“Memory has been considered concomitant to our sense of personal identity for a long time. It is the medium through out the record of our past memories survives within us besides the ego awareness´ basis.”

Whitrow (2005)

Abstract

Denbingh, in his book Three concepts of time, asserted that time is a topic that perplexes. The tendency of understanding time as something existing, something that is 'out there' is one of the factors that provokes this. He continues his argument stating that time is an abstract entity, a necessary construction to cope with the changes involving existents. This statement is the starting point for diving in the meaning of a video. For this analysis it is necessary discussing image and its form of relationship with time, emphasizing how long materiality – that constitutes image – stands.

Keywords

semiotics - Images - representation of time - photography - video - video art

Introduction

Santaella (2001: 193) classifies images, inserting them in the visual matrix, supported in secondness, putting the images in the universe of index, but the author says  "it does not mean this language is unable to achieve the purest levels of iconicity." This statement allows to accommodate the notion that a picture represents by similarity of qualities, and qualities can only be compared with other qualities. We intend this comparison enrich the reception of the video in question.

The challenge here is to think about image and time. For doing this, we started our reflections, about a video made by the brazilian artist Felipe Barros. We used a synchronous approach, taking images of different places and epochs comparing the similarities which may exist, emphasizing the visual qualities, in order to highlight some aspects of the relationship between time and image.

Time

Discussing some image and time aspects, the first concept to be clarified is the time itself. Task already considered difficult by St. Augustine, in his Confessions when in BOOK XI, he says: "What, then, is the time? What, then, is time? If no one ask me, I know; if I want to explain him, who asks, I know not”.

Whitrow (2005) discusses the time quoting several scholars who have dedicated to this topic: Jean-Marie Guyau in the second half of the nineteenth century said that time is not an earlier condition, as a Kantian intuition, but a result of our experience of the world. Whitrow also quotes Robert Hooke who, in the seventeenth century, wondered about the existence of a sense that would give information about time, concluding that none of our senses are capable of it, but memory has to do with this.

To Denbingh (1981: 3) one of the difficulty causes of dealing with time concept is the fact that it is taken as an existing, when in fact it is not. It is clear at this point: “'Time is not 'out there' as a substantial thing like a flow river; it is rather an abstract entity, a construction. The things which are 'out there', on which the construction of time is based, are the material objects and their events and processes”. The time concept would have been created, as stated Denbingh, to account for the changes and events:

... the clouds are moving and changing their shapes; plants are growing and withering; the positions of the heavenly bodies are slowly shifting; and men themselves progress inevitably from birth to death. The great value of the time concept is that it provides a systematization; all such events and processes of change   can   be   treated   as   elements   within   a   unique   serial   order. (Denbingh 1981:3).

For example: I looked the apple yesterday and it was green; I look today and it is ripe. We have here two perceptions that could refer to two objects, but several factors, like the fact that they were at the same place, suggest that there was the same apple; in this case, I only can understand that it is the same fruit if I include the idea that there is a change, which must have occurred in the period between yesterday and today. In other words it is necessary the time concept. This necessity is also emphasized by Peirce:

That time is not directly perceived is evident, since no lapse of time is present, and we only perceive what is present. That, not having the idea of time, we should never be able to perceive the flow in our sensations  without  some particular aptitude for, it will probably also be admitted. (CP 6.416)

The statement that time is a mental construction can be translated into peircean terms as time is a semiotic construction because there is no thinking without signs.It is well known the argument with which Peirce answers negatively to the question: "Whether we can think without signs", in the article "Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man".

Thus, time is the result of a semiotic process in which events and changes are perceived and articulated. This process allows a mental organization in which different perceived things are

understood as different moments of a temporal process. Taking the example given above, the ripening process of the apple is a possible interpretation of the perception of two apples; in this case, the ripening state of each moment I look at the apple is index of the time passage.

Time is a broad subject, including the relation between time and simultaneous events that were important to Einstein theory, as well as theories in many fields of knowledge, but the ideas we have seen here are adequate to develop our reasoning.

Image

Time has much implications in different areas, so its comprehension is difficult, but the notion of image is not also easy. A first distinction to be made is shown by Nöth and Santaella (1998: 15) on the two domains of images: "the first is the domain of images as visual representations (...). The second is the immaterial realm of images in our mind.” In this case, we are talking about the first domain, those images that these authors specify as "drawings, paintings, prints, photographies, films, television, holographic and infographic images."

