STATI D'ANIMO 2005

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Videographs

Stati d'Animo continues to engage with the contemporary world of global networks and connectivity explored in my earlier work, Connected. The images were captured at Kuala Lumpur, Charles de Gaulle, Brisbane, Helsinki, San Francisco, Sydney, Philadelphia and Sao Paulo airports using a concealed video camera. Almost as if engaged in furtive surveillance, the camera moves or rests without composing or focussing on the subjects it tracks and traces. Passing in and out of frame anonymous figures rush past on their way to departure or arrival gates, to immigration, baggage areas, and to taxis waiting outside. Emerging from, or disappearing into the crowd, figures seem lost in space and thought. By this withholding of any recognition of the subject, I only incidentally intend to register the anonymity of these travellers and public spaces. What is more important is the way the blurring of the image and indeterminacy of sensation correspond to a state of mind (stato d'animo).

I have used the word videographs to describe the formation of the image in these works, which is different from both film and photography. It closely resembles the sequenced exposures of chronophotography by Jules Etienne Marey which (like Henri Bergson's reflections on time) inspired the painterly experiments of the Futurists. Unlike the film- or video-still, the videographs condense and dilate the experience of time, by superimposing a sequence of frames in transparent layers. The cinematic division of time into discrete frames is dissolved into the sensation of duration within the image. In this work the 'present' is therefore continuous (and coexistent) with the past, in a perpetual state of becoming and vanishing. The videograph is without the fixed now, the 'decisive moment' of photography.

60 Seconds, the video triptych, relates directly to the still images, using duration to reinforce the sense of people caught in the ever-elusive space between past and future.

Technical

The still and moving images of Stati d'Animo (Seconds) were shot on SD digital video.
The still videographs were composited in Photoshop.
60 Seconds, the video triptych, was edited in Premiere Pro. It has been output to DVD/SD formats. 60 Seconds is available as a limited edition three-channel DVD installation.

Prints

Seconds: 40 x 50 cm. Pigment prints, edition of 5.
9 Seconds: 96 x 120 cm. Pigment prints, edition of 5.

(A pigment print is a high resolution, high fidelity print made using a large format inkjet printer. They have a similar archival quality to a watercolour.)

DVD

Stati d'Animo 60 Seconds
Duration: 4:05. Colour. Silent.
3 DVD set
edition of 10