1.
In The Camera: Essence and Apparatus, Victor Burgin described “the fundamental distinction maintained between film and photography is one between the temporality of narrative and an image assumed to be ‘instantaneous’” (Burgin, 2018 p.165). This statement has led me to discover how the practices of sculpture and moving image uniquely embody and expose the concept and value of contingency — understood as the unpredictable, unstable, and ephemeral nature of reality. I believe that both mediums share a distinctive symmetry and paradoxical dance between permanence and impermanence, materiality and temporality, process and outcome. What or where is the value of contingency within these specific and multidimensional mediums, and how is probability strategically eradicated unlike in other practices?
Behind the scenes, all artists are icebergs: drifting through the tundra, attempting to melt, evaporate and rain back down throughout the world. If their ideas can capture the hot, attentive sun of the zeitgeist, we then get to bear witness to something akin to discovery. This journey of sublimation, I believe, relies upon the jeopardy of contingency: one that will return to another contingent state. It is this superposition or subplot of contingency that connects the world and is best observed within the practices of moving image and sculpture.
In his essay After Finitude: The Necessity of Contingency, philosopher Quentin Meillassoux asks us to open the aperture on the reality of contingent forces as “what we see there is a rather menacing power – something insen-sible, and capable of destroying both things and worlds, of bringing forth monstrous absurdities, yet also of never doing anything, of realizing every dream, but also every nightmare, of engendering random and frenetic transformations, or conversely, of producing a universe that remains motionless down to its ultimate recesses, like a cloud bearing the fiercest storms, then the eeriest bright spells, if only for an interval of disquieting calm.” (Meillassoux, Q. 2008) With skill, sculpture and moving image achieve this motionless universe through frenetic transformations. Perhaps then contingency is at the core of these practices. If so, can we understand how, and what, this “interval” value of contingeny brings to practice, works and world? Or must it remain forever beyond probability?
2.
Hyper-individualism has mutated further with the advent of a techno-feudalist society. Emergency politics dominates media, as we move from one disaster to another, opinion divides and removes nuance. Social media has commodified behavior, allowing for either rigid ignorance or extreme fugue states. Our digital lives play host to post-truth and post-ironic ideas that exonerate our physical existence. Within this incredible information age, we all aim at an unknowable shapeshifting target on a foreign map; a vision of the future, whilst denying the caged Moloch-beast that is contingency.
Within this context, or non-place as Marc Augé might describe it, I am draw to the notion of the ignored power of contingency. As Robin Mackay described, contingency at its simplest is an “attempt to think events that take place but need not take place: events that could be, or could have been, otherwise” (Mackay. A. 2011). Therefore, within the mediums of moving image and sculpture, this idea is most powerfully addressed. In both practices I feel the process is buried by the outcome, yet there is something deeply influential, immediate, present and controlled being hidden within their structures.
It is not financially viable to be a practicing artist in the world today. The structure of globalism and unregulated capitalism encourages the contemporary artist to find value systems that qualify work via traditional aesthetic, academic or market routes. Art as commodity. Even the power of collective movements has become largely banalized because of this hyper-individualistic culture, and an assumed freedom found within technology. This standpoint we find ourselves in, among many other dogmatic systems that underpin value today, are directly challenged by hyper-chaos, an unbound-absolute we could call contingency. The global economic markets operate this idea at their core with and beyond the realm of probability. The contingent brings liberation through volatility, a non-structure which dominates every aspect of our society.
The renaissance works live on in antiquity. Revered sculptures stand, as they always have, eternally in stillness, both physically and now ideologically. As we scroll through reels and auto-play on YouTube, the stories and symbolism of these works become more invisible and irrelevant. The same could be said when Netflix or Amazon release yet another studio film or endless series ad infinitum. Before the advent of streaming services, cinema could be a poetic museum, now it can barely survive. Just like these ancient works of power, failure, gods and nymphs, is the work of moving image and film becoming invisible? Does the democratization of stories echo the incoherence of the classical? Whatever arrives next relies on before, therefore where do we allay value? It must now be found in the immeasurable and unplanned.
