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A found-footage film about folding — folding paper, folding land, folding video planes, folding timelines; convolutes the recorded history of the Grand Canyon and the history of stereoscopic cinema into a five-and-a-half-minute stream of images and sound. Inspired partially by the work of Akira Yoshizawa (1911 – 2005), the so-called ‘grandmaster of origami.’ |
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A trek down the entire length of Coorow-Latham Road – a small, barely inhabited path in Western Australia, about 250km north of Perth. The camera faces forward at the beginning, then slowly pans to the left over the course of the journey until it finally settles on a rear-view gaze of the road travelled. Images acquired from Google’s Street View application. |
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A mini-essay on motion, image tracking, and mapping in an explicitly digital form. It moves through various modes of software and internet aesthetics to frame images of sublime landscapes and flying vehicles (airplanes, space shuttles, UFOs). Set to a score of air traffic control radios, transportation ambience, and ominous drones, the accumulating layers of found, manufactured, and self-shot footage – plus a swarm of digitally animated fireflies – ease into an ambivalent co-existence. |
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A study on time, speed, light, and the compression of those three elements. A 16mm film projector (offscreen) pans its light across a studio, passing over a bouquet of yellow daisies. The 24fps flicker clashes with the 30fps recording by the video camera, creating a phasing pulsation in the light. The video repeats again and again, doubling in speed with each successive play until the length is only one frame. |
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A performance in which I enter a pitch-black studio, insert a single fluorescent light bulb into a ceiling fixture, walk up to the camera, tilt it down, open the camera’s shutter (one click at a time), and then tilt the camera back up to the ceiling. I was interested in the way the camera received and shaped the light, as well as the way cognitive discrepancies in the diegetic sound can enforce a spiritual tension. |
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I turn on a Digital Light Processing (DLP) projector without wiring it to any input channels, thus prompting the system’s ‘no signal’ message default. I wave my hand through the projection of the message, first to mimic a shutter, then to greater exaggerate the distortion of the white text into a rainbow blur. My hand gets increasingly vigorous over the course of 4 minutes before I get too exhausted to continue. |
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Set some time around twilight, a choreography of interior lights turn on and off randomly, accumulating to give a vague sense of the architectural lay-out of the structure that contains them. The evolving constellation of windows dictates how the viewer intuits the overall shape that is hidden in the forest. Created to be a gallery loop, so that the arrangement of lights are never the same in a single day. |
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I picked up a small rock when I was at the beach in Summer 2009, and a ladybug almost immediately flew onto it. I was trying to keep the ladybug on top of the rock; as it walked along, the rock’s rotation would coordinate with the bug’s trajectory. Or was it walking in the direction that I was turning the rock? It became difficult to tell who was following who after the first several turns. |
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A looping animation. It just keeps going… |
contact: blake.williams@utoronto.ca