Mutable Temporality In and Beyond the
Music Video: An Aesthetic of Post-
Production
Arild Fetveit
For the last twenty years, neither matter nor space nor time has been what it
was.... We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique
of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even
bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art. (Paul Valery)...first we had the industry of the moving image, today we have the indus-
try of the accelerated image. (Gene Youngblood)...the body of the speaker dances in time with
his speech....the body of the listener dances in rhythm with that of the
speaker! (W.S. Condon and W.D. Ogston)We listen to music with our muscles. (Friedrich Nietzsche)Paul Valery’s words about innovations transforming the entire technique of the
arts, quoted by Walter Benjamin in the opening of his essay,“The Work of Art
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”still resonate today.We are also in a
time when we must take stock of sizable changes in artistic production, in part
inspired by technological innovation. Today, the technological innovations
which may be“affecting artistic invention”and perhaps even bringing about a
“change in our very notion of art,”are not the apparatuses of mechanical repro-
duction that reformed artistic production in the days of Valery and Benjamin–
predominantly photography and film–but the computer and its operational
logic, which keeps penetrating and reforming the spheres of cultural produc-
tion.
The aspect of such changes that I specifically want to address here is amutable
temporality, especially prominent in music videos, which appears to be a new
aesthetic of post-production. It is associated with a greater change in which crea-