Near Real Time
Creators: name: Pickering, Gail
Publisher: name: University of Westminster
Year: 2025

description: This commentary provides a critical reflection on a body of audio-visual artworks submitted for PhD by Published Work. The practice-based research begins with the transmissions of an early 1970s French community television project, Vidéogazette, and the community that purportedly distanced itself from its televisual representation. It considers the unique contexts within which the Vidéogazette evolved and discusses the discovery of the only surviving video recordings of its live transmissions. Through a sustained engagement with these material remains, the research explores modes of disidentification and ambivalence as forms of reflexive agency that problematise the documentary image. Despite the apparent disavowal of the recordings by the community they depict, the images stubbornly persist, and in their persistence, they are found to acquire a material and performative subjectivity of their own.

This exploration is developed through three time-based art installations: Karaoke (2014), a two-channel video and sound installation, investigates an archaeology of the media repository in its resistance to the archival impulse, problematising the found moving image by raising critical questions about its provenance, decay and contingent materiality as a complex interplay of withdrawal and transformation seen in its visual subject, the recorded transmission of the unwrapping of an anonymous mummified cadaver. Near Real Time (2014-2018), a three-channel video and sound installation, explores the community's estrangement from their own representation as a generative process bringing forth a 'people of images' within the recordings. Developing observed intimacies with actors and performers into embodied gestures that both trace a source and assert their own reflexive autonomy, the work further problematises historical distance in the staging of the viewer’s encounter with the installation. She Was a Visitor (2014-2018), a large-scale immersive installation and performance, investigates the tenacity of context into an all-encompassing image that resists framing. The discussion addresses how the work performatively implicates the viewer in the unresolved and open-ended questions surrounding the political inheritance of the Vidéogazette and related cinéma militant. What these three works share is an approach to scripting a voice whose polyphony embodies the multiple subjectivities and perspectives emanating from the material as much as it is situated in the conditions of the production of the work.

If community television and cinéma militant are drawn on for their enduring potential, then the body of work challenges this sense of linear history by proposing that their productions may be recuperated in ways that extend beyond a singular trajectory toward collective self-representation. Instead, the production of images, intended to represent and activate the community, may individuate into a community of their own in parallel temporalities alongside the ‘official’ histories they emerged from. Far from being passive representations relegated to archival logics, the research suggests that image bodies, such as the remains of Vidéogazette, can be approached on their terms, as forms of individuated subjectivities seeking agency in dialogue with the present.