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This chapter considers pieces by Victor Burgin that stage and foreground the acts of reading and writing to explore the recursive and self-reflexive elements of making found in Burgin's projection pieces. Starting with the metaphor of the palimpsest, this paper traces the way the pieces explore specific forms of language and of telling aimed at 'spatializing the temporal flow'. The chapter explores how the image of the palimpsest or "overlay" allows the viewer to see in the projection pieces a gesture that complements the coalescence of different times. Seeing the palimpsest as haunted space, the paper uncovers melancholy stories of loss and exile echoing from A Place to Read to Belledonne. The critical power of the projection pieces lies in the way they disrupt traditional categories of chronology and spatial compartmentalisation, allowing story and history, present and past, collective and individual experiences to reflect one another.

This chapter examines recent work by Victor Burgin as a questioning or interrogation of the concept of medium in artworks that hold perception in an interstitial space between stillness and movement, image and text. The principle question is: what is a virtual Image? The analysis begins by reviewing Rosalind Krauss’s canonic essay, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” and George Baker’s more recent account of transformations of photographic media in his essay, “Photography’s Expanded Field.” The chapter continues in examining the variety of ways in Burgin’s artwork challenges normative concepts of the visual not by rebalancing the relation of image to text, but rather in investigating the relation between sense and Image. The argument begins with an analysis of Burgin’s earlier conceptual works like Photopath, and continues with close analyses of more recent moving image installations like Hôtel Berlin, Listen to Britain, and A Place to Read. In these works, what Burgin calls the remembered film acts as a force of memory where the experience of the work does not lie in any one formal element—whether textual, acoustical, photographic, videographic, or 3D computer modeling—but rather hovers between them in mobile acts of perception and memory.

By considering John Cage's re-phrasing of 'responsibility' as 'response-ability', and thus foregrounding political engagement as requiring aesthetic capabilities and sensibilities, alongside Victor Burgin's extended explorations of the specificities of both making and viewing an artwork, the introduction undertakes two key functions. Firstly, it sets out the context for the book, which concerns Burgin's sustained reading of Barthes, begun in the 1960s, and how we understand images/imaging/Image. Secondly, in dialogue with this context, the chapter establishes the key operative themes and terms operative in the book as a whole. In attempting to set out its theoretical underpinning, the chapter ranges over issues of the political aesthetic, spatial/temporal ethics, the generative capacities of visualisation technologies, and contemporary spectatorship, particularly in relation to contemporary art.

I was Sitting in a Room: Cybernetic Aesthetics and Victor Burgin's Projection Loops The chapter examines the loops that structure Victor Burgin's projection pieces in relation to works by US composer Alvin Lucier to suggest that a form of cybernetic and post-digital aesthetics is operative in each, resulting in similar ethical and political agendas regarding agency, space and attentiveness. Burgin's discussion of his digitally-modified panoramas addresses the 'zero degree' of perspective that he crafts in them, suggesting that technological systems of information-gathering and perception simultaneously provide the conditions for a perceiving and understanding subject while removing the subject from the picture through the performance of its subject matter: 'the disembodied point of view'. The desire of the zero degree renders an aesthetics and politics that speak neatly to cybernetic formulations. The chapter argues that the seemingly anti-humanist qualities of cybernetic aesthetics and Burgin's decidedly humanist aesthetic steer actually lead to the same ethical and political agenda regarding agency, space and attentiveness.

Victor Burgin's projection work, Belledonne (2016), which poignantly evokes the sanatorium in which Barthes lived for a number of years in his youth due to tuberculosis, is rendered in print in this chapter. The impossible panoramic views of this work along with the numerous inter-titles often using Barthes' beloved haiku form evoke a poetic imagining of life in the asylum where Barthes spent World War II. Scattered throughout the projection piece are allusions to Barthes' entire body of work while evoking the work being done to his body. The rendering of Belledonne offers a vivid visual preface to the 'zero degree' that pervades the book, and which beckons the exploration of a political aesthetic of 'zero degree seeing'

This chapter offers a reimagining of Victor Burgin's projection piece Prairie and its political aesthetic. Using the specificity of Chicago as site and staging ground, the chapter deploys Roland Barthes' conceit of the ship Argo, 'each piece of which the Argonauts gradually replaced, so that they ended with an entirely new ship, without having to alter either its name or its form.' Using this critical tool in which 'the system prevails over the very being of objects' to build its own version of the projection, the chapter explores explicitly many of the themes and issues in Burgin's piece: issues of urban destruction, race relations, spatial justice and deep time. The chapter begins with Prairie and, 'by dint of combinations made within one and the same name' comes to find that, like the argo, 'nothing is left of the origin', but instead is understood as a site of both disappearance and of writing.

