Duration – 100 minute seamless loop
Video formats – 4K + 1080p/HD
Exhibition – lightbox or projection
Soundtrack – silent

ARTIST STATEMENT

One of my main goals with this work was to achieve a full balance between moving visual art’s two main antecedents, painting and music. In fact, I wanted to remove the border between them altogether. 20th Century narrative cinema began this process, but it could only go so far, being wedded to the needs of story-telling. Developments that happened in the 19th century, when music and painting moved beyond the needs of narrative, are beginning to happen to moving visual art.

This video loop’s painterly aspect partly comes from my use of a strip of (Canadian National Film Board) transparent 16mm film leader as a starting point. Film, while it isn’t paint, is a chemically-based visual medium from before the 21st century. The use of this analog medium grounds the work in the world of objects. This work was also made to function like a painting in important aspects, for example it loops seamlessly, it has no beginning, middle, or end, it starts whenever a viewer chooses to look its way.

The Failure of Rhythm in the World’s musical elements begin with rhythm, and are deepened by colour. My intention is that these are ‘heard’ by the viewer, not literally, because the work is silent, but we don’t yet have conventional language to describe this form of visual experience. So we currently need to borrow from music, and in this work we can feel its rhythms as if they’re heard. Also, traditionally, colours have been related to musical harmony as an analogy, where they do serve a similar function.

My own feeling about photography and cinema is that the former is like a cousin to this new, 21st century category of visual art, and the latter is its sibling. But I’m talking about ‘narrative photography’ and ‘narrative cinema’ – and I think it could be argued that the latter has more in common with opera than it does with non-narrative moving visual art. Opera (or all music with lyrics) and non-narrative music have become related parallel streams. In this century, I believe a similar bifurcation will happen between cinema as-we’ve-known-it (narrative, theatrical) and moving visual art. The tools to accomplish this development are newly available, and artistic developments are very often built on the creation of other forms of innovation.

The glitch aesthetic that’s central to The Failure of Rhythm in the World stems from having broken open the RGB colour mode that makes up colour digital images. Once that break’s happened, the image’s layers (Red, Green, and Blue) can move independently – a new level of movement that deepens the image’s movement. This happens within the body of the image itself, challenging the rigidity of the digital form and replacing what we thought was solid ground with a shifting terrain. This fundamental break seems evocative of the many breaks with the past we’re now experiencing, and it’s then brought back together in a new way. By borrowing the best structures available from spatial and time-base art forms, in other words, by using available models left to us by painting and music.

Finally, the work’s title is a quote from an essay by Jeff Wall.