-dee
Hide and Seek, Imogen Heap, 2005
https://offscreen.com/view/bergson2