We are interested in pictures of the first domain and we need to know what possible relations they establish with time, however, classify how this relationship occur is not easy because time is always present in the image in one or another way. About this subject Santaella (1998: 75) proposes a division between "intrinsic and extrinsic time in  the image."The last one can be of three kinds: time of wasting; time of the reference or utterance, and the lack of time.

Describing these forms of relation between image and time, the author defines the time of wasting as how long it takes for the deterioration of the image materiality. With respect to the image that refers to time, the relation changes according to the image types. The time in figurative images comes of the referent; abstract images "it cannot work as indicators of the reference time. They are, therefore, in this respect timeless images "(Santaella 1998: 84); The symbolic images can only suggest temporality.

Time in images

Time in the figurative images will appear differently if there are pre-photographic or photographic images. The comprehension of this difference provides a path to understand the relationship between time and image. We will see that comparing some of them.

Although it is not a new text, the Dondis' book (1974) present a useful proposal when she says about the three levels of the image, which she call abstract, figurative and symbolic. In the context of Peirce's thought the terminology deserves questioning, but keeping to the proposal, we have a thinking way about images that suggests a methodology that can be articulated with Peirce's thought.:

Therefore, when analyzing any image, at first level we have formal aspects or visual qualities: patches of colors, lines and directions.

As Maurice Denis (apud Chipp 1978: 90) says, "a picture  – before being a war horse, a woman or any anecdote – is essentially a flat surface covered with colors given in a particular order." This is a difficult task because as Dondis says (1974: 74) “Abstraction, visually, is simplification toward a more and more intense and distilled meaning”. The splashes of color may represent something by similarity, they can be seen as something like a man, a woman, a dog, etc. If we have a representation of a man, for example, this man could represent a sort of idea, in a more symbolic level.

One image useful to exemplify this analisys is the Norman Rockwell painting, The Gossips, created for the cover of "The Saturday Evening Post," of March 6 in 1948.

Norman Rockwell, The Gossips

The image shows colors, lines, textures and a kind of structure, in the level of formal qualities, that can be perceived as several people who are probably part of the same community. The characters are presented in pairs where one is looking to the right and another to the left, showing different facial expressions. The painting becomes meaningful when we see the juxtaposition of different images as representing different moments in which one person tells

something to another, and change expressions showing surprise or laughter, representing synthetically what happens when a gossip is spread. To understand this, we must build a notion that between one pair of images, and another there is a time interval. A representation of time is implicit in this image.

A completely different way of dealing with time in a picture form can be exemplified by the work of Dennis Oppennheim, Reading Position for Second Degree Burn, 1970. This work, performed in the context of conceptual art, consists of two photographs, which also contain mainly visual qualities that can generate an interpretant as a representation of a person, but in this case we have special qualities that allow us to see that as a photography, which brings several consequences in the generation of meaning, especially for what is emphasized by Barthes (1984: 14 ): "the Photograph always carries its referent."

Dennis Oppennheim, Reading Position for Second Degree Burn

The juxtaposition of images and verbal information allows us to identify the visual qualities as two photographs taken at different times. The photograph itself, in other words, its filmic support made of silver salts (at that time) also goes through temporal changes, but the most important here is the change in the object of the sign, the referent. It was necessary hours of exposure to the sun for the book leaves its mark in skin of the artist. Being more precise, the sunlight marks the skin but not the space protected by the book.

There are several chains of meanings; among them, the fact that the mark left by sunlight on the artist's skin is a negative mark. This expression indicates the origin of the photography name, in greek phōtos and graphé, meaning light mark. It is worth of mentioning that time left its mark on the skin and this is what generates image and meaning. The two photos record a time that is not a symbolic interpretive construction, but a concrete mark of its passage. We have time on the relation between sun and skin.

We cannot forget that many artists of that time worked with this approach, among many examples we can see the work of Richard Long, A Line Made by Walking (1967) that is a mark left on the grass while he walked over it several times, in Sommerset, England.

