The Time and The Energy 1982

In 1981, Yates was invited to create a photo essay for the first issue of a new journal - Formations, which was to be a new series on feminist and socialist cultural theory, history and debate.
The first issue was called "Formations of Pleasure" and was published in 1983. It explored the social management of what we enjoy, and the possibilities for creating new forms of pleasure to displace existing ones.
There were essays by Fredric Jameson, Cora Kaplan, Terry Eagleton, Simon Watney, Laura Mulvey, Griselda Pollock, and Judith Williamson. Victor Burgin presented his work "Gradiva" as a photo-essay, and Yates made a work entitled "The Time and The Energy", which addressed filmic pleasures.

Below is the descriptive text which accompanied the montage.

This work was later constructed as an exhibition piece and shown widely

"On the left, pleasure and desire are largely unaddressed, despite a growing recognition of their importance for the development of a number of divers practices. The separation of the visual and the textual in art discourses finds echo in the separation of pleasure and desire from politics and theory in other perhaps more vocal discourses. Laura Mulvey suggested that "desire born with language allows the possibility of transcending the instinctual and the imaginary“ and maybe it is time to consider this.
When watching moving images the visual codes manipulate the mechansms of our pleasure to the perfect pitch of satisfaction by rapid shifts of emphasis of the look, from voyeuristic gaze to identification and back. The sound echoes the image to create a coherence which encloses us within these identifications and positionings.
 Current image production has developed counterpoint techniques to intervene in these mechanisms, and these practices are referred to in this work. It is therefore necessary to view the textual images as if they are moving across a screen with all the processes of pause, delay, repeat, relay and change implied."