“We’re running?” Mekas asks the cameraman. “We’re running!” replies the latter. Mekas repeats the question, as if he’s not quite sure. Then he pulls out a watch. “It’s a quarter to two, Saint Paul time. We should be finished by five minutes after two.” So begins Jonas Mekas’s Self Portrait from 1980. Despite the title, Mekas is not filming himself. A cameraman captures him standing in a garden in front of a friend’s cottage in Saint Paul, Minnesota, drinking a can of beer.

A plan for this self-portrait seems to be lacking. Like the viewer, Mekas only knows that he now has twenty minutes to fill. The camera will run continuously until time runs out. Mekas starts cautiously. He states his name and where he is. Then follow reflections on his work. His autobiographical cinema is often described as “film diaries,” he says. Every day, he films little “notes” which he then strings together to form a film. These little pieces of fiction prove essential to his life, precisely because he wants to film them.

“I’m being taped, I’m not being filmed actually,” Mekas continues. Unlike his earlier work up to that point, this image is not shot on analogue film, but digitally on video. A medium that he considers no less valuable than film, but a different instrument with its own possibilities and contents. “Cinema is constantly expanding, into new forms.”

In the end, it matters less what Mekas tells us precisely. Although he doesn’t hold the camera himself in Self Portrait, with this brief exercise, he does show us something essential about digital video as an art form. Inquisitively but steadfastly he places himself in front of the camera, as if he wants above all to understand what this new camera can do, what exactly happens the moment it begins to record. Unlike a film camera, a digital camera doesn’t run either; it’s a machine that’s “on.” That difference creates a certain lightness, a rarefied texture that also seems to define the subject matter. It looks like Mekas has too much time, as if caught in an endless now, without beginning or end. He lingers. “So here I am ... and it’s but 90 degrees, and we are in Saint-Paul and I’m standing here ... So where are we? It’s about three minutes after two.” There is indeed a demarcation—a twenty-minute tape—but it belongs to a different order than in physical film, where you hear the meters (and the money) running and where there is a direct, physical contact with time.

It’s this inherent temporality of the digital that takes hold of Mekas and also brings with it an undeniable fragility. Unlike the steady analogue cinema, time in the digital realm seems to constantly stand still or stretch. Time doesn’t crawl forward, but accumulates diffusely and elusively. Precisely because of the lack of a physical component, time must be constantly reaffirmed and repeated.

In his later work, Mekas would wholeheartedly embrace digital cinema. “Invisible technology,” he called it in 2015: the result is visible, but the machinery itself is not. “It’s like watching a spirit—there are results, but you don’t see how they got there.” Precisely this haunting takes shape in Mekas’s self-portrait. As a digital apparition, he makes tangible how he must enter the picture again and again in order not to disappear, to continue to exist. As if he experiences himself as a ghost: “Here I am. Here I am. Here I am. Here I am. Here I am...” Until time runs out.