Digital video, w/o audio, 2017.

This piece addresses notions of self-reflection and absorption towards digital technologies, and focuses on time as a key aspect in the navigation and contemplation of the work. Drawing on artists who actively promote meditative and investigative qualities within their work, (Cardiff, Tcherkassky, Raban, Gidal, etc) along with those who blend the acts of production and consumption to further negate the fourth wall between the static viewing audience and the activity of production of the artist, (Mirza-Butler, Rhodes, etc) I was inspired to create a video piece that could synthesise parallels between the throwaway documentary and habitual self-archiving activities prevalent in today’s culture of social media, to consider the role art plays as a means of preserving/presenting the ephemeral. In particular I wanted to look at how these cultural spheres may begin to inform one another and affect certain social behaviours in specific social conditions, in order to reflect on them as whole sites of engagement within their various exhibited states.

Working from the concept that all playback media is feedback of one kind or another, I wanted to challenge the historical and ideological narratives attributed to it by provoking a critical evaluation of video as a relational medium, whilst raising questions about the ‘a priori’ pre-conditioned attitudes and expectations we bring to our own participation with it. By attempting to suppress the artificial, illusory, visual field, and eschew the linear, narrative-based ideology we have become accustomed to, through our own prior experiences; I hope to explore the language of digital video in a more materialist way to reveal the ‘artist’s presence’ in the complex structures and temporal utterances of a digitally transposed experience.

Through the tensions created by the overlaying of different temporalities, the work is unavoidably challenging to anyone familiar with video in its linear form. They are asked to immediately re-evaluate the medium as the illusion dissolves, and the processes and properties of its pre- and post-production are brought to the fore. ‘Framed’ by the various limitations, both material and temporal, of its coming into being, the piece alludes to the ‘invisible constraints’ which are usually overlooked in conventional cinema, but here become the focus of the piece. The frame rate of capture, the size and resolution of the frames, the original length of time captured by the artist, the editing that enables the footage to loop into a repeat motif, the modulation of content and emptiness in the flickering of frames with and without footage; all return the viewer to a questioning of whether the piece will resolve to anything more, and if so – when? Combined, they pose a dilemma of how long the viewer should give over to the work in order to complete the exchange of communication they require… How will they know when they have seen enough?

It is through this thought process that the work forges a dialogue between the artist and viewer, based on the duality that exists between the original recorded moment as captured by the artist, and the point of ‘activation’ by another individual, which is bound up in the act of viewing. It is in this act that the artist’s lived experience can be re-accessed, and thus it is not in the artist’s time but the viewer’s, within which the art work is completed.