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Now + Here = Nowhere

video

6:13 minutes

2015

 

 

Now + Here = Nowhere

Installation view

          Now + Here = Nowhere, is born after becoming part of

a platform for researchers and artists to present work exploring issues of place, space and site and questioning research methodologies as embedded in the art practice. Organised by Susan Trangmar, Steven Ball, and Duncan White for Fine Art Research at Central Saint Martins, this project started in October 2014 with an intensive research into the King’s Cross area, providing a constructive environment for discussion, feedback and peer review.

Abstract

          For a few months I’ve been regularly observing a series of webcam streams from the King’s Cross area, available at

set with the premise of watching the ongoing development in real-time. Visiting the physical space and the website simultaneously, I noticed a time delay between the webcam images and my own ‘real-time’. This lapse was the starting point for my research.

Sensingsite Symposium

Central Saint Martins

4th June 2015

          Bodies moving through physical space and captured by the webcams, appear as dark pixels, generic beings devoid of character designation; they’re an absence visible throughout the steady flow of the digital image. In cinema, temporal continuity is determined by absence, by the lost interstices in the division between frames. This inter-frame absence separates a past (frame) and a future (frame); it manifests a temporal modernism. The absent figures in the webcam images are persistent; they permeate the footage, always there. In these figures past, present and future are collapsed together, there's no discernible separation, not post-modernism, but hyper-modernism; silhouettes traversing networks at digital time-scales: speeds, not just faster than visual perception as in cinema, but faster than thought.

          King's Cross is in between frames. As a new future appears in the process of disappearing the past, real-time images of the development make contingencies momentarily emerge. Observing this shifting rift provides a frame for addressing relationships between the past’s presence in the present and the ambivalence of the soon-to-be-built future, and the void of human bodies that occupies both.

          During this investigation, I’ve developed a close relationship with this live-streamed view of King's Cross. I’m interested in documenting the integration between architecture, technology and digital infrastructure, and the dispersion-fragmentation of what we experience as the self. Looking both at its always changing -though static- constructions, and at the people moving through them, I’ve been recording unforeseen realities. This collection of contingencies is the source for the creation of new digital-cinematic narratives, a correspondence between my self and the dematerialized, digital other.

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