c8400.commovement: approach (7, 8)conceptMoving around urban space or in between cities, our experience of space has become a function of the vehicles used to transport our bodies. In the same way our eyes are fixed on the screen of our electronic devices, our bodies are fixed to the seats, handrails and safety belts. This brings forth a similarity with the posture taken in a cinema, where our bodies are likewise immobile and our gaze is fixed on the projected image. Furthermore, as in a cinema, travelling is a collective experience: bodies moving together through space. Our field of view becomes the internalized camera angle as we are being moved around in or on the vehicle, replacing the camera dolly.Looking out of the window, we see landscapes passing by, yet the purpose of journey is the movement forward – approaching a destination. As in the dolly shot, it is the distance between the observing subject and the object observed that influences the perceived speed of the movement. The two video loops (Movement7, Movement8) seek for the cinematic in the everyday, contrasting two movements of rather disparate speeds and subject-object distances. Both works are built up from micro moments experienced during travel. Moments similar to uncountable other ones but not the same, sampled fragments whose length is measured by the duration of blinks and glimpses. Movement7 depicts one of the slower mechanized movements, that of a subway escalator. Despite its relatively slow speed, the pace of the intersecting fragments, originating from a single sequence of images captured during the movement down the escalator, appears rapid and pressing. The bodies are static, as is the camera, yet all together they are being moved, taking on the role of a transported material and statistical unit. Movement8, on the contrary, depicts one of the fastest mechanized movements – it is shot from an airplane in mid-flight, approaching a continent illuminated by city lights at night, sandwiched between the darkness of the sea in the foreground and the sky in the background. Here, despite the rapid speed of the airplane, a soft and slow movement prevails, as if the distance from the ground would make time flow slower. The interval created between the fast-but-slow (Movement7) and slow-but-fast (Movement8) establishes a coordinate system into which other combinations of perception, experience and fact can be projected and imagined. |