Play/Pause, FF/Rewind. End. Machine Times, End Times: Theatre, Live Film and Video

Abstract

In Chapter 8 we consider two art media that have long been threatened with extinction – film and theatre – and discuss how remediation charts their formation of a practice looking backwards and forwards, communicating histories and the future worlds of NMD. This chapter deals with questions of temporality and belatedness in NMD and considers modalities of machinic temporality through a number of examples of work that seem to betray a dramaturgical commitment to a particular form of technically enabled recursion. This chapter pursues lines of enquiry opened by Cubitt and others on the idea of time-shifting – that since the advent of the Sony Portapak in the mid 1960s, and the subsequent ubiquity of technologies like the VCR, live temporalities have been subject to varieties of shifting: rewinding and repeating, fast-forwarding, pausing, amid the presentness of ‘play’. We discuss Tacita Dean’s Event for Stage, Atom Egoyan’s Steenbeckett, and Gob Squad’s Super Night Shot, works that in different ways seem to provoke existential questions about liveness, temporality and memory. We explore how strange this quality of time can seem to be and how easily it affects us. This uncertainty is also acute in Verdonck’s End, the concluding artwork for the chapter and a pivotal work for the book as a whole. End is a performance for ‘ten figures’, five of whom are actors – the others are machines, visual effects and projections. They seem to be performing the possible final stage of a human community. The ‘starting point of END’ comes from media images of environmental catastrophe, the extinction of species, and ‘the horrors of famine and war’ (Van Kerkhoven, End, A Two Dogs Company Website d). The performance lasts one hour but has no discernable beginning or end. It is dramatically flat – there is no story, only actions, and one senses that it could easily go on into infinity.

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