Time and cinema as art forms.
Cinema and art as forms of time.
The camera is not only a recording device. It is a way of seeing the world, a way of being in the world, a way of negotiating progression, surface, recognition….

A Disturbance of Shadows is an illustrated lecture in video that presents eleven cinematic reflections on the nature of time. The video begins and ends with the question: “Do you consider time to be a hostile enemy or intimate companion?”

Run Into Peace presents a text adapted from the writings of Meister Eckhart, a controversial mystic, priest and religious teacher from 14th century Germany, who did much to vernacularize the religious contemplative life of his day.

The text is simple and simultaneously self-contradictory; it recalls a world where language did not have to mean but could merely express, a world where the self knew better than to attempt defining the world. The images are also often contradictory, juxtaposed in flowing layers: highway landscapes, blood maps, vacant rooms, hands against the ceiling, glowing streetlights, invading icons, circular staircases.

Dedicated to Louis F. Capson [1944-96]

Losing Sleep presents interview footage of a self-confessed computer hacker who is struggling with chronic insomnia. His work on the computer has become such an all-encompassing cyberworld that, for him, returning to the grounded physical world is a frightening endeavour.

‘Giving in’ to sleep seems like a violent surrender. Yet only by submitting to simple physical acts, such as long deliberate walks late at night, can he find rest.

Using a text adapted from Paul Virilio's Pure War, and scenes of pedestrian movement in urban landscapes, combined with the visually arresting treatment of archival images of twentieth century warfare and wartime, this video explores our changing experience of space and time as everyday life is shaped by the military developments of technological speed and spectacular motion.

PART THREE OF THE TIME SIGNALS TRILOGY