UC San Diego

ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS

INSTANCES INSTANTIATE

by

Elanor Boyd

Master of Fine Arts in Visual Arts

University of California, San Diego, 2013

Professor Sheldon Brown, Chair

Ela Boyd's video installation work explores issues of representation and visual perception in terms of the body, time and space. In her Visual Art MFA thesis exhibition catalog essay, Instances Instantiate, she considers the ways in which instances of multiplicity instantiate the actuality of simultaneous modalities of embodied presence. Outlining her research and practice, Boyd looks to constructions of cinematic production, (character, set, context and linear succession) as an analogy for our experience of perceiving, apprehending and simulating a continuous reality. Whereas the formal aspects of film/video media, such as frames, pixels, editing/remixing and spatial presence substantiate properties inherent to space-time outside of our perception of it. Boyd utilizes Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of film and Henri Bergson's philosophy of time to evince her own ontological theory of multiple selves existing in various modalities simultaneously. Expanding upon this theoretical trajectory to posit multiple selves as proliferating via mediated spaces and "time-traveling" within conscious apprehension and projection. She looks at the metaphysical body, the cinematic/iconic body and the fantasy body (imagined or dream self). Boyd uses the body-in-space to address what is considered to be actual/viable embodiment, new forms of intersubjectivity and to generate a sense of a de-centralized presence. Through film theory and her own artistic practice, Boyd unfolds three temporal scenarios; multiplicity, parallel and potential. Lastly, expanding upon the ontological implications of flattened, extended and multidimensional/conceptual space, Boyd is able to advance her theory of embodied

perception.