#devotion gradient

“In terms of process I thought also of Trisha Brown's Set & Reset - Version 1 (1983, in the classic video by James Byrne where the camera was within the dance) because with these new screen gestures—that a child seems to learn almost completely intuitively—I wanted to focus on them as the driving choreography for the film and its movement. I am also a fan of Robert Bresson and his process and As far as I know borrows both from his closed focus on hand gestures and his use of actors as ‘models,’ rather than the traditional central narrative characters of cinema. Both were key points of reference. 

“Something else has happened in the last ten years with the introduction of touchscreens and cameras on smartphones: the image’s surface is no longer sacred. Instead it invites you to tap it, touch it, rub up against and make gestures with it. Gestures in cinema and its relationship to language have been theorized by Rachel Moore’s writing on Béla Balázs in Savage Theory (the chapter ‘Close Contact’) but these new intimate gestures with the surface of the screen in public space are a new territory, perhaps largely untheorised, and I wanted to work with that.”

I grew up with celluloid and television, where the photographs were untouchable and moving images were trapped in large boxes with glass screens. In the light of digital media, working with these physical photographs in collages rather than photoshop, made me aware just how significant that the taboo of touch had been. That, I realised, is partly what makes physical collage so exciting—that you’re somehow breaking a cultural taboo by cutting into the surface an image. All collage, in whatever media—text, audio, film, architecture, concepts—somehow hinges upon this fissure, the actual point of the cut. But with the physical photograph or celluloid it becomes pleasingly apparent, a place your eye can dwell that allows a shift in relation to your own changing perceptions.”

“As well as the subject, I've long responded to Brakhage because he makes so evident his the cuts and the material, they are not well mannered. I have worked a lot with collage, both literally and as an expanded notion through other media, and generally keep a keen eye on developments in the technology of photography and the moving image, so the key thing that made As far as I know a necessary project was also this subject of “the touchscreen” and the ubiquity of people touching their private images in public! It felt like this was a natural continuation of my ongoing practice that always attempts to grapple with what is at stake with, first of all my perception, but that usually comes hand in hand with what ever is happening with ‘the photograph’ or ‘the image’ right now.”