Abstract
This paper takes embodied experiences of printmaking as its point of departure and examines two artworks, Susanna Castleden’s 1:1 Gangway (2016) and Lydia Trethewey’s Interstices (2017), in order to elucidate the presence of stillness and movement in time-intensive practices. Underpinned by a curiosity of fast-slow dynamics and continuums, and informed by cultural geography, these works probe mobile relationships revealed in cruise ship and car travel respectively. Through the use of frottage and stop-motion animation, the mobility-immobility dichotomy is challenged, thereby intimating at an understanding of pause, place and pace as mutually enfolded. Importantly, both of these technical processes are laborious and foreground the artist’s body in a time-based connection with the work; accelerated and protracted. In effect, the body becomes a fulcrum for considering notions of passage and terminus. As co-authors analysing the parallels in these approaches to making, the concept of prints as mimetic reproductions is also interrogated. The printmaker is considered in these time-intensive encounters as both composer and performer, disrupting exactness through hands in motion, within a mutable world. By scrutinising the intersections of 1:1 Gangway and Interstices, this paper thus points towards expanded understandings of time-intensive printmaking that have arisen primarily through practice itself.
Introduction
Pressed flat against a cruise ship gangway in Fremantle Port in Western Australia, a piece of paper protests the wind as it is brushed with fine sandpaper and an impression of bolts and rivets appears, white against black. Hands move fast; but progress is slow. Elsewhere, a camera falteringly records a suburban car trip, and the resulting footage is fractured into nine thousand frames, laboured over one by one in a studio suffused with solvent. Each image is a split second of recording, yet stretches into hours of physical work. At first glance, these two artworks – 1:1 Gangway (2016)by Susanna Castleden, and Interstices (2017) by Lydia Trethewey – appear incongruent, dissimilar expressions in print of encounters with a mobile world. However, commonalities can be found through an analysis of each artist’s approach to motion, stillness and duration, and these parallel threads of investigation point towards an expanded understanding of time-intensive processes in printmaking. As this paper is co-authored by the two artists in question, it draws upon such resemblances in seeking new understandings of printmaking practices, with a particular focus on working intensively fast and intensively slow, sensitive to encounters with – and experiences of – movement and stillness. This self-reflexive approach drives the ensuing practice-led analysis. Engaging with mobilities and the discipline of cultural geography through practice-led research, the print becomes both subject and method of enquiry, a medium caught between and within motion and immobility. The analysis in this paper is conveyed through three intersecting parts: firstly, there will be an examination of time-intensive practices and how prints gather residues of motion and pause; secondly, attention will turn to how each of the works disrupts the binary of stillness and movement, with the suggestion that these seemingly dichotomous experiences can be mutually enfolded in various ways instead; and lastly, the works will be considered as encounters with the world, specifically in relation to how questions of repeatability and fluctuation in printmaking are thrown into relief. 1:1 Gangway and Interstices thus offer a nexus of investigation into the oblique relationships between mobility and immobility, laborious actions, and the role of mimesis and mutability in encounters between print and a world in motion.
To begin with, in order to root this inquiry firmly in the realm of practice, the processes used to make the works, and the considerations underpinning them, will be elucidated. 1:1 Gangway was made using frottage, traditionally a process of taking an impression by rubbing a wax crayon on thin paper and recording the raised features of the object below. In this instance, the process was inverted and the wax crayon was replaced with fine sandpaper; instead of being an additive process, sandpaper was used to rub off a layer of black gesso applied to the surface of the paper, revealing layers of white gesso below – a reverse frottage. And the object, rather than being a headstone or plaque, was a cruise ship gangway in the passenger terminal at Fremantle Port. Furthermore, instead of working from a blank paper surface, the paper used in 1:1 Gangway was a collection of paper maps, concealed by layers of gesso, and revealed only as minute glimpses through sanding. The process involved a time-based connection with an object that facilitates motion and is encountered through mobility. The frottage is made on paper maps as a way of reflecting the geographical and cartographical dimensions of travel whilst referencing the sites in which the work was made.
