LIAM COO
ANIMATED STILL Video
The image is a rapidly changing object in our current world. Technology is advancing and pushing the mediums of photography and video together creating a new hybrid entity. In addition, the viewer is more aware of the blurred lines between fact and fictional imagery. This series examines all these issues through the subject of portraiture, a genre that is popular in both photography and video. Animated Still is a series of hybrid still and moving images of studio sitters that look at the representational and the hybridization of mediums..
In these projections the viewer can find still photographs, video work and animation seamlessly brought together into one composition. Current technology allows for these different types of mediums to be placed within the same frame. In addition the Internet especially has pushed for the combination of video and photography into a hybrid form. We need only look to the recent explosion of ‘cinemagraphs’ and GIFs to see examples of where these mediums are headed. Stillness and motion have been previously seen as separate from one another, can now be found mixing freely together in a variety of different forms. In this way this series of projections continues to play with this notion by subverting the expectations of the viewer: a static video, including freeze-frames, and a animated photograph positioned alongside one another. Along with the conversation that happens around the hybridization of these two mediums is another about the digital verse analogue. It is a discussion that we are used to having a lot in contemporary art practice. In Animated Still this familiar discourse finds new meaning in the level of representational difference between the 8x10 film image and the digital video portrait. Looking at these two images side by side means that the viewer is even more aware of the hyper real look of the analogue representation. The video portrait appears to be closer to reality, which is strange considering they are both, considered ‘realistic’ forms of representation.
During a recent artist talk, Anne Immele said that the photograph has always sat between fact and fiction. This statement perfectly sums up everything about the photographic medium’s predicament. Photography, and video, capture reality but at the same time exclude context and circumstances leaving the viewer with a misleading picture to decipher. In Animated Still both the video and photographic portrait are extended to allow the viewer a more in depth look at the sitter, supposedly providing the audience with more information to construct an understanding of the subject. However that is not necessarily the case, adding more information in this case seems to actually complicate matters by providing the viewer with more opportunities to be deceived by the images. The intervention of the photographer and sitter is unknown because the sound has been removed. Which party is initializing which movements?
Animated Still functions as discussion about the future, past and present of the photographic medium by examining the hybridization of still and moving images and the continued dialogue about the factual and the fictional elements of photographic representation.