Mark Fisher articulates this contemporary malaise as the "increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present”. I believe he encourages a contingent philosophy further by suggesting that “in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate anymore” (Fisher. M 2014 p8-9). Unable to share in a vision of the future, we zombify the past, and culture stagnates like a still lake. The commitment to the present is the practice of communicating with events. But it each individual’s communication with the present is commodified (the attention economy) the contingent becomes denied and the present loses its value. With no movement, the body of water begins to dry up.
Contingency is the only reality by which our world is defined: “the laws of nature are contingent”(Badiou, A. P.4). I feel that within the boundaries of this notion, an eternal and transient truth can be captured. For contingency to exist you need direction, aims and margins. The parameters of these practices are mnemonic and serve this specific purpose to society. It is their processes that share particular contingent acts that require response, communication, participation and transience. The three dimensional space of objects, experience and mind is under threat as our nature is maligned. More than ever we need to employ this fluid anachronistic value as a fundamental right to creation.
I hope to explore and frame the primacy of both of these crafts from an artists perspective and the power that can elicit. I hope to observe the similarities shared between sculpture and moving image by looking at works and ideas throughout history. In doing so I hope to explore and capture the symbiosis of contingent acts within these mediums. And finally, I hope this body of writing articulates how this comparably undervalued principle is the key to collective experience.
3.
Guy Dubord’s 1967 The Society Of The Spectacle foresaw a world in which images replace real experience, and superficial reality is created around appearances, removing people from themselves, others and reality. This understanding of globalized capitalism suggests that the power and influence of the economic markets have an abnormal and “irresponsible sovereignty” over culture and politics. This has had a powerful effect on the psychology of society. Yet despite all the control, the remaining underlying truth is chaos.
Jean Dubuffet, Character with Rhinestone Eyes (Personnage aux yeux de strass), April 1954, Private Collection, New York © 2021
Kurt Schwitters understood this, as exclaimed in his description of the Dadaist movement as “the only savings bank that pays interest in the hereafter!” (Kurt Schwitters, unknown.) And indeed this is reflected through the economics of the time. As the economist Frank Knight described “It is a world of change in which we live, and a world of uncertainty. We live only by knowing something about the future; while the problems of life, or of conduct at least, arise from the fact that we know so little”. The originality of Duchamp could only exist in a world where - “if we are to understand the workings of the economic system we must examine the meaning and significance of uncertainty; and to this end some inquiry into the nature and function of knowledge itself is necessary.” (Knight . F.H. 1956).
Through modern digital and technological advances the spectacle has evolved much further than the Dadaists, Situationists and economists could imagine. If we fast forward to the 2020’s, even the value of physical and material reality is being called into question. As the tech oligarch Mark Zuckerberg stated, “It’s an interesting thought experiment how much of the stuff that we physically have today just doesn’t actually need to exist in the future” (Zuckerberg. M & Von. Theo Podcast, 2025). Tech companies, following the economic markets, have capitalized on contingency. By creating digital worlds that rely entirely on our random participation, which then a contingent algorithm and structure can then cipher us into addictive echo chambers.
In 1954 Jean Dubuffet began work on his ‘Little Statues Of Precarious Life’. A series of sculptures that capture the “strange bewildering worlds that exercise a kind of fascination” for Dubuffet (Selz. P. P90.96). Combining steel wool, sponge, lava stones and more, Dubuffet discovered that “what were defects in the trade were added virtues” in his magical creation of characters. Without the material, these defect-virtues would be cast aside as unnecessary. These works are examples of the natural contingent forces that have brought them into formation both consciously and unconsciously by Dubuffet.
Character with Rhinestone Eyes is formed from the materials of a burnt-out car found in a garage, it looks precarious and molten yet natural and ancient with weight. The incinerated and scorched figure strikes immediate connotations of intense fragility, fire and heat as a wreck begins to crumble. Similarly Dubuffet made use of sponge for The Dancer and Maestro, in which critics recognized them as ‘hybrid beings being situated at the meeting point of vegetal and the human’. The anima of these characters, as Jung would describe it, are situated in a contingent state, both natural and ephemeral.