This chapter explores Victor Burgin's Prairie through rhythm and the aesthetic conditions for constituting politically viable engagements with the image. The chapter posits rhythm as something simultaneously organising the relationship between the political and the aesthetic and as a principle that can undo that organisation. In this manner, the argument draws on Barthes' concept of 'zero degree' to render the contradictory and ultimately irreconcilable concerns of Burgin's projection pieces evoked and embodied by their rhythms. Drawing on writings by Sergei Eisenstein and many others, the chapter asks the following questions in relation to still and moving images: can we envision a rhythm that, at a juncture between the aesthetic and the political, does not operate as a principle of systematic organisation? What image of the past and of the collective would this other rhythm engender?

The exchange presented in this chapter between Victor Burgin and Sunil Manghani builds upon an earlier on, 'Reading Barthes', as presented in the volume Barthes/Burgin (Bishop and Manghani 2016: 73-89). The text is premised upon reading Barthes again, as in reflecting on what it has meant to engage with his work while addressing questions around the zero degree, specificities, responsibilities of form, and the political. By establishing a number of historical and critical interests, the exchange recounts how Burgin's sustained reading of Barthes begun in the 1960s long before many in the art world were familiar with the name. The dialogue covers a range of ideas and issues including medium specificity, the Neutral and the trope of 'as if' as common to both Burgin and Barthes work.

Having established important theoretical links between both Barthes and Burgin in the previous chapter, this chapter turns directly to the book's key consideration of 'zero degree seeing'. It provides historical overview to Barthes' Writing Degree Zero before going onto explore a visual equivalent of the zero degree. The starting point is Barthes' essay on seventeenth-century Dutch painting, notably his commentary on Saenredam, whose complex, interlaced rendering of space and augmented perspective sets up a way of picturing that is echoed in the modernist writing of Robbe-Grillet, and Burgin's practice of a 'theoretical vision'.The notion of a 'zero degree' form in the arts remains an enigmatic idea, and not least for potential critique of and through political aesthetics. This chapter takes on the challenge (as does the volume more broadly) to offer an assessment of both what constitutes 'zero degree seeing' and how any such 'form' must always continue to evolve.

This image-text offers a series of propositions that theorise perspective and Image through the technologies that create different visual mediums. The chapter takes its lead from the propositional nature of the essay 'From Work to Text'. In this case, the focus is upon the 'image', upon the technics of the image, rather than the Text. We might suggest a practice of imaging, except that in everyday language such a term for the making of the image seems to falter somewhat, to evoke techniques and technologies of the image, rather than a more general conceptual space, as we understand with the Text. Here, as we look through painting, photography and projections, we come to consider perspective as the underlying construct, and one which leads us to work against the image, or at least the fixed, empirical image.

The chapter provides a conversation between the three authors in which a number of Burgin's site-specific installations frame a consideration of the status and future of the camera from photography to moving image to computer-generated virtual works. In the process Burgin modifies Bazin's question 'What is cinema?' to ask 'What is a camera?'. The CGI projection works extend and develop Burgin's long-standing interest in the relationship of aesthetics and politics as rendered through visualisation technologies, especially as it pertains to space. Burgin's account constructs a genealogy of seeing, visualising and image-making as technologically determined and crafted. In brief, he explains that 'the history of the camera is inseparable from the history of perspective'.

The chapter provides a largely psychoanalytic reading of Victor Burgin's Belledonne that relates the panoramic form of this projection piece to the nearly mechanical operations of Freud's death drive and the unheimlich encounters with non-human agency that pertain in the projection. The gaze in the artwork, the gaze of the zero degree CGI camera, which Burgin calls 'theoretical vision', therefore does not seek satisfaction but instead repetition, excess and destruction. The argument made is that there is a critical structural relationship between the impossible subject position offered by the virtual eye of the virtual camera and the indescribable, psychological object operational in the projection piece. In turn this opens up a deeper rumination on the 'absent' or unseeable aspects of artworks and how such 'viewership' persists over time.

The Situation of Practice In Writing Degree Zero Roland Barthes addresses the dilemma of the writer who wishes to be free from the grip of bourgeois history as enshrined in language: the doxa of style. Thus at the end of that book, he invokes the image of the writer facing the blank page. The confrontation with the blank page is the degree zero of any art practice, the schematic centre of the situation of the practice. In everyday speech the word 'situation' is used in disparate senses: from the gallery space in which it is encountered to the geopolitical context of its production and reception. The issues explored apply to the material means specific to Burgin's own art practice - writing and camera images - and at other times concern 'art' in general.

This concluding chapter provides a meditation on the ontological status of cinema in light of its intermedial history and engagement with technological developments from the late 19th to early 21st centureis. It further considers the status of knowledge as a product of Derrida’s formulation on the interdependence of the machine and the event while proposing film comedy as a productive site for examining the conjoining of these supposedly antithetical forces. The comedic impulse or eruption serves to bring these binaristic qualities together in one and the same moment, with the comic utterance showing the utter necessity and interdependence of the machine and the event for thought and interpretation of the world that erases easy or clear distinctions between subjects and objects, machines and nature.