Interstices is a stop-motion animation made from 9,700 still frames taken from a recording of a suburban car trip, each of which becomes a solvent wash print. The work probes the potential of experiences of daydream and immensity during everyday car travel. The process involved recording footage from the car window on an ordinary trip, uploading the videos to a computer and then digitally extracting still images at a rate of 25 frames per second (fps). Each frame was then printed individually as a 6 x 4 inch photograph, and certain elements of the image masked out with a latex solution. Solvents were then applied to each print, such that the depictive space was unfixed, becoming analogous to its material state, and partially washed away. This process was termed a “solvent wash”. The prints were then scanned back into the computer and collapsed together as a stop-motion animation, which exists as three simultaneous two-minute channels, each showing a different view from the car. The final work has a shifting, unsettled surface constituted by the materiality of the washes in conjunction with the flickering light of animation. Interstices and 1:1 Gangway share a focus on experiences of mobility, grounded in ideas drawn from cultural geography, creative practice and lived experience.
Located within the field of human geography, cultural geography, as discussed later in this paper, provides a theoretical underpinning to both these works, drawing together intersecting threads of human movement, landscape, place and more specifically mobilities studies. Suffice to say that in 1:1 Gangway, the movements of the gangway in Fremantle as well as the larger systems of global ocean travel are the focus; in Interstices, the more everyday experiences of car travel around the suburban streets of Perth come to the fore. Importantly, both involve laborious, time-intensive processes of making which foreground the body in relation to the print, and the print in relation to the world. Though 1:1 Gangway is made through frottage, and Interstices is a stop-motion animation, the works resist easy categorisation and benefit instead from a closer look at the sequences of their creation; the roles of working intensively fast and intensively slow.
Time intensive
By drawing parallels between 1:1 Gangway and Interstices, understandings can be gleaned about how time-intensive practices infuse prints with entangled residues of stillness and movement. Both works were created through laborious, protracted actions, which prevent the final works from being seen in their totality, and thus funnel the artist’s attention to the sequences within their making. As an object, the gangway is stationary in the long periods of time between cruise ship visits, and it is during this time of perceived stillness that the artist was granted passage through the empty quarantine and immigration lines of the Passenger Terminal to enable a haptic encounter with its form and surface. The mostly hot and windy early morning visits revealed the magnitude of the scale and time-based challenge this work presented. It was a slow, methodical, and almost insurmountable task. Repetitive motions of placing one sheet of paper onto the heating metal surface as the sun rose over the port became an instinctive rhythm that seemed to mark out the glacial pace of production. Movements of the body were quick, though overall progress was slow, attesting to an overlapping of speed and stillness within the encounter of paper with a sometimes mobile, sometimes immobile object.
Similarly, Interstices was made over a period of months through repetitive, almost mechanistic actions. Working with thousands of physical photographic prints, existing in minute increments from one to the next, the action of the hands brushing on masking fluid became automatic, a slow accumulation of kept moments. This slow action of the hands contrasts with the initial printing of the photographs from a machine, which was fast. Following the masking, the solvent wash was an intensively fast process, taking only a few seconds to unsettle the image; the process thus undulated from fast, to slow, to fast, blurring the distinctions in between. This laborious process of repetition transformed the body into an instrument, habit compelling the fixing and unfixing of both attention and photographic space, in an echo of the habitual motions of car travel. Yi-Fu Tuan (1977) writes about the habitual ways we negotiate space in Space and Place. He uses driving as an example, suggesting that navigating the road involves a degree of geographical competence which is not stored internally as a spatial configuration or map but as a succession of movements remembered through the body (1977, p.70). The driver ‘blanks out’ yet the body ‘maintains control’ (Tuan, 1977, p.69), a kind of habitual movement, which cultural geographer J.D. Dewsbury refers to as ‘body-thinking’ (2015, p.33). Interstices thus arose through a slipping between awareness and disappearance, prompted by the sheer duration of the task: quickness was eroded by slowness, only to be reverted in the rendering of the frames as fractions of a second in the animation. Both of these works reveal the capacity of fast and slow processes to cohere, diverge, and intertwine, in a way that reflects the enfolded mobilities of their subjects.
What is significant to time-intensive printmaking, revealed through these processes, is the role of physicality; these are not conceptual encounters with mobility, but embodied ones. As such, they gather into their being all the imperfections and unanticipated moments of their making. Between scheduled visits to the immobile gangway, cruise ships would berth at the port and the usually motionless gangway was manoeuvred to funnel passengers from terminal to cabin. However, when the gangway was returned to its horizontal position, its former orientation on the terminal had inevitably been disrupted which meant the next phase of rubbing was slightly misaligned from its previous section. This rupture in both time and form emerges visibly in the work in small fragments: a window slips two centimetres between visits; a weary handmark at the end of one session abuts a freshly rested gesture on the next. In Interstices, traces of the studio environment find themselves embedded in each frame; stray hairs and fingerprints, bits of latex that got caught in the liquid wash, all the dross which, given the already labour-intensive process, accumulated because there was no time to remove it. Though Interstices flows smoothly as an animation, a shifting view of an ordinary street, the static physicality of its making shows through in vestiges of labour and the shedding studio space; the time-intensive encounter of two hands with 9,700 prints. In both Interstices and 1:1 Gangway, corporeal remainders and elements of the environment find their way into the works. The intensively fast and intensively slow physical engagement with the stuff of masking fluid and gesso dust in synchronicity with the dynamics of car travel and cruise ships thus draw forth an alternative understanding of encounters between print and world, as bodily meetings of material and time.
