Articles

Interweaving the Aesthetic and the Infrastructural: Whitehead's Theory of Symbolic Reference in Leighton Pierce's Long-Exposure Films

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Abstract

For works such as Stone Moss (2008), WhiteAsh (2014), and Deck (2018), avant-garde filmmaker Leighton Pierce shot thousands of handheld, long-exposure stills and then animated them in editing software by layering, merging, and fading between them – a method he calls “weaving.” Synthesizing fluid motion from still images, the filmmaker constructs intricate and impressionistic meditations on the sensation of time, in which each image lingers and blends in with the next to render the present spectral and multi-dimensional. Pierce’s films negotiate – or “weave” – between the opaque, sub-perceptual level of infrastructure and the phenomenal level of aesthetics – that is, between the underlying, distributed, and largely inaccessible operations of the technical and environmental substrate and the the higher-order activity of conscious perception and film form. I argue that by weaving the causal structure of perception into cinematic form, LeightonPierce’s long-exposure films enact what Alfred North Whitehead calls “symbolic reference” – the elucidation of the perceptual mode of durational “causal efficacy” by means of the instantaneous mode of “presentational immediacy” -  between aesthetics and infrastructure. The final, continuously animated videos serve as the grounds for an embodied encounter with the processes of lower-order perception and digital capture and editing. I suggest that Pierce’s films accordingly inform an atmospheric ontology of media that both includes and exceeds embodied sensation.

Keywords: Leighton Pierce, Whitehead, atmospheric media, process philosophy, computational time, infrastructure, aesthetics, experimental cinema

How to Cite:

Turan, K., (2025) “Interweaving the Aesthetic and the Infrastructural: Whitehead's Theory of Symbolic Reference in Leighton Pierce's Long-Exposure Films”, communication +1 11(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/cpo.2051