tive performances in audiovisual works seem to be increasingly relocated, from
the site of the profilmic scene where actors, set designers and dancers display
their craft, to the site of post-production, where new kinds of computer-en-
hanced creative performances take place, and where an emergent algorithmic
culture becomes increasingly prevalent.The tendency is not only to“fix it in
the mix”or in the editing suite, but to develop“the mix”or editing suite into
the key arena for creative performance. It is when such changes seem to mani-
fest themselves aesthetically in deliberate and particular ways that it becomes
reasonable to talk of anaesthetic of post-production.
By addressing it as“an aesthetic,”I aim to do two things. First, I aim to loca-
lize it at the level of aesthetic practice, akin to a poetics, which reaches beyond
the actual means and techniques of production that are utilized, and is therefore
not simply congruent with the works where certain technologies and means of
post-production are used. Second, the emergence of this aesthetic is fundamen-
tally imbricated with the technological developments afforded by the surge of
new code written for cultural production in the aural and visual realms. These
technological developments supportvariousaesthetics of postproduction that
are interconnected, yet different. An aesthetic of sampling, as well as a related
aesthetic of remixing–reinvigorating older practices like collage, montage and
appropriation–have been addressed.Others might also be identified, or are
yet to emerge. Thus the various aesthetics of post-production take a number of
shapes across multiple fields.
In the field of art, the French critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud intervened
inwith an inclusive notion of post-production.He argued that the prac-
tices associated with post-production processes in audiovisual media–that is,
the taking and combining of elements that are already there rather than the
creation of something from the scratch–had become the newmodus operandiin
the art world. He asserts that,“Notions of originality (being at the origin of) and
even of creation (making something from nothing) are slowly blurred in this
new cultural landscape marked by the twin figures of the DJ and the program-
mer, both of whom have the task of selecting cultural objects and inserting them
into new contexts.”This logic of creation–mirroring both the DJ and themodus
operandiof the computer itself–is vital both for the specific aesthetic addressed
here and for understanding the wider reach of the aesthetics of post-production,
and its fallout in the art world in particular. Bourriaud also points to a wider
cultural sensibility within which the aesthetics of post-production are lodged.
However, this article, as indicated in its title, aims first and foremost to interro-
gate a limited aspect of this field, what I am calling mutable temporality, which
enriches the field between the realms of still and moving images, as well as the
dynamism of moving images as they render music“visible.”
160 Arild Fetveit