Through these experiments of materiality we begin to understand what Dubuffet describes as ‘slippages’ or better put, “notions assumed to be very foreign to one another and in which the clue kinship is suddenly revealed” (Dubuffet, Notes For The Well Read p.148). This revealing concept itself perfectly articulates the captured contingency, and it is taken a step further when a viewer shares the space with the material. The experience of the work adjusts the perspective of the mind as we anthropomorphize them. The sculptor or film maker includes the chaos and unpredictability of the individual experience as the event beyond the outcome. The value is intrinsic to the experience of it.
4.
Joesph Beuys described this relationship with sculpture as according completely “with the human being and the subconscious, chaotic will” (Beuys. J. 2004). This goes some way to explain the influence and ever-captivating works of Baroque renaissance masters, such as Gian Lorenzo Bernini. With the backing of the cardinal Nepote, Bernini rivals Michelangelo in his influence. The Romans marveled at the master sculptors’ ability to harness form and light to render cinematic moments.
"Drawing of the fountain of the four rivers in the piazza Navona, Rome." The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Art & Architecture Collection, The New York Public Library. 1664.
In sweeping cinematic form Apollo and Daphne captures the thrilling moment as Daphne begins to turn into a tree. The Sleeping Hermaphrodite lies alone within a dark room of the Uffizi, the solitary figure resting on their front with their back to us. It was these revolutionary works, these “talking sculptures” that redefined the individual experience of story through material.
Bernini was also known to work before large audiences. Attending his studio was a mark of social distinction, an environment charged with contingent social relations. To some extent this space could be considered as a performance space “eliding the role of the artists model with that of an actor” he was able to “choreograph narrative groupings”. He understood how to capture the natural unpredictability within the “two sources instrumental to his art making: gestural language and scenographic effects” (G. Warwick. 2012 p.110). The performing body of his students and visitors dealt with the lifelike and ‘liveliness’ whilst the artist’s imagination set the scenography.
Sculpting light and shadow in this way reveals how “the context of reception, then becomes the medium - in a cultural sense - out of which Bernini fabricated his art” (G. Warwick. 2012 p.109). Therefore it is this symbiotic relationship to the work, its presentation, and the material that utilizes a contingent principle and thinking, in the same way a good communicator is listened to and not simply heard, the participation becomes conducted.
If “one pole is determined” by that of the sculpture, and “the other is indeterminate” i.e that of the viewer, then “the principle of motion…that is to say something is conveyed from here to there” (Beuys. J. 2004 p.48-50) acts as the contingent property. Then, as Beuys goes on to say, “the only thing that counts is how far you take it from one pole to the other”. Bernini understood this. It is no accident that he operated as the illustrator of the Vatican’s power, especially seen in public works that resonate with the “chaotic will” to this very day.
This dynamic is exemplified in Bernini’s Fountain of Four Rivers, which Michelangelo Lualdi described poetically: “[The obelisk] is placed in the centre of this most artful macchina: and is the first line of the marvel that strikes the eye of the curious spectator” (Lualdi quote: Huse, Norbert, 1970. ‘La fontaine des fleuves du Bernin’, Revue de l’Art). Evidently the formation of these materials, styles and symbols encapsulates the marvels of the Baroque period.
The great feat of this civic work fused together art and architecture, winning Bernini the commission over his rivals. As we pan around, this coalescing hollow sculpture suspends an obelisk surrounded by the mythic river figures, culminating from the four corners of the earth.
“The camerawork is almost stately …” gallery view of Grenfell by Steve McQueen.
Photograph: Photos by Richard Ivey. Steve McQueen, Grenfell, 2019 (still)
Photograph: Photos by Richard Ivey. Steve McQueen, Grenfell, 2019 (still)
The fountain puts Rome at the centre of the earth, illustrating the collective power of Catholicism during the period. This physical manifestation of symbols and narrative captures the public’s attention to this day precisely because of its universal, reciprocal symbols and by extension, the contingent psychological freedom that it evokes.
Across centuries, contingency shifts from divine narrative to moral document. Bernini’s theatrical control contrasts sharply with McQueen’s exposure of collective failure, yet both works compel the viewer through an unplanned encounter. Through the form, a viewer is in an experience whether they understand it or not. Grenfell (2019) exposes the viewer to the vast dark reality of the same unaccounted force turned inside out and made real.
