* omslag Between Stillness PB:DEF

dically boosted mutability. Lev Manovich, in discussing the future of images,
notes a number of computer-facilitated techniques that define the new status of
what he calls the hybrid image:

The ability to composite many layers of imagery with varied transparency, to place

still and moving elements within a sharedD virtual space and then move a virtual

camera through this space, to apply simulated motion blur and depth offield effect,

to change over time any visual parameter of a frame–all these can now be equally

applied to any images, regardless of whether they were captured via a lens-based

recording, drawn by hand, created withD software, etc.

The new situation offers a radical malleability to images, even if they appear to
be photographic, and therefore“forced to correspond point by point to nature,”
in the words of Charles S. Peirce.Therefore, as Manovich proposes,“while we
can say that today we live in a‘photographic culture,’we also need to start
reading the word‘photographic’in a new way.‘Photographic’today is really
photo-GRAPHIC, the photo providing only an initial layer for the overall gra-
phical mix.”Thus, the boosting of post-production capabilities has offered a
situation where the malleability redefines images both in terms of spatial and
temporal parameters, as well as where this malleability is intimately connected
to the palimpsest, and to hybridity. How, then, is the temporal palimpsest of
Only Youconstrued?
In Cunningham’s video, the temporality of universal clock-time is not so
much sacrificed in favor of letting us appreciate the details in the spatial unfold-
ing of the movements, as is often the case in slow motion. Clock-time tempora-
lity, institutionalized through technologies of automated cinematic reproduc-
tion, is first of all sacrificed in order to allow a subjective intra-emotional
temporality to come forth, a temporality that embodies the music as much as it
articulates an inner pulse of life itself.
How, then, do we probe such a temporal dynamism that seems to intimately
link musical and a bodily movement? This question brings us right back again
to Richter and his effort to create a universal language of rhythm, where he saw
film as a uniquely fitting medium, and to the Russian painter Wassily Kandins-
ky’s related efforts to manifest movement and rhythm in abstract paintings.
This relates as well as to efforts at the margins of musicology and dance theory
to understand “correspondences”between musical and somatic structures.
Levi-Strauss has been concerned with these issues, as has the Hungarian musi-
cologist János Maróthy, who according to Richard Middleton, argues that
“rhythmic sensation”snatches us out of particularity,“switching the individual
into the circuit of universality”.In the perspective of Middleton, the key con-
cept that links the aural to the visual, the music to the embodied human life, is
gesture. We may well understand temporal dynamism in music and in the hu-

Mutable Temporality In and Beyond the Music Video 171