Time

Time; photographs capture moments, paintings capture longer 'summaries' of experience, video/film can accomplish both these and more. It can represent time representationally 'as is', it can slow it down, speed it up, create rhythm or disrupt rhythm. This added element at my disposal is one I feel yet to master. In an attempt to get to grips with how I exploit/use time in my work I have been both contextually looking at many more video artists work and reading related critical texts. One book I have been working through is TIME - Documents of Contemporary Art -Whitechapel Gallery. 

Within I found an interview with Anthony Gormley in which his opinions of time in his work resonates with my own ideas, albeit he put it far more eloquently;

"We now live in bits and bytes, at broadband speed. We have forgotten biological time. The exchange of imagery now happens so, so fast and everything is so available that the idea of resistance and just being has, for me, become more important. My work is an obstacle to easy reference it demands that you stop"

This echoes my own thoughts about slowing my work down, I feel I do not have to imitate the flow or speed of contemporary culture in my work. My work is contemporary in that it has been created within a contemporary context. Working as a counterpoint to this kind of time heightens the quality of otherness. In the same way I feel music may have overpowered my images, a faster fractured narrative will not allow the viewer the time to really search the image, and it could become nothing but visual noise.

In my work time exists in the evident layering and material history of the works construction, and through physically transitioning through time-based pictorial mutations. On reflection I have started to consider if 'physical' time is needed in my work. The viewers attention or time could be extended through other strategies such as:

Scale -  The vast, with large scale detailed works the viewer has more visual information to consider or search.

Excess/Reproduction - Each animation can be broken down into a set of 'stills' exhibited together. These would provide a multitude of works to be individually as well as collectively considered, linking to a post-modern sublime of technological productivity and excess.

Line, Form, pattern etc - The formal qualities of a work could be enough to hold the viewers gaze, however the projected image depends on resolution. Enlarging a digital (bitmap) image to to a great extent there will always be a tipping point at which picture quality really starts to degrade. The answer is to either work with the highest resolution possible, which can and has made opening/saving/editing a nightmare. Or find ways for work to incorporate such degradation as part of its aesthetic.  

The question I now see as central to the development of future work is - Is animation the best way for me to extend the life of the work or should I experiment with other strategies? I intend to continue creating animations but will look to draw other kinds of outcomes from the body of work I develop.