Hito Steyerl

Hito Steyerl plays with cinematic techniques, learned codes governing our understanding of film and vision in film. This film How not to be Seen references Monty Python’s “how to be invisible”. While I like the work, i also think the original is much smarter, and reminds me of the amazing Monty Python sketches that use necessity and expectation to create humour and a jolt of expectations. My favourite clip is of Arthur running to the Castle in the Holy Grail - timing!

Hito Steyerl, How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013

Bill Viola

After watching this excerpt in this interview of Tape I, 1972 - mirror, reflection, self, and his other works reflecting on reflection. I really like this play on expectation and reflection that the simplicity of the mirror brings, and although i think the screaming part is a bit earnest, but I guess it was the seventies. The ending is really great too, using the self to physically stop the tape, it really works in a great way.

Darryn Sylvester

Darren Sylvester: Carve a Future, Devour Everything, Become Something

What a great exhibition. His video work is really great and also his sculptures, like the SKII series is amazing.

Moon rock

Robert Smithson

Robert Smithson’s notions of time, and in particular his views of cinematic time and experience. Ideas of the loop and time constructs in cinema “Repetition creates order” and “Temporal continuity conceals the discrete structure of illusion” while also the immersion of memory and the viewing/viewer experience, “we remember cinema as being in it, not of watching a screen”  are observations that are helping to rethink and develop my ideas of viewer experience in relation to cinema.

Pierre Huyghe

Pierre Huyghe’s early experiments, firstly with the opening up of time and creating an “open present” (in works such as his billboard series in 1994 and Trajet 1992) to his development of non-linearity in cinematic time and delving into “a time beyond screen-time” (ie. The Third Memory 1999-2000, L’Ellipse 1998) has influenced me to rethink time as fixed/objective and has opened up the possibilities of time/duration/experience as subjective and malleable. 

His ideas on time:

1. The time of the market (working time - encompassing the relation between representations and historiography),

2. The time of duration - subjective. Duration dilates and expands time, with no respect to the calendar or clock. Its presence maintains the import of subjective differentiations that intrude on distinctions between now and then. The attention to duration disables the homogenisation of time codes, leading to the production of mirrors, double and ghosts.

3. The time of the image - now more crucial to consider the image in time. This tactic encounters the amnesia of instant history or “presentism” by recognizing that there is time beyond screen time 

Pierre Huyghe Chantier Barbès-Rochechouart Billboard, Paris 1994. (Part of his billboard series)