2 channel Video Installation, 13 minutes as an endless loop, 5;1 Surround Sound. 16 X 9 widescreen Colour. The work premiered at The Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney as part of the 2002 Sydney Biennale - The World May Be Fantastic curated by Richard Grayson.

Advisory Panel

Susan Hiller (London)

Ralph Rugoff (San Francisco)

Janos Sugar (Budapest)

The Seventeenth Century of Occultation & Surface

Anne Finegan

What if the seventeenth century were to erupt into the present, in a place which had never experienced the seventeenth century as such? A place which may have lived, a time which existed unchanged for centuries, possibly millennia, and which was untouched by Europe and its seventeenth century until the eighteenth? For late post-colonial nations, like Australia, the seventeenth century never existed; it haunts the imagination like a phantomatic cipher, part of the baggage of a culture that can't shed the formations that made it The Baroque with its folds and its torsions sums up a moment of architecture, or a style of draping, dizzy with the romance of repetition which never reiterates. Even in the modern city, in which there is nothing Baroque, per se, an energy or a force can bear the imprint of a memory bursting through the repressions of modernism. A city might look modern, but it only takes a slight shift, or a juxtaposition of images, to release a torrent, which recalls the Baroque. Cities never stop bleeding into the past and the future, not even the most modern. Time seeps and lingers, as well as acceler­ates, and the shape of a line or a form, of a juxtaposition of forces, is enough to project the imagination backwards as well as forwards. Time can roll backwards in images which return to a place not yet constructed building pasts which are as real as they are imaginary. It's possible to read the Baroque in a modern city, to sense an energetics belonging to an occulted time.Haines' cloud-like formation is paradoxi­cally solid and pouring, a time-image which could be sculpted in stone, such is the density of his enigmatic matter; it flows upwards against gravity with the slow weight of a lava which billows in a mass too heavy for billowing. The time-image achieves what the Baroque did in stone, but backwards, folding the ether of cloud back into a concentrate of matter. The cur­rent swirls against the Baroque movement of infusing matter with the lightness of spirit; rather, from nothing, from an unfurling mass of image, there's a sensing of pressures, and a materialization of force which imposes with the sentiment of mat­ter.

The Baroque seemingly presses itself into the present, through a line of recog­nition, which passes 'without touching'. The image screen of the cityscape relates to the cloud by a seemingly unseen leap of a ratio of forces. Neither image reveals the origin of its energetic system. The city as time-image is not a representation of what Levinas called the 'II y a' ('there is') of things, but one in which origin is always covered over in the movement of time from one moment to the next. Translated into an energetics, less a place than a system of relay, of pulsations of darkness and light, the city engages with the shadow play assumed in the Baroque. The lights are not merely sparkling; there's a discern­ible pattern, which reiterates the mutating rhythm of underlying energies.

In Deleuze's theory of the Baroque, there's a stairway of folding leading from matter to the soul, and a whole system of floors; the Baroque is a house stretching into a tower. The principle of immanence, to which Deleuze adhered, is one in which there is no hierarchy of thought over matter, but only relations of strata and enfoldings, and differentials of speed. Turn the fold of matter over into thought: it's a question of point of view and where you place yourself in the strata. How does a surface fold and emanate an energetics? How is it that the Baroque could spiral up through a series of folds that is also depicting the movement of energies, if the folding of planes wasn't enough to create movement?

There are no depths only an unfolding of surfaces. Depth itself is always hidden and can only reveal itself in a series of, or comparison of, surfaces. Haines' city scape emanates a ratio of the modulations of city-as-motion laid out in one surface, while the pouring cloud  rears up as a torrent to image the depths of many surfaces.

The Seventeenth Century is multiple not double. If there's a mirroring, it's a mirroring to infinity, in which a differential ratio of distances and angles causes it to exist in more than one 'place' in the energetics of its images. It's time-image, not simply because the images change over time, but because the work fulfils the conditions of the notion as developed by Deleuze in his analysis of cinema: time-image is based on a shift from the linear progression of narrative (move­ment-image) to the multiplicity of holding different states in time.

One not only senses the force behind the billowing cloud of matter but trans­poses this feeling between images, sensing both as different states of the same; the city-scape can be thought of as a slowed down spread-out plane; the Baroque spiral­ing of cloud occupies a strata which is accentuated and accelerated. As such there are no signifiers in circulation, as in the familiar Freudian theory of the unconscious, in which connections are made in the hid­den or occulted psychical paths of the un­conscious.

In Haines' cinema of immanence there's no unconscious to be dredged. No narrative, no signifiers. There are no stories to be told, rather shifts of intensities per­taining to states. Therefore, there are no people-to-people cathexes or cathexes between people and things (fetishes, fixa­tions). There's rather a Deleuzian geology in which the relation is not even one of thing-to-thing, but rather one of surfaces or planes, and speeds and differential flows. Immanence is the knowledge that rises from the surface of matter, or the surface of a screen, and which, in turn, can fold into the surface of thought. Equally you can think immanence through the 'imma­terial' material. You begin with planes and states. Haines, like Deleuze, chooses not to fathom psychical paths for occulted knowledge, but to yield to the principle of immanence for what it displays on the surface.