The tragedy of Grenfell is exemplified by seeing our green and pleasant land passing away on approach, exposing the vague paradox of our country. Once we reach the tower one cannot ignore the literal and metaphorical symbol of a crumbing established system. The National Tour of Grenfell places the demise of community at the centre of the western world. It is horrifying and captivating, the medium is experienced as both individual and communal. The reality of the work is potently heavier than the Berninis fountain in its moral purpose, yet the images and symbols are no less universally resonant or real in the contingent effect.
Both of these public works personify the individuals lack of power, and through a contingent experience suspend the viewers complicit imagination. McQueen understands contingency and how this “complicity is a twisted form of embracing contingency, because it has an inverse mechanism: through closure, complicity seeks to twist the soft dogma of ‘opens toward contingent materials’ into a ‘being-opened by contingency materials’ (Negarestani. R. 2015 P.14). Be it a sociopolitical document, or a fountain of myths guiding water, embracing and illicting the unplanned is at centre of these works.
5.
In Man and His Symbols, Aniela Jaffe describes states that only in the “interplay of consciousness and the unconscious can the unconscious prove its value” (A.Jaffe & C.Jung. 1964). This “interplay” is the operative chaos that I am exploring, therefore it is worth focusing further on symbols. Similar to Carl Jung’s ideas around symbols, Russian poet and playwright Vyacheslaz Ivanov wrote:
“The symbol is only then a true symbol, if its meaning is inexhaustible and boundless, and if it expresses, in its secret (hieratic and magic) language hints and suggestions to something unspeakable, something which cannot be put into words” (Vyacheslav Ivanov, Trudni i Dni. 1912). This description of the inexhaustible and boundless is proven through moving image, wherein the activated symbol carries the audience along a journey of silent code. Wherever these nonlinear artifacts come from, they embody instability and flow through our collective subconscious behind language. The contingent “cannot be put into words”, regardless of the narrative or symbolic structure that is being rendered. Therefore it must be an ordered schema that is generative. The moving image could be seen as the sum of these parts.
Moving image does not directly address the forces within symbols presented, nor the limit of time itself, or the lens attached. Instead it utilizes them, and in essence captures the spontaneity of reality. Spontaneity is provoked via forces and materials which surround it, just as the kinaesthetic apprehension and mobile viewing of a sculpture can “never be assimilated in a single fixed image” (Jacobs. S. 2017. P14-15). The whole process is therefore a contingent act.
An excellent example of this static spontaneity can be found in the short film L'Enfer de Rodin directed by Henri Alekan, 1957. As the camera pans around the bronze sculptures and plaster originals, the shadows present a doubling effect. The original Two Dancers and Three Nymphs as well as their copies are presented cinematically and interpreted as the vision of Dantes Inferno.
This presentation of reproduction, both of a text, material and form, captures the unfinished texture and style of Rodin’s work, especially as experienced with the Gates Of Hell. As Alekan presents the fragmented and incomplete within this short film, the Gates also “segment the figures it carries…to disallow them the fiction of a virtual space in which they can appear to expand.” (Krauss. R. 1977 p.15.23). The moving image, like stone or bronze, actually serves to disallow any choice of what is presented. The viewfinder does not create the image, it assimilates and accepts the nature and symbolic feeling, our own perspective is what makes sense of it or not.
Stills from L’Enfer De Rodin, Henri Alekan, 1957
Be it of moral, nature or status, symbols are passed through both mediums as the banks of a river guide the flow of water. Over time they grow, bend, or break, yet the flow is uncontrollable. We can only ever gravitate around the symbol and not enter fully into it, in the same way a true contingency will always exist outside of probability. Perhaps it is this sensibility that is required to create a timeless value: consistently ungraspable and yet universally recognized.
Throughout the history of moving image and cinema we have seen the repetition of these myths. But perhaps we are also witnessing the degradation of them, as the critic Gilles Deleuze suggested. (Deleuze. G. Lecture 15, 1982). Though archetypes clearly retain their function, their symbolic value is now more defined by the structures that surround them than any direct reading. Before the internet, within the experience of cinema or moving image, the archetype influenced the self. Now, it may be the other way around. “The self-disciplining, contingent ‘human’ is both subject and object: it is the object that is invested in and she is the subject of investing”.
