Output details

Fragments of the Los Angeles River

2009, 45m, Standard-definition digital video, colour, stereo, 4:3

Synopsis:

Fragments of the Los Angeles River can be looped in a gallery space or projected in a cinema. The video presents a variety of landscapes along the banks of the Los Angeles River.

The work deviates from what we might expect of a ‘conventional’ or mainstream documentary. Rather than being structured to create an ordered representation, coherent portrayal, or argument about the river, the video is built around an arc of shifting rhythms. (Chiefly, these rhythms are created through editing, composition, and on-screen movement.) The video, then, portrays the river as a nebulous cloud of contrasting qualities with little apparent order or hierarchy; formal coherence stems instead from an almost musical structure of developing rhythms.

Research Questions include:

• Can the compositional and editorial rhythms of a video provide sufficient formal coherence or unity, in the absence of a structuring argument or principle (beyond the simple shift from day into night that we see at the close of the video)?

• Will an audience form for themselves a coherent or structured representation of a subject, even from the unstructured fragments of portrayal?

• In creating a standard media product, to what extent does the creation of a coherent representation depend on the controlled elision of aspects of the subject?

• How does an image function differently when presented in a video work as part of a sequence and when shown individually?

Screenings and Exhibitions include: International Symposium of Electronic Art, Belfast; Living Landscapes Conference, Aberystwyth University, UK; Director’s Lounge Festival of New Media Art, Berlin; ‘X-Space’, Hubei Academy of Art, Wuhan, China.

Documentation: playable DVD with PAL version of video; CD-R with exhibition and festival screening catalogues; personal web-site.