Making video offers a convenient shorthand for the time-based narrative structure of language that interests me, but I’m not comfortable yet with the glaring presence of the technology I need to make it work. In projects like the Blackbird’s Whistle installation, the arrangement of projectors, the sound and heat they made, and their need for a darkened space, were all unintended additions to the work itself, which I wish I could have made simpler.

I think it’s partly just a matter of putting more thought into the technicalities, and when the time comes that’s what I’ll have to do, but for now I’m trying to move my work away from video for a while in favour of objects, drawings and text.

 

Kinetic sculptures like this one feel like a convincing middle-ground between my tabletop videos and static work like Composition with Forks (2). The forks and things are threaded through rotary motors and at a point in their rotation they always nearly touch. Their speeds are stable so the relationship between their circles never changes. They sit together on one chair, with an empty chair beside them, for somebody to sit and watch and join in.