Velocity Screengrab 6
VELOCITY
Screengrab 6
Curatorial Essay | Velocity: Screengrab 6 | James Cook University & Townsville City Council, Gallery Services | 2014
Image credit: Mitch Goodwin (2014) Screengrab6 installation, Pinnacles Gallery, Townsville, Australia
Essay Introduction
(Read the full curatorial essay: PDF)
The dawn of the 20th century represented the grand opening up of narrative, of formal space and of our perception of time. Central to this recalibration was the moving image dreamscape. Cinema reconfigured our collective mind’s eye: the Lumiere Brothers brought locomotives steaming into theatres and Parisian factory workers spilling into the light of day / Picasso and Braque saw the relationship between form, perspective and time and gave birth to Cubism / while the Italian Futurists, knowing a good thing when they saw it, took these formal experiments and wedded this new found perception to their virulent manifestos. Jilting history and orthodoxy for the romance of the future and the ferocious power of electricity and distributed networks (radio / rail / flight paths) the Futurists carved a tradition of technological engagement that remains to this day.
The 20th century is bookended by such fascinations – of the play of light, of experiments in three dimensions, and our obsession with communication technologies. But with these attractions and their repetition come the consequence of invention: the accident. As Paul Virilio has observed:
Overexposure is the live broadcast, it is real-time replacing the past, present and future. A society that heedlessly privileges the present necessarily privileges the accident… So somewhere the end of the future and the end of the past, in our societies of immediacy, of ubiquity, of instantaneity, are necessarily the advent of the accident. (Virilio, 1994)[i]
The icons of this relationship are speed, image making and the industry of war. It was the changing ratios of technology and the terror that they engendered which spirited otherwise sane politicians and emperors and the military arms of their ruling parties to war in 1914. They feared the Russian railroad, the British naval fleet and the gauge of the German machine gun. Similarly it is the speed and dexterity of technology which governs the balance of power in 2014. The instantaneity of relational data, the scope and penetration of satellites and the omnipresence of image capture devices breed their own revolutions, conflicts and paranoia. Within this evolving lexicon of visual communication methodologies exists the artist / the cultural observer / the media analyst. As we watch the quaint windmills of Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music evolve into the animé dreamscapes of Jamie Hewlett’s Gorillaz to the giant wind turbines dotting the coastlines at the ends of the world like icons of a distant solarpunk future, we are constantly witnessing change in shape and in form and at speed.[2] It is the image maker who tracks the temperature and nature of these prevailing forces and by extension our collective reality echoes these visions with ghost-like tracings. It could be said that at the heart of this creative exchange is the quantification of difference – in speed, position and direction. Mapping the various social, political and cultural consequences of this by registering – and archiving – the vector shapes of our shared reality we can see the past as the science of the future. Indeed, it just may be the making of us, this velocity of things.
Image credit: still from Rose Staff’s multichannel work, “The Space Between Us” (2014). 3 channel HD video, 2D and 3D animation.
The rushing up of the Earth from below as we leap into the unknown is a strong pervasive force. We witness this image in our collective mediated histories time and time again: in Tullio Crali’s Futurist aeropittura painting Nose Dive Into the City from 1939 / in the GoPro footage from the helmet of space jumper Felix Baumgartner / in Robert Drew’s 9/11 photograph, The Falling Man / to Sandra Bullock’s plunge back to earth in Alfonso Crurón’s 2013 film Gravity.[3] Authors, artists, designers and futurists have witnessed, imagined and predicted technological states of change, at speed everywhere for the best part of a century. The comings and goings of objects, the rhizomatic fever of life – of memories and of perception – is the stuff of both nature and the machine but also the stuff of change – of a compelling need to move forward, at pace.
This velocity is expressed by data and scientific measurement as much as it is by our personal perception of such change. We constantly bear witness to the variable rapidity of velocity, from the reconfiguration of physical space to the fluctuations of our emotions and thoughts. In physics we understand this to be the boundary layer, a layer of fluid that is influenced by the speed and direction of a moving object. We too are influenced as much by our observations of the object itself as we are of the effects that object’s movement has on our environment. As an inherently visual society, we are attracted to the influence of change upon ourselves and our immediate surrounds. And it is visual evidence of this change that we seek to capture, to have and to hold – one image from an infinite number of angles. We tap, snap and archive these evidential phenomena incessantly via analogue hand and by machine sensor. The immediacy of these experiences is more tangible and traceable than they ever have been before.
Image credit: still iamge from Francesca Fini’s film “White Sugar” (Italy, 2013)
Screengrab6 seeks to investigate this change – in direction, position, speed and most importantly context. It is as much about movement and shifting points of view as it is about studying objects from a fixed position. Velocity operates under various guises: hypervelocity exists at supersonic speeds in often imperceptible parcels of reality, while glacial velocity is represented by incremental modicums of change over a long extended period of time, while terminal velocity is the final act – the ultimate rendition – often going nowhere, preserved in its inertia back here where we started.
The artists whose work has been shortlisted for Screengrab6 interpret the notion of velocity in the broad spectrum of these terms. Through the technology and mechanics of visualisation they depict and explore velocity as a shifting coordinate, as an exploratory reconnoitre, as a fine grain study of the present and the future state of things – in flux – via the medium of the screen.
As we move forward, we change. As our lives take on new ideas and new demands and new ambitions we shift gear, we change direction, we close off circuits and where possible re-route new ones. We manoeuvre our way through the slipstream of those who came before us and in turn we disrupt and alter the information flow for others. This is the great velocity of things of which we are all a part. Here on the screen is but a fraction of that story.
Image credit: NASA & ASF (2000) Lambert Glacier Velocity Map (asf.alaska.edu)
