referred to as a“time warp”effect. A few years ago, tailor made software made
its spectacular time warp effects a selling point. Avid sold“Liquid Pro,”by
claiming to offer the creation of“fast motion and slow motion effects in real-
time,”which makes it“much easier to try various speed changes to find the
perfect matching speed.”Algolith’s“Time Warp plug-ins”claimed to provide
similar features, and Real Viz’s“ReTimer Professional”claimed to let one“con-
trol time for astonishing slow motion or fast motion effects...giving...ultimate
flexibility during post-production.”Interestingly, these powerful“time warp”
capabilities seem now to have taken a back seat as selling points in the market-
ing of post-production software, which indicates that such affordances are in-
creasingly taken for granted as part of new and upgraded post-production
suits.
The developments in software production invite a new look into how, more
precisely, innovation in cultural production takes place. Innovation now, it ap-
pears, takes place as much in specially-designed software as in particular art
works. A new algorithm may be created for achieving an effect in a film, for
example, and outputs from such an algorithm are readily exportable to other
projects, either through the original software produced, or through other soft-
ware producers’attempts to emulate the effects. The stunning mutable tempo-
rality of the“bullet time”effect in theMatrixtrilogy provided a groundbreak-
ing achievement that echoed through audiovisual culture in a number of more
or less convincing imitations. The imminent and almost viral spread of this aes-
thetic was soon supported by specialized software offered as add-ons to widely
circulated editing tools, though the original effect was not merely a matter of
code, but a creative set-up and use of photographic still cameras drawing on
pioneering experiments by the U.S. photographer Eadweard Muybridge and
the French cartographer Aimé Laussedat.
So far, we have seen how visions and technologies supporting a mutable tem-
porality can be located in the earlyth Century avant-garde, as well as in the
tools for digital post-production of the earlyst Century. The latter tools have
been developed in concert with an emergent aesthetics of mutable temporality,
which took off in thes and now seems to be taken for granted as part of
current audiovisual discourse. A number of precursors could be identified in a
more conclusive history, which could consider music video alone, or also ad-
dress art video and various uses of animation in the wider realms of film and
television production.
Animation techniques like stop-motion and pixelation, technically positioned
between photography and film, have a rich history of interrogating the land-
scape between still and moving images. These techniques have also been used
in music videos. A notable example is the video for Duran Duran’sAll She
Wants Is(), directed by the photographer Dean Chamberlain. The video
Mutable Temporality In and Beyond the Music Video 163