Upon entering the gallery, you catch sight of three wall-mounted plasma monitors, placed side-by-side, on which are displayed the faces of three middle-aged individuals: a woman on each side and in the middle, a man (fig. 1). You gradually approach this grouping of monitors until you are several feet away; you plant your feet and focus in on the face on the left, that of an Asian woman (fig. 2). You look intently at this image for perhaps a minute or so; as far as you can tell the face shows signs of some neutral emotional state, as if the woman, not quite certain of what she is looking at (is it meant to be you?), were struggling to get a fix on it. More striking than the expression itself, however, is the fact that it doesn't seem to be changing in any way, and, indeed, you find yourself hard-pressed to perceive any movement whatsoever in this allegedly moving image. Somewhat befuddled, you step about a foot to the right and fix on the white, unshaven, slightly graying, male face in the middle. Like the woman you just encountered, this face displays a neutral expression; yet, in this case, it is one that indicates reflection about something personal and a certain obliviousness to its surroundings (fig. 3). Again, however, having registered the significance of the expression, you are struck by the odd stasis of the image; though it is clearly moving in time, as the occasional blink or twitch betrays, you can discern no other significant movement or change in the facial expression. Stepping still another foot to your right, you now fix on the second female face, a white, curly-haired woman (fig. 4). Not surprisingly, you undergo a similar experience, though this time you pay less attention to the neutral expression itself, to the woman's sideways glance and slightly pursed lips, and focus your attention on discerning even the slightest hint of change in the image. After intense concentration over the span of several minutes, you find the same odd stasis that you discovered in the other two facial images: while the image is clearly moving, as again occasional physiological actions like blinking and twitching serve to indicate, the facial expression itself does not seem to change or evolve in any discernible way. Still befuddled, you move on.

When, somewhat later, you return to these three monitors, you are greatly surprised to discover radically changed expressions on the same three faces. The man is in the depths of sorrow, mouth curved downward, eyes wet and squinting, face tensed (fig. 5). The woman with curly hair seems to be in a state of shock, as if she were looking at something spine-chilling; her eyes are wide open, her eyebrows are raised, her mouth is drooping, her shoulders are arched, and the tendons in her neck stand taut (fig. 6). Finally, the woman on the left is in a state of inward bliss, with her closed mouth in a wide smile, her cheeks scrunched and puffy, eyes clenched tight, and shoulders inclined inward (fig. 7). Concentrating on each facial expression in turn, you again find the images completely static, allowing not even the faintest trace of change to be perceived.

It slowly dawns on you that what you are standing in front of are images portraying emotional vicissitudes of life that, paradoxically, remain imperceptible to your eye. Consulting the description of this artwork, Anima (2001), by the video artist Bill Viola, you immediately fathom the cause of this imperceptibility: these images portraying the passage among the four primary emotions of joy, sorrow, anger, and fear have been so radically slowed down that they are in effect still images; originally lasting about a minute of recorded time, the movements have been extended to last eighty-one minutes in playback time. So what you have in fact encountered in this work is the rich texture of the microstages in between recognizable or discrete emotional states. Normally imperceptible because they happen too fast for the eye to register (at least with any capacity for cognitive reflection), here these interstitial microstages of affectivity are imperceptible because they happen too slowly; in these effectively static images, you simply cannot perceive the incremental series of changes filling the unmarked continuum between discrete emotional states as anything like a continuity.

Armed with this knowledge, you resolve to watch the image sequences for a longer span of time, allowing yourself simply to absorb them in a relaxed mode without trying to identify changes or link images together in a cognitively coherent manner. This time, though you have no further success in perceiving the images as a distinct, evolving progression, you do discover that the experience of simply watching them has left you deeply moved, with a feeling that you've lived through something quite intense, even if oddly unidentifiable.

Let me posit this experience as an instance in which self-affection--long identified by Western philosophy as constituting the very content of that elusive experience we call subjectivity--undergoes a technical expansion. By opening the imperceptible in-between of emotional states, what I shall hereafter call affectivity, to some kind of embodied yet intentional apprehension, Viola's Anima exemplifies the capacity of new media to broker a technical enlargement of the threshold of the now, to intensify the body's subject-constituting experience of its own vitality, or, borrowing terminology from Maurice Merleau-Ponty (to whom I return below), to expand "the thickness of the pre-objective present" that comprises the very ground for experience as such¹ In this paper, I propose to explore the technical expansion of self-affection as it has been variantly configured in recent new media art and cultural theory. As we shall see, what is at stake in such expansion is the givenness of time itself, that is, the content of self-affection. Insofar as new media art invests in the bodily experience of affectivity, intensifying it and enlarging its scope, it might be said to embody time consciousness and, indeed, to embody the being of time itself. Following along this shift from abstract time consciousness to embodied affectivity, we will find ourselves in a position to fathom the apparent paradox of contemporary subjectivity: the fact that technical expansion of self-affection allows for a fuller and more intense experience of subjectivity, that, in short, technology allows for a closer relationship to ourselves, for a more intimate experience of the very vitality that forms the core of our being, our constitutive incompleteness, our mortal finitude.