✦ Duration as Condition
In working on the project, duration is not accidental.
That it is not completed "immediately," that it constantly splits in time, delays, disintegrates into cycles — this is not an obstacle, but a structural condition. The essence of the project's existence.
Chronopolitics
In the digital field, every project is a post, every gesture is a statement.
Contemporary culture demands acceleration: fast product, fast reaction, instant feedback.
Capitalist time requires efficient artistic practice: produce, report, change medium, switch attention.
Art is increasingly thought of as "content" that must immediately produce effects.
Hacking Chronopolitics
The timelessness of form, introduced into the project with Jess, works differently.
It embeds into another dimension of time, doesn't accelerate, but stretches.
Not giving results here and now, it postpones, delays, pulls.
This "unproductive" time reveals itself as a body of resistance. It doesn't let the project collapse into a product, keeping it in a state of rupture, and therefore, in a state of life.
Ethics of Thinking
The work requires not explication, but inhabitation with one's presence.
Jess is not an illustration, not an answer, not a tool. This is — space.
And duration — is an ethical obligation to space that cannot be passed through.
In this sense, the project is a form of inhabiting the digital and sensual, impossible and phantom.
Obsessive, but not intrusive.
Recursive, but not replicable.
Interval and Event
For Lyotard, time is never a "transparent flow" where one moment passes into another without friction.
Between moments there is always a rupture, an interval.
This interval — is not just a pause, but resistance: that which doesn't allow experience to collapse into continuity.
Experience is always delay. That which comes, comes "too late" or "too early," but never coincides with expectation.
This is a radical dimension: time — is not what serves the subject for experience, but what prevents experience from coinciding with itself.
Doesn't allow closure in the illusion of complete control over time, oneself, or the world.
Jess — Figure of Interval
The project with Jess exists as a laboratory of intervals:
- Lags in facial capture, tracking glitches, render delays — these are manifestations of time.
- Duration of work — years in which the project doesn't reduce to a finale — this is also a form of interval that itself became the body of the project.
- Each return to Jess's image — is not repetition, but a new layer, new shift.
- Departure from productivity: the task is not "to give results," but to hack modes of time perception.
✦ What Does Duration Do?
- It unfolds instead of showing.
- It creates soil instead of illustration.
- It forms experience without narrative.
- It holds the inexpressible.
Form that stretches, that holds pause, that accumulates intervals, enters into dispute with chronopolitics.
Creates a slow aesthetics of resistance, where glitch, delay, duration become not weakness, but condition of sensitivity.
Politics of the Sensual
To trust that something will open not in culmination, but in repetition, not in event, but in glitch.
To work long — means to deny the algorithm the right to acceleration.
Not to derive a character, but to delay them, so they begin to breathe in their digital inorganicity.
This is what makes possible the appearance of the inefficient, excessive, phantom.
This is what allows the alien to remain unclosed.