Perhaps, therefore, the experience of moving image is now more contingent than ever before. Our reading of archetype is more subjective as “the immeasurable qualities of the self have become a measurable quantity under post-fordist capitalism, provoked by and further fueling neoliberal politics” (Fisher. M 2014). Hyper-individualism, then, becomes a new form of contingency: the placement of the subjective experience in relation to art as paramount.
Alekan’s prowess is epitomized in Wings Of Desire (1987), a timeless popular masterpiece. This is in large part due to Alekan’s cinematography and his ability “to obtain psychological reactions out of mere technical means”(https://mubi.com/en/cast/henri-alekan). The dulled world of two angels is achieved in black and white and by simultaneously pulling tights across the lens. The emblems of the narrative echo “the essence of the moviegoing experience itself: spectators unable to affect what they see on screen, and yet so often, unable or unwilling to remain emotionally disconnected.” (BFI.org.uk, 2015).
Although Tarkovsky insists “there are no symbols or metaphors” in his work, an audience still inescapably presupposes them in their subconscious viewings (Tarkofsky. A. 1986 . p212). This natural individual experience of the symbol is inescapable.
Still from Wings Of Desire, Wim Wenders and Henri Alekan, 1987
Converesely, sci-fi novelist Bruce Sterling suggests today “there is no single authoritative voice of history” (B.Sterling. WIRED, 2018) an assessment that aligns with Henri Bergson’s sense that “in truth, all sensation is already memory”. But what if our memory is manipulated, and the interplay with our subconscious is coerced rather than expressed? Then the idea of contingency must act as a challenge to these advances in technology. “The so-called ‘digital’ is not a mere technical medium, but a medium of thought. And when modern democracies turn technical thought into a separate domain, those modern democracies incline towards totalitarianism” - Jean Luc Goddard (Cullinan, N. 2011 p.75).
The practical relationship between a sculptor and their material mirrors that of director and moving image. Each maker must “be able to trust solutions which present themselves spontaneously” (A. Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time). Solutions are absorbed and transmuted by the maker, viewer and participants, through event and relationship, carried or fused through an accompanying symbolic motif and edited by choice. These are all time-based, limiting factors – challenging, but precisely what make the mediums unique and powerful on a collective level. Therefore it is worth thinking about time; a contingent principle at the core of the practices.
6.
By funneling out time and rendering an experience of three dimensions, both of these mediums require an acceptance of absorption and transmutation throughout the process of making. Both mediums illustrate the “ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future” (Bergson. H. 1911) Matter and Memory). Maybe the value is further derived from the contingencies that deny choice because of time. The presence of life is felt closely in these mediums because of time passing.
As discussed, the “slow cancellation of the future” has set itself into a collective doom-psyche. The removal of the present gives way to a “deflation of expectations” across culture, an idea I feel encapsulated best by Maurizo Cattelan’s 2019 Comedian. Cattelan described the $150,000 banana taped to a wall as “a sincere commentary and reflection on what we value”(Bull, M. (2025) 'Why Is There the Amount of Art That There Is?'). One could argue whether the ‘we’ refers to the art world or society at large. Either way, the material itself will rot and/or be replaced, just as the symbol itself rots, with time ignored.
Within this work, the contingent is embedded within the irony and participation of the work. Comedian stands supported by the trust architecture and traditional aesthetics of the contemporary art world, and yet emphasizes the paradoxical existence of contingency. The work appears self referential, virtual, ultimately metaphorical and or non-symbolic, yet I feel it speaks more to the contingent concept that surrounds it without any acknowledgment. The work as an event was taken a step further when it was eaten by performance artist David Datuna in 2019. The state of our mental reciprocity continues.
The Clock, Christian Marclay 2010
A defining work that captures the structure of contingency, time and event, is The Clock (Tate Modern 2010) by Christian Marclay. This captivating moving image work pulls together archival and popular footage perfectly synchronized with the 24 hour clock. Each turn of the hand produces a new world and generates new attention. The room becomes a new dimension, as it separates time and space, perfectly capturing Bergson idea that “clock-time” and what he called capital-T Time—time as we experience it, a lived duration—were entirely different” (Gabbet. E. The Paris Review 2020).