Richard Long, A Line Made by Walking

There is also another thing which can be seen in these examples. The images created by processes occurred in time could have scientific purposes as the record of a bacteria culture growing or the slab deformation, but our interest here are the signs of art that make use of this time record, those works in which the indexicality brought by transformations, are understood as the passage of time, provide a polysemy that is inherent in art and invite the viewer to navigate on the multiple meanings.

Image deterioration

One issue placed by Santaella (1998: 81) with respect to extrinsic time is degradation; for her, "The most obvious form of extrinsic time appears in the wasting or aging image."

Wasting or deterioration is normally seen as something negative that should be minimized,  since it is not possible to avoid it, but it can also appear as constitutive element of image, in works of art that use the deterioration process to generate meaning3. The deterioration can also be used as appropriation of something that was degraded over time. This is the case of a photo essay by Andy Goldstein La Muerte de la Muerte.

Andy Goldstein La Muerte de la Muerte.

In 1979, Goldstein made a series of photographies in cemeteries of Buenos Aires from the oval shaped photo-ceramics that are placed on the graves or found on headstones. The pieces photographed photo-ceramics were damaged and images were almost unrecognizable.

The image deterioration is inevitable, but the gesture of the photographer transforms it into language, leading our eyes to the perception of what is left from the person buried there, his portrait, is also dying. Goldstein's photographies were shot and printed with technical accuracy showing the photographies damaged in the tombs. About this exhibition, Bril says that the photographies show the three deaths:

The first happens, in accordance with Barthes, already in the time to take the picture; it would be the death of the individual being transformed into an object. The second is physical the death and finally come upon the overall death in image effacement and affirmation of oblivion.

The Video

This theme of the photographic image representing other photographic images in the destruction process, leads us to the video that motivated this trajectory, authored by Felipe Barros, artist from Alagoas, Brazil, who took part in an artist residency, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, in Palo Alto, California,in 2010. During this period, he produced several videos related to time issue, using changes in the photographic image with chemicals that damaged the photographic support.

From all videos he produced in California, we will analyze one called "98001075056", which shows a sequence of images being vanished. At the end, the video in reverse shows an image regenerating.

Felipe Barros, 98001075056

The video, which lasts 3:11 minutes, shows the credits, five photos disappearing, and one image appearing. These images appear in the following sequence:

●             00:01 - Video Title.

●             00:07 - Picture 1 - couple

●             00:36 - Picture 2 - couple

●             01:12 - Picture 3 - man

●             01:41 - Picture 4 - Woman

●             02:19 - Picture 5 - couple

●             02:50 - Starts appearing the Picture 6

●             03:04 - Beggning of the fade-out

●             03:06 - Photo 6 - Child

●             03:07 - End of the fade-out with totally black screen

●             03:09 - Credit of the author

●             03:11 - End of the Video

The artist tells about this process in his masters dissertation. He does not say who are the people, but indicates that they are his family (Barros 2012: 16). The first photography that shows a couple can be seen as a very old photo. This interpretation is possible due to the sepia color of the photography and appearance of the couple, especially their clothes. The second picture also shows a couple, it may be the same time as the previous, but the contrast, the position of women and the neckline of her blouse, allow interpreting this photo as later than the other. This idea will be enhanced in comparison with the other pictures in the sequence.

Felipe Barros, 98001075056 - Picture 1 and Picture 2

When we have two images in sequence, we already have possible meanings that emerge from the relationship between them. So, we can think there is any relationship between the two couples, which gets other nuances when we see the third picture, which shows a young man. The picture does not give us certainty of the possible relations between people. The only possible thing is: would this man from the previous photo be the couple's son? Would he be the father of the artist?

The image that comes after shows a woman, the image itself does not offer much data to establish a temporal sequence between these photos and the others, but it is possible to say that is newer than the first. At this moment of the video is possible to establish a hypotheses:

there is a time sequence in the video. This photo and the previous one are the ones that show only one person, creating a relationship between them, stronger than the others. But the established relationship doesn't allow the knowledge if they are mother and son, siblings, mates, etc.

Felipe Barros, 98001075056 - Picture 3 and Picture 4

The last picture which will be destroyed shows a couple, they seem to be newer than the other two couples and give impression to be wearing social clothes,indicated by the tie. We know that these pictures represent the same family which ensures some similarity between the different faces, but the hypothesis that the photo of this couple is from the same man and woman of the previous photos is not at all improbable.

