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influencing impressions of the Gallery, prior familiarity with museums, and opinions about media art and technology. This ethnographic material was central to my study, as the voices of visitors guided its thematic direction and ensuing analysis. As the first in-depth, qualitative analysis of visitation to the Screen Gallery, my study therefore makes an empirical contribution to existing visitor research by offering an original means of exploring issues of museum visitation and agency, and movement and stillness. For example, visitors often received Drift with complete stillness, lulled into a focused state of attention by the shiftings of light and sound. As interviewee Colleen reveals, this concentration arose because Drift resonated intimately, akin to a meditative encounter: There wasnt any other emotion or feeling behind it other than feeling relieved and comfortable, and relaxed. It was almost meditative I was actually trying not to think about anything! I didnt want it to be influenced by the mornings happenings I just thought this is relaxing. Colleen has described how stillness and movement are therefore modalities within a broad vocabulary of interaction. While theorists have long noted how the transition from painting to film marked a shift from still to more active forms of contemplation (Benjamin), an unanticipated finding of my study reasserted stillness as a dominant modality of active reception. In this article I therefore ask how agency finds expression within states of stillness. I propose that stillness mediates a distinctive form of agency as it is laden with what Brian Massumi calls potential movement. I explore this concept with reference to visitors experiences of History of a Day, a work in World Without End. I then draw upon Henri Lefebvres description of eurrhythmic congruence to describe how stillness is characterised by a focused state of attention, reflecting a highly subjective form of agency. I conclude by describing how this spatial awareness enables individuals to realise their own creativity, and inspire new praxes for daily living.
while movement can be understood as the actual content of architecture (322), it is more difficult to draw correlations between the properties of movement and perception of still images. He developed the idea of potential movement to breach a commonality between the two, as paraphrased by Massumi: potentials for movement are extracted from actual movement, then fed back into it via architecture. We normally think of abstraction as a distancing from the actual, but here potentials are being abstracted into it (323). Spuybroek therefore inscribed the idea of tendency in his work, an affordance that manifests as a possibility of convergence that unconsciously exerts a pull, drawing the body forward into a movement the body already feels itself performing before it actually stirs (Gibson in Massumi 324). This idea suggests that the act of sitting and viewing an image, can be reconceived as a state laden with potential movement. As Massumi describes, sitting still is the performance of a tendency towards movement It is the pre-performance, in potential, of the movement and its function It is in intensity (324). Sitting can therefore be regarded an 'active' state, where 'tendency'indeed intensitycharges stillness with a potential for movement, actualisation and change. Conventions that invite still forms of participation in an interactive museum are an opportunity to express ones agency, as one cannot feel the full momentum of tendency if not having at first remained still. At one level, the process of waiting for a work to begin or end generates a potential for movement, as visitors must decide when they will move towards another work. However, the potential for agency is also articulated within a less performative, internal shift that arises within stillness, when visitors eschew reflexive forms of interaction to maintain a focused state of attention.
maintained a focused state of attention. By focusing their attention in this way, visitors become more receptive towards the affective experience of viewing art. For example, History of a Day flutters with time-lapse images, a soothing rhythm of night turning to day and to night again. On one hand, each screen has been allocated its own narrative, a temporal illustration of a days passing within natural and human-made landscapes. A fairground, for example, was shot at night and showed crowds arriving, swarming, alighting rides and departing. However, it is possible to yield to the projections visual and aural rhythm, and in doing so abstract the figurative signifier of each scene. Narrative logic recedes as the senses become flooded, and in turn slows the pace of reflexive perception. Without the imposition of a linear narrative the works images begin to unfold with a new slowness. The main ride comes to resemble the slowly beating wings of a moth in lamplight, arms lifting, rotating and dropping in the fairground floodlights. People, rides and the dark sky blend into a meditation on colour, rhythm and sound, a palette comprising the many moments that emerge and pass at a night carnival. This form of perception elicits an agency of complex, affective awareness. Sound artist Brian Enos account of the role of silence in ambient music provides a close analogy as to how experiences of stillness in the Screen Gallery become dynamic with enhanced affective awareness. He describes how silencesa stillness in soundactually draw attention to the aural experience that preceded it, as the rests are invariably filled in by echoes of previously heard fragments (in Tamm 134). In other words, the experience of listening is heightened by silences, for they create a space of reflection that resonates with the impressions of sound passed. The Gallery is an ambient chamber that echoes with affective forms of experiential encounter rather than echoes of sound. The echoes of visitors encounters are also intensified by stillness. Stillness focuses attention, so visitors garner an affective awareness of their spatial environment. This awareness constitutes a distinctive form of agency within the museum, for it enables visitors to locate what Henri Lefebvre describes as a rhythmic congruence between their subjective experience and conditions of external environment.