This work being a combination of event, moving image, assemblage and installation creates a structure, which when interacted with generates something beyond probability. The work is captivating and sparks the imagination in a uniquely unusual way. This unfinished balance of stasis and movement captures the aim of my own exploration and practice; to capture contingency.
7.
The current state of restless temporality is described as Hauntology by Mark Fisher, and goes some way to accurately frame the context in which our society views Comedian. If our nature has been codified by technology, and more specifically cameras, did moving image begin to direct us?
Our natural symbolic language has been deracinated and degraded, as has our spontaneity and collective psyche. The world is full of hyper-individualism and “we seem to feel an explicit and intense daily need to give it meaning” (Augé. M. 1995). We upload ‘Stories’ to instagram, share memories and memes, emojis and gifs in order to retain a sense of connection. Yet this perceived evolution acts in the same way digital has disposed of film, something is always lost. Still, chance and contingeny will always surround the format.
The video work of Margie Van Warmderdam presupposes the social media format. Throughout her looping video works we find evidence of contingent forces presented in sculptural simplicity. Each work, along with its title, captures the essence of atmosphere in the same way cinematography can funnel a script. The suspension of time, of a moment, combined with a domestic or simplistic perspective, arrests a feeling in the viewers experience.
In Wake Up! a “tranquil landscape is disturbed by a splash of water that suddenly appears in the picture”(Warmerdam. M.V. 2006). Filmed in an arcadian landscape, a splash of water glistens against a backdrop of rolling summer hills. The wash twinkles in midair for a pause in the summer sun. Two sweeping hills rise in the distance beyond a sea of yellow wildflowers gently floating. At the horizon, an empty baby blue sky. Within this setting, which feels like a memory, the heat of a day is captured by the refraction of light. The water grows gradually like a wave, its movement dreamlike. For the short duration the viewer enters the atmosphere, noticing something that was never there. Similar to her first work, Passage, a portal appears and disappears.
Wake Up! 2006 35mm loop, colour 1’45”
The pure transience of Warmderdam’s film works embraces contingeny in simple terms. The videos are short in duration and looped, yet the work becomes meditative by framing impermanence, distance and duration at the centre. In a flash, these snapshots suspend a viewer’s dualistic relationship to moving image. For a moment, silently, they become a part of the landscape, as does the viewer.
8.
None of this to say that the mediums of sculpture and moving image do not rely on structures. Contingency needs structure to exist. At every stage, from process to presentation, unplanned variables bump up against parameters. The final contingency is of course the experience of the viewer, the embodied encounter. Although both mediums create an interval in which meeting is co-produced, in the end, at least some of the ‘success’ of the work remains undefinable. The purpose of an effective work is to make visible what is otherwise unseen. The unseen, the unplanned, the contingent can and should be welcomed, both practically and politically. Reclaiming and creating generative structures. This requires a responsive and communicative practice, a present mind that selects choices as it goes, that even plans, but never shackles itself to a fixed finality or outcome.
Note: I feel that this subject is inconclusive and requires a lot more space for examples and applied philosophical discussion. I have purposely avoided natural works, such as those of Robert Smithson or Andy Goldsworthy, that I feel also particularly embody contingent principles. This is due to the fact that it is obvious to me nature itself is a contingent force and doesn’t explain what fascinates me about the principle in art and my own practice.
Bibliography
Text (Print & Online)
1. Burgin, Victor (2018) In The Camera: Essense and Apparatus. London, UK: MACK
2. Meillassoux, Quentin. (2008) After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Translated by R. Brassier. London: Continuum.
3. Mackay, Robin. (ed.) (2015) The Medium of Contingency. Falmouth: Urbanomic.
4. Fisher, Mark. (2014) Ghosts Of My Life : Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester, UK: Zero Books.
5. Debord, Guy. (1977) The Society of the Spectacle
6. Knight, Frank .H. (1921) Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit, Part III, Chapter VII. Houghton Mifflin Company
7. Nairne, Elenor. (2021) Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty. London: Prestel.
8. Selz, Peter. (1962) The Work of Jean Dubuffet. New York: Museum of Modern Art.
9. Beuys, Joseph. and Harlan, V. (2004) What Is Art?: Conversation with Joseph Beuys. Translated by M. Barton and S. Sacks. Stroud: Clairview Books.