Felipe Barros, 98001075056 - Picture 5 and Picture 6

At the end there is a reversed video, showing the movement of pieces of photographic emulsion with pigment, these pieces start to join one another showing something that resembles a face, but soon starts a fade-out that will make the screen totally black. The pigment begins to show a photography in an orderly manner on the screen when the screen becomes darker, the recorded image begins to appear when a videographic feature begins to hide it. We can still identify a photography different from others because it is colorful. In the clues to the perception that the image gives, we can see a face of a smiling child. Only these last two photos show smiling people.

The Image deterioration shown on the video

The video is a type of image that falls into the category of intrinsic time, an image that consists of time, and "this constitution depends, on one hand, from the characteristics of the device from which the image is produced and presented " (Santaella 1998: 76). The device here is a video camera; as well as the photographic camera that registered the old pictures. There are some features in a video that already existed in a photography, such as the framework, the shooting angle and lens, but I want to highlight that it is an image what is linked to that photographed, its referent, as Barthes (1984: 41) says:

We would say that the Photography always carries its referent, both affected by the same amorous or funereal immobility, at the heart of the motion world: they are glued together, limb by limb, like chained to a corpse in certain tortures doomed; ...

The video image analyzed is also attached to the referent. We have faded color photos from people with clothes that is no longer used, what qualify as old photographies, family photos. Even before we see the movement of the video image, time is present in the difference between video time and that one of the photographies, creating a similar situation to that mentioned by Barthes (1984: 142) in a photography showing Lewis Payne sentenced to death in 1865 with the caption "He is dead and will die." He is dead when I see the picture, but he will die when it was taken. In Barros' work the images of the photographies belong to a different time from that of the video record, even if the people who appear in the photos are alive,  time when the photo was taken, has passed, died.

The photographies, taken by Andy Goldstein, represent the deterioration of the image material basis; in the case of the video we are talking about, the artist provokes and records this process. He says (Barros 2012: 17) that this effect "happens by printing photos on a full bleach transparent container, which by the action of chlorine corrodes printed silver-based photographies”.

With this process, after about five minutes, the picture is completely destroyed. The curious thing is that we are talking about a type of image, which for Bazin (1960: 4) was a subsidiary of the practice of embalming, not only the picture but all image.

If the plastic arts were put under psychoanalysis, the practice of embalming the dead might turn out to be a fundamental factor in their creation. The process might reveal that at the origin of painting and sculpture there lies a mummy complex. The religion of ancient Egypt, aimed against death, saw survival as depending on the continued existence of the corporeal body. Thus, by providing a defense against the passage of time it satisfied a basic psychological need in man, for death is but the victory of time.

Bazin and Barthes present two different stances to death, that  has been pointed before in the origin of our notion of time. Mulvey (2006: 60) notes that:

… for Bazin and Barthes, photography touches the complex human relation to death, but their shared perspective then diverges. For Bazin, it is to transcend death, part of the process of mourning; for Barthes, it is ‘the dive into death’, an acceptance of mortality.

The photographies in the analyzed video show the two aspects together, remember that those people died, but it also act as a reminder of died people. These two characteristics are inherent to the sign, as put Santaella (2003: 65) "the mere presence of the sign denouncing the absence of what it represents."

But this feature is lost when the material basis of the sign decay, when the emulsion that bound the pigments dissolve, the organization of colors is lost and nothing guarantees the similarity between pigments, sign basis material, and what it represents. The fading of the figure also reminds us that signs are things. As things sign deteriorates, as well as people they represent. When losing the sign, we also lose the memory and history.

There are several factors in this video that indicate ways to interpretant generating, the title is one of them. The number 98001075056 appears as a puzzle, but in Brazil it can be recognized as the sequential number of the ID card. The word identity, however, has a broader meaning than the document, pointing toward the generated interpretation by Barros' (2012: 16):

In video 98001075056, I try to act directly on the materiality of images when I appropriated from old photographies of my family. The name of the video is my ID number, national identification document, which sought to address the idea of identity by descent.

