Output details

Following Your Heart, single screen video work

My early research in film focused on ways of using found footage; Following Your Heart extends this exploration. Many artists who use found footage simply cut it together. My film is more orchestrated: the sound is perfected in a recording studio and the rhythms are all adjusted to fit so it is bound into a stronger whole.

I bring together a variety of material, from adverts for mobile phones, credit cards, bread, and new DVDs, to Fantastic Voyage, the classic film about a miniature craft inserted into a person. The work’s central conceit is to take found footage and manipulate it into a new artistic experience while unpicking the common contradictions of mass media. The video is a fast orchestration of elements that use the verve and life of the original adverts but in a lyrical fashion. The adverts all relate to the ‘heart’ in some way, either in terms of health or, in the usual capitalistic fashion, by asking people to consume by appealing to the emotions.

Yet, as the piece intimates, following your heart has consequences – it is not something we can always do, in shops or in life. The messages start to collide and contradict. Consumerism wants us to act on impulse, to just do it, yet this is a dark message if people are cajoled into applying it to other aspects of their life. The research contributes to a wider critique of Western society: in a pleasurable way it points to the moral vacuum that would ensue if one treated loved ones as commodities to be cashed in or dropped as we wish.