Time is experienced not as a succession of singular moments, but as an interpenetrating, organic whole: the past is never really the past, but cuts through the present.

Written by Sean Carballo
June 22, 2023

At the tail end of the nineteenth century, the French philosopher Henri Bergson proposed another way of seeing time. Contrary to Newton’s clockwork universe, which deemed time as an absolute and measurable entity governed by physics, Bergson argued that time unravels a plurality of durations. Time is experienced not as a succession of singular moments, but as an interpenetrating, organic whole: the past is never really the past, but cuts through the present. For Bergson, time was intuitive rather than mechanistic; our most authentic encounter with time, he posited, is not with the clock but within the vast expanse of our inner selves. “We do not think real time,” he observed in Creative Evolution. “But we live it, because life transcends intellect.”   

‘Live Take Feed Console Play,’ an ongoing group exhibition at MO_Space, feels especially conversant with Bergson’s philosophy of time. Gathering a selection of 16 artists deploying video formats and digital technologies, the show sketches a rough trajectory of moving images throughout the country. The showcase doesn’t aim at an exhaustive record but instead relays a dialogue across diverse practices. The conceptual studies of Vic Balanon and Gary Ross Pastrana commingle with the documentarian narratives of Rico Entico and Cocoy Lumbao, Jr. But taken as a whole, ‘Live Take Feed Console Play’ finds kinship with Bergson’s concept of duration, encouraging viewers to set in motion their own sense of time. 

Spanning two decades of the practice, the exhibition percolates with the fluidity of duration. Poklong Anading’s 1998 video work “linedrawing,” which greets viewers at the entrance of the gallery, promptly introduces the show’s dynamic reworking of time. Featuring a television transmitting a tangle of lines being traced on a wall, Anading’s piece recalls the hazy blur of static set against the material components of pencil on paper, juxtaposing the suspension of time with the potent, physical act of drawing. 

Meanwhile, we find a critique of the capitalist demands of productivity in MM Yu’s “Timekeeping,” which depicts snapshots of workers in the midst of daily mundane labor, including the administrative work of a receptionist, manual laborers installing a television, and a security guard on break, fanning himself with a piece of cardboard. Yu engages with these humdrum shots to subtly push back against the commodification of time under capitalism while also challenging the audience to linger alongside her subjects. 

Experiencing the show can often seem like navigating a puzzle box of ever-changing contours. Varying manifestations of screens are dispersed all over the space, each with their own idiosyncrasies. It’s a heady experience taking it all in: from the collage-video hybrid of Greys Compuesto, and the embroidered map work of Lena Cobangbang, to the airport terminal television sets from James Clar’s “A New Day / A New Night.” There is simply so much to absorb, and given the compact confines of the gallery, there’s some intimacy lost to the whole ambition of the show. 

At its best though, ‘Live Take Feed Console Play’ acts as a reminder of the daring and beguiling presence of the moving image across the wide scope of visual arts. Beyond its experimentalist ethos, the show ultimately celebrates time and duration in all their immiscible, oddball pleasures.