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This work is neither video nor film and not photography — it lies somewhere between the
conventions of
the still and moving image. With most film and video work one yields attention to the work
until it reaches a conclusion. In some sense we follow the natural narrative that time
conveys.
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Documentary truth-telling could once be done with painting. Nowadays we readily accept the interpreted fiction
of painting and drawing (courtroom drawings are a residual, but interesting, archaic form of visual documentation).
The Rodney King beating is made credible because it is video. A single image would not be so convincing. A drawing,
mere heresay. Contemporary weddings are recorded on video — no longer just photographed.
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I called this medium Moving Still Images because the work is composed from still images (often photographs)
that are animated. A better description, coined by my friend Marcia Tanner, might be Kinetic Photography.
The images in this medium can be layered and combined and presented in a loop that
is constantly changing. At each iteration of the loop new perspectives on the images
are created, some never to repeat. There are ephemeral moments of beauty that cannot be held.
They slip away slowly, beyond our grasp.
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I pass by this work in my studio and, from the corner of my eye, see images emerge that I wish
to hold and yet they slip away beyond my grasp. The machine constantly makes such accidental
moments of beauty — my work, as an artist, is to set up the mechanism for the production of those moments.
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Still imagery (drawing, painting or photography) allows us to remain
under our own control and direction. The images move but move of our own volition — we turn our heads
away, then we return to view — the viewer chooses. In this sense still images do move.
Time based art shifts the volition from the viewer to the director of the moving images.
As Lewis Caroll had Humpty Dumpty explain to Alice (concerning the meaning of words)
it is merely a matter of who is to be the master.
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"From this day forward, one might want to say, paraphrasing Delaroche, chemical photography is over!
The monocular claim to univalent objective reality is falling away once and for all, and we are being thrust back
on ourselves, forced to take responsibility for the way we make and shape our realities, with eye and hand and heart."
David Hockney
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One summer evening I had a basket of apricots sitting in my kitchen and they seemed so
vivid and luscious that I couldn't resist capturing their image. The stainless-steel
japanese wire basket offered an engaging contrast in texture. However, a simple flat
set of images couldn't convey the delight I found (and still find) in the apperance of
these apricots.
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The random, fleeting moments of beauty that is possible in this medium allows the work to be
constantly fresh and vivid but impossible to hold. Impossible to contain and capture. Sartre
wrote of listening to the strains jazz being played on a gramophone in a neaby apartment,
realizing that a perfect moment of sound could not be held.
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The sound only exists in flux.
If it were to be frozen it would be instantly gone, like a photon at rest.
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We live at a time when digital imagery has come of age. The burden of truth that photography
has carried is being lightened. The photographs of the abuse at Abu Ghraib still carry the
power of a truth-telling medium. However, it is video that is our contemporary truth-witnessing
medium. A single still image is now readily manipulated — fortunately.
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By layering and animating the images it's possible to create a visual immersion in the subject.
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