Frances Young
Between Movement and Stasis: Loops within the Durational

PhD

Summary
Additional Info

Practice: Selected Work

Summary

My research examines various iterations and configurations of looping: as methods in moving image, sound, and conceptual art practices; and as figures through which to read temporal, material, and ideological conditions. The thesis situates looping as a manifestation of cultural conditions, and explores the potentiality of the loop as a reflexive process - which can subvert the medium while bringing into view the conditions and constructs surrounding it.

Additional info

With the terms loops and looping I refer firstly to the digital or analogue loop: at its most basic, a short repeating section. I then examine how the loop can embody more complex structures – involving variation, modulation, layering, erasure; multiplicities of loops, and divergences which return to the same point. Looping also extends to feedback loops: in terms of analogue audio / video / electronic feedback, as a function of cybernetics and machine-to-machine imaging, and as a mode of operations within a broader network of social monitoring and surveillance capitalism.

The thesis explores the relations between looping and the durational, movement and stasis; engaging with mutating dynamics between technology, temporal experience and perception, economies of time and attention, social conditions and governance, imaging and the post-representational, materialities and meta-materialities of moving image and sound, cybernetics and the post-human, recording and erasure.

The research takes a loop-based methodological approach which bridges artistic practice, academic writing, and research strategies. This includes the use of a historical looping which extends back to the period from the mid-1960s to early 1970s, and returns to the contemporary.

Alongside my research I have worked as a lecturer in Moving Image at the University of Brighton, and as a visiting lecturer at RCA in programmes across the School of Arts and Humanities.