Abstract

In The Elusive Made Present: Art and the Incipiency of Images, I offer a new conception of images by exploring the relations between sensation and composition through the prism of new media, film, video, and painting. Examining Paul Sharits’ flicker films, John F. Simon Jr.’s internet art, Wood Vasulka’s metamorphic videos, and the resonate paintings of Piet Mondrian and Robert Irwin, I proposes that all images, regardless of medium, emerge through the shared encounter between viewers and artworks. Acknowledging the significance and influence that Deleuze’s thought has had in the areas of art, cinema and visual studies, The Elusive Made Present works from a “Deleuzian” perspective, arguing that images are not preexisting, static representations or simply a transition from one fixed state of experience to another. Instead, I suggest that images are intimately entangled with experience and undergo a continuous process of emergence and change, which I call the incipiency of images. These changes may not be dramatic or even visible, but, as I contend, they are felt as an intensity that unfolds through the activity of seeing. From this idea of intensity, which is central to the incipiency of images, I develop a concept of compositional force that demonstrates how images do not exist in the materials of artworks or within the minds of viewers; rather, they reside in a dynamic perceptual field that both viewers and artworks experientially share.