Between the multiple parts that make up Interstices and 1:1 Gangway, there are gaps that mark and fill the pauses between motion. In Interstices these are the spaces between the frames that ratchet them together. Here, the gap is not an absence, rather an entity that holds together the moments between time; the gap becomes a medium. In film, the eye and mind join frames together, smoothing milliseconds of stillness into motion, whereas in Interstices the excision of frames and the action of rendering them with solvent disrupts this familiar smoothness; the frames slide and fidget against one another, making the time between them visible. In 1:1 Gangway the multiple paper fragments align, mostly. Where they do not, the rupture signals the transition of time and a reorientation of the object. The spatial disruption between panels marks the movement and time that occurred between the activities of rubbing. This is a visibility that, in studio practice, usually remains invisible. Yet here, in the plein air studio of an active port, where the cycle of cruise ship itineraries demands the gangway’s function, these gaps of time become visible, fracturing the otherwise smooth lines of the represented gangway. The laborious, protracted action of working frame by frame or panel by panel allows time to settle onto the surface of, and between, each print.
Stillness and movement
The points of congruence and divergence in the creation of Gangway 1:1 and Interstices further suggest that movement and stillness are not a binary pair, but variously enfolded. Through embodied encounters with mobilities in the creation of these works, conceptual tendencies that frame movement and stillness as absolutes are refuted. Absolute ideas of movement and stillness are often applied, abstractly, to the body, as Rebecca Solnit (2000) points out in Wanderlust: A History of Walking, whereby postmodern approaches to the body in motion tend to conceptualize it as either utterly passive, or utterly mobile, and in doing so it becomes a surface on which experience is imprinted. The passive postmodern body is a site for sensations, processes and desires, rather than a source of action and production (Solnit, 2000, p.28); it does not strain muscles, feel car sick, or get sunburnt. If a body is mobile, it is within a hypothetical extreme of velocity, for example, when travelling globally by plane; it is movement without rest, yet this is still a passive motion in which the body does not move, but is moved (Solnit, 2000, p.28). However, through embodied practices of making, it can be shown that the body, like the print, is not inert. In the making of 1:1 Gangway and Interstices,movement and stillness are found nested within each other in fast and slow processes, through a comingling of repetitive action and passive respite in the artists’ own bodies. The artists bodies are enmeshed in experiences of labour, involving reverie, lunch-breaks, sunlight and perceptible respiration in which the hard division between movement and stillness evaporates. Residues of these experiences find their way into the works, in the sections of frottage that do not align, in the stray hairs that fall into the solvent. These experiences of overlapping pause and motion echo the modes of mobility that are explored in the works, namely, boarding or departing a ship, and driving or being a passenger. The gangway is a conduit for movement, but is often still; in the car, a traveller is in one sense immobile, yet in another is moving. In 1:1 Gangway and Interstices movement and stillness are encountered not in terms of brute functionality but corporeal experiences, incorporating the laborious, uncomfortable and unforeseen. The very focus on function which so often ensnares consideration of systems of mobility is obviated in the choice to encounter the gangway rather than the cruise ship, and the experience of driving rather than arriving; these are spaces in between movement and stillness which do not conform fully to either. Thus, through the embodied and often imperfect encounters of 1:1 Gangway and Interstices with interstitial mobilities, movement and stillness are irreducibly entangled. Significantly, it is through practice that movement and stillness are revealed as neither extremes nor opposites.
