Where a Straight Line Meets a Curve
2 channel projection, 16mm, colour, sound, dur: 30mins.
Sound By David Cunningham
Where a Straight Line Meets a Curve is a durational sculpture, of real and imagined activity shot entirely in one room. It is a film concerned with the objective reduction of space, a film 'about' the recording and representation of space and the politics of the viewing space of film itself. Projected onto two adjacent screens, the visual material is constructed so that light and colour form relationships between and across screens continuously, redefining the viewer's perception of the space presented through the images. Time is measured out in ways analogous to the coming and going of the everyday, exposing the passing of time to a (continuous) present.
Extract begins 11 minutes into film.
The work questions the usual strategies of the viewer, mediating between the mental image, the dimension of physical space, and the illusionistic space of cinema. The sound is constructed from the speech of the artists within the space broken down by a process of re-amplification and rerecording to a point where the resonant frequencies of the space have an equal value to any spoken content. A structure of loops and phase patterns internally resonating both within the filmic space and in parallel with the textual content of the intertitles. Through the framing and re-framing of images and the constructed relationship of sound, text and image, the film creates perspectual shifts and unexpected confrontations that confound our usual way of distinguishing between the actual and the representational.