Traversal - First Passage screening at Ear Me Now

Traversal - First Passage is to be screened as part of 'Ear Me Now' an evening of performance, film, installation and conversation celebrating and investigating the dialogue between hearing and seeing. Ear Me Now takes place on Friday 17th September, at Second Floor Cafe Netil House, Bocking Street Entrance, E8 3RL, 8pm / doors open 7pm.

In Traversal - First Passage the image is not constrained to visuality – but it attempts to utter its own existence in the sonic realm. The overarching soundtrack in Traversal is made as ‘visual sound’, an experimental procedure I use that connects with the way sound is transmitted in optical sound films – a process first developed in the 1920’s to allow sound to be synchronized to images in cinematic film. The technique of 'visual sound' that I have developed in this film translates light frequencies, read with a specially designed microphone, into sonic frequencies, which become the film’s abstract and vibrational soundtrack, and in turn offer a non-visual perception of the image.

The idea of the utterance of the image, in Traversal, is literally the graphical inscription of the image running through the projector to external speakers as a kind of activation of the material trace between sign and object. In this journey the sound goes from visible (what we see on the screen), to invisible (sound waves), to the physical (the vibration of tiny hairs in our ears to enable audition), offering a tangible trace and a material connection between object and sign. In this process, no longer satisfied to appear before the eyes, the image translates its being to the sonic realm where it presents itself in a new form of perception, one which looks to conquer the historic dominance of visuality which as Douglas Khan puts it ‘overwhelms aurality in the cultural balance of the senses’.

30°36'53.26"S 130°24'46.88"E

19th July 2010, 2436km from Sydney sits Cook.  A town that once had a population of over 100 now is reduced to a population of 2.  Cook is a town that once was, in a time that is no more. There are no roads in or out of this place, just iron rail.

Mail - part two

Mail - part one

Having the luxury of more time on my hands than I have known for quite some time, I have been going through some of the small projects I have done in the last couple of years. The first of these is Mail. Between May and October 2008 I photographed many of the different piece of paper/plastic that dropped through my letterbox as mail. Why you may ask?

I think to start with it was a result of being amazed by the amount of recycling I was accumulating each week and I wanted to turn the camera on the cause of at least part of it. 
However, as I went on with my task of recording these banal objects I became fascinated with how I could photograph them in abstract ways that drew attention to each one’s own materiality, be this colour, texture or design. But more than anything this little project was about giving something normally very banal a little bit of attention in its own right. Maybe it is also in part referential to Brassaï’s Sculptures Involuntaires…

Under the bridge at Yarra Flats

Field Trip Magazine

This week saw the launch of Field Trip Magazine; the first of edition of which is dedicated to analogue photography and includes a small selection of photographs taken from my latest film Traversal - Third Passage. The film Traversal - Third Passage is the third instalment of a trilogy of work occupied with the Australian landscape as perceived from the train window as I travelled from Melbourne to Darwin and back again.

All elements of Traversal are in some way are concerned with exploring perception and blurring the boundaries between the still and moving image. In Third Passage, a film made from 54 single photographs, the still image is animated and gives the viewer no opportunity for the considered observation of the single image which we tend to expect from photography. Instead in the film the 54 still images flick by in a frenzy of changing patterns and rhythms that build towards an overwhelming crescendo. 

In Field Trip Magazine 12 of these images are isolated and time is frozen on the page giving opportunity for observation of these normally fleeting photographs.

The spread as it appears in Field Trip Magazine, Issue 1, Summer 2010.

Australian International Experimental Film Festival

Olympic Changes: an inadequate document of life is showing this weekend at the Australian International Experimental Film Festival, in Melbourne. The film will be presented during 'Private Space, Public Space and the Line In-Between'. For further details see: http://www.aieff.org/2010programme.html

Dust Breeding

London, January 2010

Film Screening - Olympic Changes: an inadequate document of life

My short film Olympic Changes: an inadequate document of life will be screening this weekend 31st October – 1st November at:

OBLONG

Weekend Screenings

24 short films
31st October – 1st November

Two screenings per day
1st screening – 12pm-2pm
2nd screening- 3pm – 5pm

Oblong Gallery
69a Southgate Road
London N1 3JS

020 7354 8330
www.oblonggallery.com

Olympic Changes: an inadequate document of life entwines the banality of a personal, everyday suburban train journey with the structural changes taking place to the urban environment around the Olympic site in East London. It is an experimental film that takes the analogue photograph as its source and transforms the still-ness of photography into the movement of film, in away attempting to mix structural film making with digital technology.

Olympic Changes originates from six medium-format photographic negatives; each celluloid negative digitally scanned and repeatedly divided to make in total 600 separate images – these individual images becoming the frames for the film. Movement is re-animated through digital video to reflect the motion present at the original moment of capture by the medium-format camera.

The work is also concerned with questioning the notion of truth and ‘document’ in relation to the photographic image. The notion of ‘truth’ is questioned through the layering of journeys and mixing of ‘modes of translation’ – what is defined here as the movement from experience to representation.

Excerpt: Olympic Changes: an inadequate document of life from Samuel Nightingale on Vimeo.

Ideas / thoughts on Traversal: A work in progess part two

I have been thinking about the work of Tacita Dean and how it relates to some of the concerns I am interested to explore in the project Traversal. While researching Dean’s work recently, I came across a number of short texts she has written that are included in the final section of a book published by Phaidon. The text that I found most interesting and perhaps most enlightening about her practice is entitled Tristan da Cunha. In it Dean writes of her fantasy of visiting the most remote island in the world, which is apparently Tristan da Cunha, to be left there for a year without any form of communication with the outside world, apart from the mail boat which appears once a year. She re-tells a dream, where she had the realisation that when the mail boat arrived, it would also be the same boat that would mark the end of her year and facilitate her return home; this thought of leaving panicked her and she felt disappointed at the letters she could not send or receive – of all the news she could not get.

Not only is the journey (so far) an unrealised fantasy, but also a fantasy of a world where you can get lost; as Dean explains, even Tristan da Cunha has a satellite public phone and the governor now has email. So time moves relentlessly on for this remote and distant land too. It is clear to see from the text that Dean hungers for these spaces where one can dream of becoming lost, where linear time has little meaning and the past and the future are all somehow present in the now. In conclusion Dean writes, ‘So I realize, suddenly, what is at the heart of this draw to the Earth’s edges – to the desert and to the sea, or to the ice at the bottom of the world, or the volcano risen out of the ocean. In these places, we are not bound by the rules of human time; we can be free of a history that cannot mark a surface in constant flux like that of the sea or the or the shifting dunes of the desert, or one brutalized by weather or extremity. In these places, we can imagine millennia; we can image prehistory and can see the future.’

Accompanying the text are reproductions of an old postcard and photograph, both images of an unstated location or date, both have German words painted in white across them indicating aspects of what is pictured.


Tacita Dean, Himmel/See, 2005.


Tacita Dean, Luft/Immergrune/Sandboden, 2005.

For me Dean’s fascination with time resonates with Henri Bergson concept of durée (duration): the dynamic movement of passing yet continuing time, in other words time that is not divisible into past and future, but is qualitative rather than quantitative. It is this concept of durée that is in my mind when I consider some of the still images from Traversal.


Sam Nightingale, Untitled (Traversal series)