MONOLITH | TOTEM ...under the yolk

MONOLITH | TOTEM …under the yolk

A silent infinivid work, reminiscent of early LED signage boards, wherein drawn line tracks animated mechanism and gridded masking gradually reveals machinery at work, running forwards, running backwards, a continuum of making in a shifting world. Colour reversal, growth and shrinkage, shifting shapes, machine activity encircled, all are strangely familiar, but not. The viewer observes two separate circular images simultaneously. The images are distinctly different but interrelated - their substance having derived from the same initial raw footage. Though there might be a struggle to absorb binocular information there is a tendency for the viewer to identify moments of visual similarity and connectedness.

This is a bi-partite piece which reflects on anthropogenic factors, our culpability for environmental imbalance and our ever-readiness to believe that we are in control. It allows the viewer to reflect on what is being seen in the moment - moving image, without an explicit narrative - a ‘loop’. The loop is infinite, enabling one to come and go, to look and leave, to encounter sameness and difference. In essence it is about looking, giving the time to look and perhaps more importantly, allowing time for reflection. The contradiction of slow and flickering motion underlines our sense of urgency ‘to move on to the next’ without really acknowledging what we have just witnessed in the silence of a contemplative space. The infinivids exist in a time-frame but play forever! They are drawings in time, drawings which exist in the present continuous, drawings which may be viewed in entirety or not…

MONOLITH | TOTEM is an immersive, visual presentation that utilises available stock video as a provocation for alternative ways of seeing a world in crisis, through the transformative properties of the moving image. This work proposes a radical aesthetics of looking at moving images. In circumstances where the propensity of Social Media is to subliminally re-structure contemporary social reality these moving images provide a kind of antidote to everyday video viewing. This not quite ‘readymade’, is part of a series of works collectively entitled TANDEMS. It is intentionally removed from what we have come to expect from video, I.e. moving image that tells a story. It makes no demand on the viewer with regard to watching in linear time, from start to finish, suggesting that there are other ways of viewing the world.