bouquets, garlands of rhythms, to which it is necessary to listen in order to grasp the natural or produced ensembles. While Lefebvre uses these definitions to develop a Marxist critique of modernity, they also show how within the flexible temporal boundaries of stillness, visitors can express a form of agency by using their heightened affective awareness to locate eurhythmic and arrhythmic experiences. By becoming aware of the way we are conditioned by rhythms, we can begin to imprint new rhythms upon the patterns that govern cultural and social practices. Within the Screen Gallery, this rhythmic observation manifests as an attentiveness towards the temporal relationship between internal sensation and external environment. Congruence between internal and external rhythms was often described by visitors as a feeling of relaxation, even meditation. For example, Sean drew comparisons between still encounters with time-based art and his impression of quiet environments: Its like having background music while youre falling asleep, or you turn the radio on so you havent caught the start of a song but you catch the end of it. These associations imply a close environmental relationship between sound and body, where the rich aesthetic presence of art overrides the expectation of narrative continuity. Perhaps most telling is Seans analogy of falling asleep to background music, as it suggests that time-based art can maintain an ambient presence while not intruding upon natural bodily rhythms. It seems that a harmony between body and art environment allows a pull towards a state of relaxation akin to the drift of sleep, which, notably, is a point where both internal and external rhythms synchronise. Falling asleep is a crossing of thresholds into a space dominated by the activities of the unconscious. Occupying the Gallery and surrendering to a state of relaxation can therefore also be understood as crossing a threshold into a deeper, more internal realm of interaction with art. Affective awareness therefore enables visitors to cultivate a greater sensitivity towards their sensory responses. This is a highly-subjective agency, as it arises when visitors develop a keen awareness of the eurrhythmic alignment between the rhythm of external space, and their own, internal rhythm. Stillness therefore draws attention to the complexity of our own subjective experience, and the different ways we are conditioned by our environments. Yet most importantly, these experiences also generated self-reflection and a desire to creatively transform their circumstances. Matthew described how his encounter with art aroused creative inspiration: I go there to experience something new. I would love to be able to do something like that Maybe its something for me, where I wish I was doing something else in terms of my occupation. Paul noted how expressive potential could be expanded by considering oneself an artist: you can do it yourself as well, and I suppose thats what draws people in to the whole thing. Katrina suggested that aesthetic forms of interaction can challenge the conventional ways of thinking about and responding to our environment: if it gets somebody to do something different, or, gets someone to do something in a different way maybe, expand their minds in that way, maybe thats a use for it as well give them something to think about, and they can see it again in a different light. These comments show how stillness can enable a realisation of ones own subjective, creative potential by countering the reflexive speed of the everyday.
Conclusion
My study of ACMIs Screen Gallery has shown how agency finds expression in stillness. The temporal elasticity created by artwork and institution allows visitors to appropriate time and space in a way that slows the pace of movement and focuses attention, in turn enhancing a visitors awareness of their presence and spatial environment. Stillness therefore heightens visitors awareness of sensation, sentience, the bodys occupation of time and space. This form of encounter elicits a feeling of congruence and awakens the spirit. This transformation was the mainstay of the political project set by Lefebvre, a statement on mobilising individuals to affect change by becoming more attentive towards incongruities between self and environment. In the Gallery it became possible, through immersion in an aesthetic, ambient space, for visitors to cultivate an intuition towards their own rhythms and those of surrounding environments. An important claim is to be staked on creating spaces for stillness in daily life, as opportunities for stillness are becoming increasingly scarce within the dynamics of spatial and temporal compression that characterise this era of globalisation and informationalisation. As Heidi describes, these moments given to daydreaming and reflection can become powerful conduits for realising ones own potential: [It] gives you a new lease on life. And all the dreams you have its possible Sometimes you think its all a bit out of reach, its too difficult, whereas you go and see something like that, and it makes everything clear. And makes everything possible.
References
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