Swerve
2015
video installation
color
two screens, simultaneously playing
50 mins

Edinburgh College of Art Degree Show 2015, 30th May - 7th June 2015

Edinburgh College of Art, 74 Lauriston Place, Edinburgh, United Kingdom


 
A radar-like sensing – sweeping, searching, scanning the ground, the horizon.

***

A stream of images discreet units placed in a continuum. The flickering discontinuous sequence inducing cinematographic vision – turning away from the moving image and being followed by it, the effects carried over into actuality. A strobe spacing time in instants of timelessness. Movement that cannot be perceived as such. Perception that cannot be trusted, that does not correspond to actuality. The discontinuity of a series of instants – a sum that is not the addition of parts (1+1≠2). Navigation becomes impossible and the spectator is left with nothing but sensory input, overloading the system and isolating parts from each other. Nothing can be articulated.

Haunted by this cinematographic vision the spectator asks – “Is this place really this place? Or no place at all?” Have they lost their sense of place? One place bleeding into another. The apparition of a spinning topography stuck in their field of vision wherever they turn. They close their eyes, only to see it more clearly – this place that is no place. They carry it with them now. A virtual space that seems to become more real with every revolution, spinning endlessly its swerve is eternal – the eternal object hooks you and takes command of your perceptive faculties, makes you see things that aren’t there. Or maybe you have finally glimpsed the eternal truth. The truth of a motion with no objective, a movement that will never move, a perpetual slowness that is suspended in time. Look at it for long enough and it will trap you. Years will pass in what seems like no time at all. The spectator is placed at the event horizon of a black hole. Here, the highest speed and absolute stillness are one and the same. The stillness of a movement without acceleration. A frictionless space of idealised movement, eternally smooth. A slippery object that evades capture.