A Fragment of Time in the Pure State

This book sets out to replace a much used model for conceiving of painting s temporality, drawn from the scopic regime of the photographic, with one provided by digital imaging. It proposes an approach to time in painting that moves away from a preoccupation with absence and mourning, a Freudian position of return, aligning itself instead with Proust s time regained , reflecting more fully a lived experience of time. It is argued that in such a repositioning, a dialogue with digital imaging offers contemporary painting an expanded topography, and as such contributes to its ability to think time in these terms. The project s route-map is Deleuzian, taking painting into the territory of the rhizome, smooth space and the cinematic time-image. It proposes shifting painting s mode of address towards one that can offer an image of thought as a form of 'haptic time'. The analysis addresses the nature of practice-based research and theorizes studio practice, documented through process notes . The project might shed light, for practitioners and researchers, on issues of dialogue between mediums and the articulation of the sometimes uneasy relationship between theory and practice.