occurance of the ‘other time’
In his talk ‘Heterochronia*: Projections of Temporality’ Thomas Y. Levin pointed out some interesting issues occuring through the increasing hybridity of the image provoked by the synthetical processes of the digital. A short simplification could put it the way that through the shift of the photochemical to digital the traditionaly assumed indexicality of the shot image moves and inherents now the logic of the temporal – leading to new rhetorics of ‘live’ (transmissions).
Thus it is just consequent that as much as the ‘surveillanvce image’ has to be considered as the ‘real’ real-time image the semiotic anxiety of the contemporary temporal condition of the hybridity of images increases. Semiotic heterogenity turns the index into a pure figure: indexicality becomes a rhetorical iconic figure of semiotics. In short – indexicality changes its rhetorics towards the temporal – or in the words of Levin:
... indexicality is in fact not in the least destroyed by the advent of the digital, but simply changes its semiotic trappings. The indexical survives, for example, by shifting to the domain of the temporal. Paradigmatic for this new economy of temporal indexicality is the rhetorics of so-called “real time.” Indeed it is the fascination with a rhetorics of real time as a displaced photo-chemical indexicality which is one of the hallmarks, so I will attempt to demonstrate, of the remarkable proliferation of a new “aesthetics of surveillance” evident – alongside the abovementioned rhetorics of indexical compensation – in a wide range of current cultural practices, from contemporary art and music to recent work in cinema, television and cyberspace. ...
*Heterochronia (in med. terms) means the origin or development of organs or tissues at an unusual time or out of the normal sequence. Heterochronia comes from the Greek word “heteros” meaning “other,” and the Greek word “chronous” meaning “time.” Put the words together and you get “other time.”
... between utopias and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror. The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there. (Heterotopias, M.Foucault, 1967)