It is important to highlight that these works share similar theoretical underpinnings, arising from the coalescence of creative practice and cultural geography. This lends the works a kinship in which embodied encounters are bolstered by an adjacent conceptual dismantling of the movement-stillness dichotomy. Both works probe certain assumptions about mobilities, foregrounding the body in terms of making art and experiencing movement. Particular ideas about car travel, for example, that the car is a space distinct from landscape and that automobility is experienced as a kind of isolation or ‘travelling incarceration’ (Featherstone, 2004)[1], are repudiated by Interstices. The making of Interstices began from an interest in the ways that a traveller in a car enfolds with the landscape, through habit, daydream and movement. Rather than a container for bodies, the car is understood as an interface. Human geographer Nigel Thrift (2004) suggests that systems of driving and being a passenger produce their own embodied practices of hybridized experience, in which the car is an extension of the traveller and a means of ‘bodying forth’ (2004, p.49). The body as, and through, the car extends into and enfolds with the landscape. Drawing on Jack Katz’s ideas (2000), Thrift (2004, pp.47-49) proposes a number of ways in which drivers experience cars as extensions of their own bodies, for example, via a repertoire of reciprocal communications such as horns, lights and hand gestures, and with certain ‘tactics’ or ways of getting around including the action of feet on pedals and the use of mirrors. Passengers experience car travel not as a sensory void, but as various enfolded materialities, including road noise, a visual layering of partial reflections in mirrors and windows, and, as David Bissell (2010) proposes, through vibrations in the seat[2]. As Peter Merriman (2004) points out, travellers in a car might choose to talk, play games, or sing along to the radio, and these become part of the experience of car travel[3]. Daydreaming, too, can be thought of as a significant experience associated with this kind of travel, as a medium through which landscape and movement are experienced. These ideas and rejections of common assumptions about mobility inflect Interstices, not just as theoretical underpinnings, but also as notions made manifest through the practical methods of creation. In making 1:1 Gangway, theways of considering and working in the mobile world were formed and shaped by the active port itself. Harriet Hawkins (2014) uses the term ‘creative geographies’ to point to the epistemological role creative practice can play in geographical knowledge production. In this project, the decision to create an artwork on an object inextricably linked with contemporary tourism, yet historically linked to migration (including the artists own migration, via boat and gangway, from the UK to Australia in the 1970’s) emerged from a comingling of cultural, creative and geographical awareness, Through looking at the relationship between creative practices and place, Hawkins points out that ‘the spaces of geographical knowledge production become the sites of artistic intervention’ (2014, p.35) and that artists draw from ‘a materiality or performance-based thinking through of geographical spaces, practices, and epistemological concerns’ (2014, p.33). In the same way that Tim Cresswell (2012; 2006) and Mike Crang (2002) consider the airport as a site of dynamic cultural geographical relations, the site of the active port provides a similar coalescence of varying scales of mobility. Lines of livestock are marched from truck to carrier, stacks of shipping containers create seemingly immobile mountainscapes, dockworkers clock on and off, and cruise ship passengers politely queue. Amongst this dynamic of pace and place, the performative and physical nature of rubbing a gangway unfolds. Hawkins’s (2014) ‘performance-based thinking through of geographical spaces’ emerged gradually in the making of 1:1 Gangway. The slowness of making the work pushed up against other forms and figures in the site, intersecting and overlapping with the existing scales of mobility in the passenger terminal. It could be suggested that through the relationship of an intensively slow printmaking practice with the passenger terminal, a new geographical understanding of the port as a site of mobility emerged
Encounters
In terms of how the print manifests as an encounter with the world, the role of mimesis and mutability is thrown into relief in both works. In Interstices, this is through an interrogation of the idea that a photograph is an imprint of the world. The purportedly ‘indexical’ nature of photography, asserted by theorists such as Roland Barthes (2010), is challenged in Interstices through the use of solvent wash as a process of material disruption. In photography, indexicality generally refers to the medium’s physical relation to the subject it images, understood to arise through the direct contact of light on a surface which belies a fundamental ontological tie to the world. As Barthes writes, ‘the photograph is literally an emanation of the referent’ (2010, p.80). The notion of indexicality lends itself to poetic musings on the way images are carried through the air, imprinted on the camera lens as on our retinas. However, this can easily result in limiting what a photograph can be by relegating it to the status of ‘reproduction’. This is reflected in the assertion of artist Jeff Wall that ‘it is in the physical nature of the medium to depict things’ (1995, p.32). In evidence here is the modernist tendency towards what Jacques Rancière identifies as ‘fidelity to medium’ (2011, p.35) as the core principle of art making; if medium defines the essence of art, then light is the essence of photography. Thus, many discussions of photography return to the idea that a photograph is ontologically tied to the world, a kind of reproduction.
