The Cracks, Linear Version, HD video, single channel, duration: 13:00 min, 2010.
The Cracks is derived from and plays with features of man-made object and surface. It is a play showing our tendency to anthropomorphicise objects around us. But the voice and resonance of concrete is locked in a far less temporal state to humans. Though we imbue it with the characters of history, concrete and steel is not sentient, nor does it have memory. This work samples the cloudgazed shapes and tries to rouse the animistic sense of walls, columns, industrial fragments with the subtle engagement of performer Georgie Read.
Artist Statement
I have worked extensively with performance artists developing paradoxical languages unique to each performing body and persona, that shifts the phenomenal experience of persona by basic recontextualisation of space and objects in relation to them. This could be called a‘shamanic cinema’ practice (Raul Ruiz), a means of using media to define subliminal positions and an understanding of the actual through simulacra; the simulated mechanisms of media. I have also worked with the paradigm of camera as boundary to sensation and the psychological compensation that takes place in the form of unsconscious revelations in the process of filmmaking. Mainstream use of digital cameras and devices develop a kind of extension to identity in the form of scrapbook collage of image in web presence. My work simply extends upon the interests of domestic media production and takes it to the realm of metamorphosis and emergence. I make use of an imaginary latent animism of digital objects which are available for endless regeneration, and the construction of a user-generated sphere of digital consciousness. This would have previously been described as cinephilia but with the difference being that current media involves participation.