Continuous looping film footage forever repeats a fractured moment in my digital memory. Like the Japanese Haiku, fleeting moments are minimally and quietly observed in a series of sometimes only three to four select shots. These film sequences range between 5 and 45 seconds in length and reference a contemporary internet meme the ‘Gif’ in their editing.
This excerpt is from a series, shot in Scandinavia during an artist residency. The voids of populous and encroaching wilderness, characteristic of the Nordic landscape, prompts a potential rupture of confines and generates an exchange between contrary territories.
The content of my films are neither staged nor directed, merely perceived en plein air, from spontaneous happenings I encounter. In this excerpt, time and space are foreshortened and juxtaposed to create a cyclical interplay between one and the same event: a young girl spontaneously performs around a tree outside her block of flats in Stockholm, ignorant of a young deer’s presence a few feet beyond the fence.
These acute intimate works investigate a merging of digital and organic memory, but specifically how we recall present time and event in an epoch of mass visual documentation, blogging culture and social media.
Verity Birt is a London-based artist, currently studying for her Masters in Painting at the Royal College of Art.
www.veritybirt.co.uk
Add new comment