Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
Goldsmiths' College
Death Mask 3
Death Mask 3 is a video essay, made using techniques that I developed over the three years prior to the making of the work. It was entirely shot by me on location in Provence, France, and La Gomera in the Canaries, using high definition camera and recording devices. The work itself was the beginning of a technological meditation, where the body and the effect of the digital are juxtaposed as immaterial, and base or abject, respectively. As with all of my other works, the coincidence of elements – image, sound, text, edit – is a certain kind of faith: a faith, perhaps, that in the right order, something might materialize or be summoned, more than likely inside the viewer.
The images are of conspicuously of natural forms, landscapes and textures. They are also in some ways essentially vacant, in the sense that there is seldom any human presence. But perhaps more importantly, they are vacated of any specificity. For example a recurrent mountain is simply ‘mountain’; the sea is ‘sea’ and so on.
Subtitles appear sporadically throughout, and are discernibly ‘off screen’ – most likely an interior monologue, they are non-sequiturs that are obscure and occasionally nightmarish in their observations. They are excerpted from the final diaries of my father, kept as he knew he was dying, though this information remains tacit.
The work was the first piece of mine to be widely shown and discussed. In this capacity it pretty much inaugurated the discourse around my practice.
