Series of recent works that reflect on the perception and interaction of images in the contemporary world, both in their impact on everyday life and on landscape and nature. At a time when screens have become omnipresent and created a significant effect on the ecosystem, these films reflect on the collision of the multiple images and viewers that digital devices generate when entering spaces, tinging them blue.
This session also shows how changes in digital technology and the obsolescence of analogue provided these filmmakers with tools that determine the way they treat themes and explore landscapes, both urban and natural. Making perception itself an essential aspect of their work, these creators use hybrid media to explore the limitless possibilities of the moving image, creating hypnotic works and experimental narratives that link the imagination with science, technology, the personal and the political.
The psychedelic single-shot videos of Tony Balko—Bars & Tone, It’s A Boy! and Tree—shine, flicker and disorient. Blue Light Blue, by Anna Hawkin, uses the visual language of horror movies, presenting the blue light emitted by cell phones, laptops and tablets as a threat. Scott Fitzpatrick’s Blue Movie sets out to evoke the elusive International Klein Blue of the neo-Dada painter Yves Klein. It uses the laser printer to stamp images directly onto transparent film, distorting its printed sources to abstraction. Dealing with issues such as her family history and the longing for truth, and using materials like hand-cut paper, textile fabrics and celluloid, Britany Gunderson’s works Background Material and Natural Order extend the idea of what a moving image can be. Late Anthropocene, by Adrian Cousins, is beautiful and mysterious, and captures details of nature with expired film: plants, flowers and insects. The film was developed by hand, not to try to reproduce the “natural colour”, but to expand the expressive range of his creations. With In Search of Mount Analogue, Leonardo Pirondi films computer-generated images in analogue to create an immersive landscape on an imagined island, while Effulgent Gleam describes the hypnagogic effects of optical mineralogy on the mind of a man inside a cave. A Landscape to Be Invented, by Josh Weissbach, presents a dystopian landscape where elements of nature—the ocean, plants and rocks—are tinted purple due to evolutionary changes in solar radiation.
Bars & Tone, Tony Balko, 2012, digital, 3’; Blue Light Blue, Anna Hawkins, 2021, 16 mm/digital, 15’; Blue Movie, Scott Fitzpatrick, 2014, 16 mm/digital, silent, 2’; Background Material, Britany Gunderson, 2020, 16 mm/digital, 7’; Anthropocene, Adrian Cousins, 2016, 16 mm/digital, silent, 7’; In Search of Mount Analogue, Leonardo Pirondi, 2021, 16 mm/digital, 4’; Effulgent Gleam, Leonardo Pirondi, 2022, 16 mm/digital, 7’; It’s A Boy!, Tony Balko, 2016, digital, 1’; a landscape to be invented, Josh Weissbach, 2020, Super 8/16 mm/35 mm/digital, 12’; Tree, Tony Balko, 2013, digital, 3’; Natural Order, Britany Gunderson, 2020, 16 mm/digital, 5’.
Digital projection.
Copies provided by each artist.