Yet in Interstices this easy formulation is complicated through processes involving solvents and printing, as the taking of the photograph forms only one stage of the creative process. The action of light on a surface is just the first step in the creation of an image which is ultimately unsettled, as opposed to the fixing of a final image. The photograph, exposed to the loosening influence of the solvent, shifts beyond a reproductive entity, forming what might be termed an ‘undisclosed’ image. Theorist Lyle Rexer uses the term ‘undisclosed’ (2013, p.32) to refer to photographs that eschew precise representation, pointing towards the way in which certain images withhold visual information from the viewer. The idea of ‘undisclosed’ photographs acknowledges that photographic images are typically formed from an initial action of light on a surface, but that this can also involve a complication of depiction and abstraction. The application of solvents in Interstices disperses the pigment, an action in which depictive and material spaces become analogous. A visual and material slippage is formed through a simultaneous withholding and revealing, across variously known elements of the ordinary streetscapes. The photographic elements that constitute the work are partially undisclosed. The mimetic role of the photograph is thus superseded by its existence as a hinge; on the one hand it seemingly reflects the world as it is, but on the other, the world is made mutable. Here, the term ‘medium’ does not equate to ‘essence’, but expresses its other meaning: ‘that which holds between’ (Rancière, 2011, p.35). The photographic prints in Interstices no longer bear a mimetic relationship to the world they express, and instead the unfixed nature of such a connection is disclosed through shifting toner and resettled imagery; yet, simultaneously, what remains of the photographic image still seems to point towards an incumbent reality. Through this material enquiry, the idea that a photographic print is an ‘imprint of the world’ is confounded, and a more expansive understanding of photography, one involving movement and time-intensivity, is embraced. Through slippage, unfixing and the literal movement of the image via solvent, the idea of ‘mimesis’ is called into question.
A material questioning of the notion of ‘reproduction’ is also carried out in 1:1 Gangway through the use of frottage. Frottage is the process of taking an impression from a raised surface and transposing it via the gesture of the hand and the sensitivity of touch from its relief surface to a flat surface. Rexer notes that a photograph can be thought of not as an imprint but a ‘visual reconstruction of reality’ (2013, p.32). Applying this idea to printmaking raises interesting questions about the role of reproduction as the essence of the medium. This is relevant given that in one sense frottage can be thought of as a direct imprint, like a photograph. And yet, the role of movement and stillness in the making of 1:1 Gangway interrupts the exacting potentiality of frottage so that the rubbing is somewhat more interpretive and performative. Analysing the problem of editions in ‘Are all multiples the same? The problematic nature of the limited edition’, K.E. Gover (2015)considers the idea that a printmaker is a performer. Gover states that editions of prints are of a type-token relation, in which no single object is the artwork. This is not precisely the case in frottage where multiple prints are intrinsically fallible and variable; however, the type-token relationship still exists between etching plate and the printed etching, lithography stone and the printed litho, so much so that the printmaker might be thought of as a performer. Gover ponders whether it might be appropriate to understand printmaking similarly to performance, as editions are executed from a type in a similar way to music and dance. Importantly, exactness is not always key to performing; each performance can be viewed as creative and interpretive, in which variation from what is set out by the composer is expected and valued (Gover, 2015, p.163). Though 1:1 Gangway is not editioned, the artist might still be thought of as ‘performer’ and serendipitous ‘composer’; these terms lend insight into the interpretive, bodily and intuitive tactics of creating the work, in which the final outcome is not an exact imprint of the surface, or at least is not reproducible. If the artist were to ‘perform’ this print again, it would be very different as they are not reproducing but encountering reality. Furthermore, 1:1 Gangway problematizes this type-token relationship through the acknowledgement that the ‘plate’ of the gangway surface was not created by the artist. The composition here was ‘found’ and therefore disrupts the causal relationship between plate and print. In this case, the plate has already been encountered bodily by the passengers who move through it and the dock workers who manoeuvre it. This, in turn, emphasizes the importance of the bodily and performative practice of bringing the print into the world, whereby drawing the image from the readymade surface is perhaps where the ‘artworkis itself’. The world becomes the type, the work the token, in an interpretive engagement which acknowledges the mutability of experience.