Erikson (1978: 36) was a psychologist who worked with the concept of identity. When he writes about a neurosis suffered by a doctor campaign, he said he was impressed with the lost sense of identity form patients and presents a concept of identity by saying: “...this sense of identity provides the ability to experience one’s self as something that has continuity, sameness, and to act accordingly”. (p. 36)

The identity is related to the perception of being the same person over time, despite changes; it is the feeling that something remains. Several facts collaborate in the construction of this feeling, but one of them is memory. If time exists as a mental construct that accounts for changes, when dealing with long-term changes, it is necessary to record them with the help of memory devices to which the human being has accessed, such as diaries, photographies, letters, etc. We need memory to remember the events and organize them temporally, if we lost memory we cannot know what changed, or what remained.

This is the irony of the title of the work of Barros: it is a number sequency that identifies him, as well as the photos of his ancestors, but the photos are dissolved, disappeared, and without some form of registration there is no way of knowing which genetic drifts of those people exist in the artist, so the identity is lost, breaks into flakes of pigment emulsion. On the other hand, the image of the child at the end leads us to new things and also indicates some hope that not everything is lost, but we should not delude ourselves, in the video there is not an idea of

redemption by the child: it is necessary effort for seeing an image forming and identifying the child. Maybe we could start to see the identity as indicated by Bauman (1998.36):

Instead of building their identity gradually and patiently, as to build a house upon the addition of roofs, floors, rooms or hallways - a series of "new beginnings", which is experimenting with forms instantly grouped, but easily demolished, painted over each other: an identity of palimpsesto.

Palimpsest in this case is a great word because for putting new information, word or image in a palimpsest it was necessary to erase the information that existed on the parchment. Barros erases the information in photography and on this empty paper that was the support of the photography, we can design our reflection and thoughts instigated by those images, which brings a new look on them.

References

Barros, Felipe Pereira. 2012. Vídeo... ciclo... reflexões. Campinas: Universidade Estadual de Campins Dissertação de Mestrado. http://www.bibliotecadigital.unicamp.br/document/? code=000870671&fd=y (23 August, 2014).

Barthes, Roland. 1984. Camara clara, a. Editora Nova Fronteira.

Bauman, Zygmunt. 1998. O Mal-Estar da ós-Modernidade. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Editor. Bazin, André. 1960. The Ontology of the Photographic Image. Film Quarterly 13(4). 4–9

BRIL, S. A fotografia e a morte da morte. Estado de Sao Paulo, 1980. São Paulo. Disponível em: <http://andygoldstein.es/textos/MIS_Brasil-LaMdelaM.html>. Acesso em: 21/8/2014.

Chipp, Hershel Browning. 1978. Teoria da Arte Moderna. São Paulo: Livraria Martins Fontes Editora.

Dondis, Donis A. 1974. A primer of visual literacy. MIT Press.

Denbigh, Kenneth George. 1981. Three concepts of time. Berlin; New York: Springer-Verlag. Erikson, Erik Homburger. 1987. Childhood and society. London: Paladin Books.

Mulvey, Laura. 2006. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. Reaktion Books. Peirce, Charles S, Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, Arthur W Burks & InteLex Corporation.

1994. The collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce - Electronic Edition. Charlottesville, Va.: InteLex Corp.

Santaella, Lucia. 1992. O SIGNO À LUZ DO ESPELHO (Uma Releitura do Mito de Narciso).

Cultura das mídias, 59–68. São Paulo: Editora Experimento.

Santaella, Lucia & Winfried Nöth. 1998. Imagem: cognição, semiótica, mídia. São Paulo: Editora Iluminuras.

Santaella, Lucia. 2009. Matrizes da linguagem e pensamento : sonora visual verbal : aplicações na hipermídia. São Paulo: Editora Iluminuras.

Whitrow, G. J. 2005. O que é tempo? Rio de Janeiro: Zahar. (ebook)

Notes

1.     A note on references to Peirce's work: All references to The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce Volumes 1 – 8, take the form CP n. m where n and m indicate volume and paragraph number respectively.

2.     All translations from books in Portuguese is authors' made.

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3   We can see some recent examples of this in the exhibition The Stumbling Present: Ruins in Contemporary Art, that happens at the Art, Design&Architecture Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara between October 2012 to January 2013.