10. Warwick, Genevieve. (2012) Bernini: Art as Theatre. New Haven; London: Yale University Press
11. Mackay, Robin. (ed.) (2015) The Medium of Contingency. Falmouth: Urbanomic.
12. Jung. Carl G, Von Franz. M.l, Henderson, Jacobi, Jaffe (1964) Man and His Symbols: Double Day.
13. Ivanov, Vladislav. (1912). Trudni i Dni. Moscow: Skorpion.
14. Jacobs, S., Felleman, S., Adriaensens, V. and Colpaert, L. (2017) Screening statues: Sculpture and cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
15. Krauss, R.E. (1981) Passages in modern sculpture. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT
16. Deleuze, Giles. (1982) 'Cinema: The Movement-Image, Lecture 15, 20 April 1982' [Recorded seminar]. University of Paris VIII. Available at: https://deleuze.cla.purdue.edu/lecture/lecture-15-6/ (Accessed: 18 October 2025).
17. Unknown, available at: https://mubi.com/en/cast/henri-alekan
18. 5 visual themes in Wings of Desire – Wim Wenders’ immortal film about watching Unknown, 2015 Available at: https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/five-visual-themes-wings-desire-wim-wenders-immortal-film-about-watching
19. Tarkovsky, Andrei. (1986) Sculpting in Time. Austin: University of Texas Press.
20. Sterling, Bruce. (2010) 'Atemporality for the creative artist', WIRED, 25 February. Available at: https://www.wired.com/2010/02/atemporality-for-the-creative-artist/ (2025).
21. Cullinan, Nicholas. (2011) The Unilever Series: Tacita Dean: FILM. London: Tate Publishing.
22. Bergson, Henri. (1911) Matter and Memory. Translated by N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer. London: Swan Sonnenschein.
23. Gabbart, Elisa. (2020) Atlantic Books - available at: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/08/11/the-unreality-of-time/
24. Bull, Malcom. (2025) 'Why Is There the Amount of Art That There Is?', New Left Review, II(151), pp. 90–104 )
25. Augé, Marc. (1995) Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe. London: Verso.
26. Warmerdan, Marijke V. (2006) First Drop. IKON. And available at: https://marijkevanwarmerdam.com/wake-up/
Media (Image, Video & Audio)
1. Von, T. (2025) 'Mark Zuckerberg', This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von, 28 April. [Podcast]. Available at: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3iOPThqD2TtpE6gZIYX5ug
2. pmilat. (2014) ‘Mark Fisher : The Slow Cancellation Of The Future’ Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCgkLICTskQ
3. Jean Dubuffet, Character with Rhinestone Eyes (Personnage aux yeux de strass), April 1954, Private Collection, New York © 2021
4. "Drawing of the fountain of the four rivers in the piazza Navona, Rome." The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Art & Architecture Collection, The New York Public Library. 1664. Available at: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/e21ac4c0-c63f-012f-1fe1-58d385a7bc34?canvasIndex=0
5. Gallery view of Grenfell by Steve McQueen. Photograph: Photos by Richard Ivey. Steve McQueen, Grenfell, 2019 (still) Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/apr/05/steve-mcqueen-grenfell-review-serpentine-gallery-london
6. Stills from Rodins Hell, L'enfer De Rodin, France, 1959. Directed by Henri Alekan. Available at: https://mubi.com/en/gb/films/rodin-s-hell
7. Still from Wings Of Desire, Wim Wenders and Henri Alekan, 1987. 2 hours 8 mins. 35mm, Available at: https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/five-visual-themes-wings-desire-wim-wenders-immortal-film-about-watching
8. The Clock, Christian Marclay 2010. Stills taken from: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/marclay-the-clock-t14038 and https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/09/arts/design/the-clock-christian-marclay-tate-modern.html
8. Wake Up! 2006 35mm loop, colour 1’45”. Warmerdan, Marijke V. (2006) First Drop. IKON.