Notions of mutability and mimesis are further called into question in 1:1 Gangway through the choice of materials. In 1:1 Gangway frottage is used as a direct encounter between the work and world, recording a unique momentary interaction with its surface. Important in this relationship is the nature of the surface onto which the print is made: maps. The somewhat dubious role of maps as accurate records of places is called into question through the more direct method of frottage; the tension between these two elements is hinted at in the title ‘1:1’. Jorge Luis Borges’s (1998) and Umberto Eco’s (1988) eloquent ruminations on the impossibility of drawing a 1:1 map of territory and empire provided a theoretical puzzle to consider whilst engaging in the toilsome task of rubbing the 15-meter length of the gangway. In ‘On exactitude in science’ (1998), Borges’s short story imagines a kind of cartographic perfection that leads to the calamity of creating a map the size of the territory itself. The realisation by future generations of the uselessness of this 1:1 map led it to be ‘delivered…up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters’ (Borges, 1998, p.160). At Fremantle Port there was a relinquishment of cartographic perfection, and an acceptance of the impact of the landscape itself on the frailty of paper. Expanding on Borges’s short story, Eco extrapolates the absurdity of attempting to map a territory at 1:1 scale by adding evermore implausible conditions, contingencies and conundrums to the initial task. This resonated with the experience at the port. As the length of time taken to complete the rubbing continued to draw out, so too did the thoughts of futility and the impossibility of accurately completing the task. The repeatability of frottage is dependent upon the mutability of the world – as the gangway moves and changes, along with the conditions at the port, so too must the prints. Though frottage as a method of printmaking suggests repeatability, it does so imperfectly, mimetic more so than eidetic[1]. Both 1:1 Gangway and Interstices probe the interlacing of mimesis and mutability in encounters between print and world, and the potential of prints to duplicate. In both cases, the idea of ‘reproduction’ is complicated through movement; Interstices disrupts the mimetic potentiality of a photographic print, whereas 1:1 Gangway could be endlessly, if not exactly, repeated.
Conclusion
In analysing the intersections of 1:1 Gangway and Interstices, this paper has offered new understandings of duration, motion and corporeality in time-intensive printmaking practices. The interlacing of fast and slow processes mirror the fleeting and protracted experiences of embarkment and car travel, foregrounding the body as a fulcrum for mobilities. This plays out in a physical engagement in which time is rendered materially, through laborious encounters; time, no longer abstract or perceptual, is an intensive amalgam of quickness and stillness elucidated through printmaking practice, through body and material. The methods used – solvent washes and frottage – emphasize effort, habit and reverie, and promote poetic deliberations on ‘gaps’ as multiple, various interpolations of time-intensiveness. Through imperfect, embodied engagements with interstitial mobilities, the dichotomy of movement and stillness, often conceptualized as extreme limits, is interrogated and repudiated in favour of more nuanced articulations of in-betweenness. Importantly, though the artists share a theoretical lens borrowed from cultural geography, it is primarily through creative practice that these realisations arise. Finally, the comparison of these two works and the analysis of their methods unsettle the easy identification of prints with mimesis, instead positing the printmaker as performer, conductor, and potentially composer in a mutable world. In doing so, reproduction no longer remains a limitation of printmaking, and the significance of embodied, time-intensive practices is uncovered.
As time-intensive encounters with movement and stillness, 1:1 Gangway and Interstices elude terminals. 1:1 Gangway currently exists as a pile of paper in the artist’s studio, unfolding to scale each time it is exhibited, and retracted again in an endless cycle; Interstices, as an animation, loops indefinitely. Both these works came into being through a fragmenting and rebuilding of their component parts, one spatially, the other temporally, and continue to defy finality in their current existence. It might be said, therefore, that they employ a sense of intentional non-terminus; they repeat, literally and theoretically, folding back on themselves, continually expanding and contracting. As explorations of enfolded mobilities, 1:1 Gangway and Interstices are the accumulation of working intensively fast and intensively slow, with paper pressed flat against a hot metal gangway, and nine thousand frames in a solvent-soaked studio.
[1] The term ‘eidetic’, often used to refer to eidetic or so-called photographic memory, here indicates a degree of precision and accuracy which is not found in ‘mimetic’.
[1] Though car travel is not necessarily an experience of isolation, as Featherstone points out, the idea of autonomy is central to the car; automobility is self-directed, independent, and speaks to adventure and freedom in the capacity to go anywhere (2004, p.17).
[2] In this instance Bissell (2010) is discussing train travel, but the same need to negotiate vibrations in a seat applies to cars.
[3] It is worth noting that there is a parallel in common ways of framing car travel and framing movement more broadly. As mentioned earlier, the body in movement is frequently conceptualized as passive (Solnit, 2000), expunged of a wider spectrum of experiences. The car as a form of ‘travelling incarceration’ assumes a passive body trapped within, rather than a traveller who is annoyed at traffic, playing geo-mobile games, or singing out of tune to their favourite CD.
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Contact
Lydia Trethewey, post-doctoral research fellow, School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry at Curtin University, WA.