Time and cinema as art forms.
Cinema and art as forms of time.
The camera is not only a recording device. It is a way of seeing the world, a way of being in the world, a way of negotiating progression, surface, recognition….
A Disturbance of Shadows is an illustrated lecture in video that presents eleven cinematic reflections on the nature of time. The video begins and ends with the question: “Do you consider time to be a hostile enemy or intimate companion?”
25:19 minutes NTSC 2005
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Run Into Peace presents a text adapted from the writings of Meister Eckhart, a controversial mystic, priest and religious teacher from 14th century Germany, who did much to vernacularize the religious contemplative life of his day.
The text is simple and simultaneously self-contradictory; it recalls a world where language did not have to mean but could merely express, a world where the self knew better than to attempt defining the world. The images are also often contradictory, juxtaposed in flowing layers: highway landscapes, blood maps, vacant rooms, hands against the ceiling, glowing streetlights, invading icons, circular staircases.
Dedicated to Louis F. Capson [1944-96]
12:57 minutes NTSC 1998
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Losing Sleep presents interview footage of a self-confessed computer hacker who is struggling with chronic insomnia. His work on the computer has become such an all-encompassing cyberworld that, for him, returning to the grounded physical world is a frightening endeavour.
‘Giving in’ to sleep seems like a violent surrender. Yet only by submitting to simple physical acts, such as long deliberate walks late at night, can he find rest.
14:27 minutes NTSC 1996
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Past, present, future. Always present, never grasped or contained. Sleeping, waking, dreams, memories. What is the reality of time?
This video presents a series of musings in the first person on the nature and experience of time. What are the ways in which we construct and imagine time? Can we imagine time without distorting it?
The imagery is presented as live video, rescanned video and computer graphics: clocks, a metronome, dissolving sugar cubes, passing through bedrooms and hallways, bathroom towels on a rack.
PART ONE OF THE TIME SIGNALS TRILOGY
8:25 minutes NTSC 1991
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Using a text adapted from Paul Virilio's Pure War, and scenes of pedestrian movement in urban landscapes, combined with the visually arresting treatment of archival images of twentieth century warfare and wartime, this video explores our changing experience of space and time as everyday life is shaped by the military developments of technological speed and spectacular motion.
PART THREE OF THE TIME SIGNALS TRILOGY
22:00 minutes NTSC 1992
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Modern technology has given us the capacity to perform the most contradictory of tasks. An example is the call-in radio talk show that makes it possible for two individuals physically separated by thousands of miles to carry on a conversation that is simultaneously overheard by thousands of other individuals.
The result is an acute displacement of all normal time and space sensibilities for everyone involved. There are no immediately recognizable side-effects: the ‘program’ works to specifications. However, the long-range effects are inescapable.
The soundtrack is the program conversation from the side of the radio talk show host. Based on a text by Jean Baudrillard.
PART TWO OF THE TIME SIGNALS TRILOGY
5:08 minutes NTSC 1990
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