Output details

Broken Windows

Specifications: 2010, 5:14m, SD, 4:3, Stereo, Colour, Single-Channel.

This work can be looped in a gallery space or projected in a cinema.

Synopsis:

Broken Windows is a five-minute video consisting of the last footage recorded with a malfunctioning digital camcorder.

On one level, the piece presents a de-mystification of the digital image. The distortion of the footage can be seen to suggest the processes by which the real world is interpreted as video.

Conversely, however, the piece implies the mystery of digital video technology for most viewers. The audience engages with the malfunctioning of the camera in Broken Windows on a purely aesthetic level, as a source of beauty or wonder, because we grasp so little about the technology that ‘created’ it. Despite its penetration of many aspects of our lives, most of us do not understand the functioning of the video camera; thus we can approach Broken Windows almost as if it were an Abstract Expressionist canvas, an expressive work rather than the result of a mechanical problem.

Research Questions include:

• To what extent can we make an audience perceive the technological foundations of a digital image through the deterioration of that image?

• To what extent can an audience take aesthetic pleasure, emotion and meaning from visual material generated automatically by a technical malfunction?

• What happens to the notions of artistic authorship, intention and expression in the context of visual material that has been generated automatically by a technical malfunction?

Distribution

Collectif Jeune Cinema (Paris) distributes Broken Windows.

Screenings include: Director’s Lounge Festival of New Media Art, Berlin; Traverse Video, Toulouse; FILE: Festival of Electronic Language, Sao Paulo; Scope Basel; Lucca Film Festival, Italy; Big Screen Project, New York.

Documentation: playable DVD plus duplicate; CD-R with catalogues and screening list; personal web-site.