Since 1996, Claerbout has explored the boundaries and overlaps between video and still photography, blurring the line between the still and the moving image. He digitizes found photographs and then introduces moving elements, and with them, time. He also uses digital video to create mini-narratives set in buildings or urban spaces that play on the changing light and passage of time to interrogate "the substance of time."
http://listart.mit.edu/node/310
"The Algiers’ Sections of a Happy Moment" is set in a small soccer field on a roof of the casbah of Algier, with a view over the labyrinth of houses facing the Mediterranean Sea.
Young Maghrebians surrounded by a group of elderly pause their soccer game as one of the players feeds a group of eager seagulls.
The succession of images of this ‘happy' moment reflects a lifelong project to open up what I term as 'the suspicious gaze'; this work investigates a recent fixation against a particular group of people. At the core of my artistic practice is the passage of time as a tool for relaxation of that suspicious gaze, and in general an attempt to reconsider what we see.
The American Room, 2009
In the American Room the relation between movement and stillness is being translated very literally into the relation between breathing and holding the breath.
If persisted: the latter results in death. But the soundtrack, through its rythmical structure advocates continuity of the inanimate world on screen.
This is the strange poetic effect of the observer watching the 'dead' - and therefore in many ways mute listener in the American Room.
subtle interventions put into question the individual authority of photographic stillness, filmed motion and spatial distance:
the listeners have been scanned using stills, not a video camera. A 3 dimensional -virtual- space allows for infinite camera movement. However, this has been purpously constrained to mimic conventional camera movement.
the music, although detached from the musicians is submitted to a reverberation as if it relates to where the camera is.
The moments in which we hear the singer are also those moments in which she is offscreen.Moments as long as a breath can hold.
http://www.davidclaerbout.com/Site_eng/Home.html
LESLIE THORNTON
Leslie Thornton is a painter turned video- and filmmaker who teaches in the Modern Culture and Media Program at Brown University. Her lush, complex works explore the mechanisms of desire and meaning, while probing past the boundaries of language and narrative conventions. Difficult to categorize or describe, Thornton's works are steeped in theoretical interest and filled with rich and intuitive imagery in experimental narratives crossing science fiction, ethnographic, and documentary forms.
http://www.vdb.org/smackn.acgi$artistdetail?THORNTONL
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