I Thought I’d Escaped the 20th Century, Artist Statement

500 minute loop, 2017

A World Without Divisions

Today’s focus on political issues involving migration and cultural or religious conflict – along with challenges to received notions of tolerance and who we should love – has heightened our awareness of the divisions we’ve inherited. By contrast, this video is a seamless, perfect whole. It has no beginning, middle or end. It dramatizes the dissolution of traditional ideologies and old models of belonging.

What’s taking its place is a fluid reformation and renewal of alternative social forms. But this is an organic perfection – its strength comes out of the analog variations found within its individual, visual raw materials.

The Gesture in Music and Visual Art

This mega-duration video was made by adapting open source and low-cost production tools from the entertainment industry, for use in a visual art context. The work’s thousands of visual parameters (that determine a colour gel’s position, rotation, etc.) are initially added as numbers, in a making process that’s similar to editing raw code.

But, there’s then the option of also swiping your hand – to the left or right – overtop of each number in order to edit it; and so, with this work, every parameter was determined by such a hand gesture.

Overcoming of the challenge of the overly-precise “machine precision” of every digital working context, this involvement of the artist’s hand connects the work to the gesture in music, where minute variation and chance are part of each bowing of a violin, movement between piano keys, etc.

Dissolving 20th Century Material Into Idea

I made this work out of a group of analog darkroom filters. I often make my art with filmic, plastic, or paper detritus from the last century. To work with these objects using this new century’s tools, they first needed to be converted into math (zeros and ones) and reconstituted into weightless images. This relationship between physical form and applied mathematics is where we now live.

Art’s Mega-categories

I tend to work in zones between art’s traditional mega-categories, such as music and photography, or or even larger ones such as time-based versus plastic forms. This is where they meet and exchange ideas. This artwork is my using new tools to try to strike an energized balance between these groups. It’s post-durational, and is suited to exhibition modes where we don’t know when a viewer will enter the room.

I Thought I’d Escaped the 20th Century video