c8400.commovement2conceptMovement2 reconstructs a fragment from memory, based on the experience of movement between places, cities, countries and continents. It addresses the notion of recollecting spatiotemporal situations. The time of the original setting has been compressed into an eternal moment.Movement and fluidity are becoming typical features of society. We are constantly on the move, between work places, leisure places, between districts, cities, countries and continents. While moving around, we remember fragments of what we see. Sometimes these fragments come back to us in our dream, or they pop up in our mind as a déjà-vu when triggered by another situation. Movement2 reconstructs one of these fragments from my memory. It is a simulation of a memory; or a dream. On my travels I encountered a déjà-vu feeling when looking out of the airplane window. I recorded what I saw in photographs, and I noted the approximate position of the plane. After repeated trips and some research I indeed could confirm – I have seen this place before. From air, the Earth looks like an endless surface, extending all the way to the horizon. The landscape is reduced to a two-dimensional flatness. The movement of the observer in relation to the ground is experienced as a change in perspective, and a slow passing of the ground behind the airplane’s window. It was a rectangular shape with a flat monochrome surface that has caught my attention. The 4 second-long, high definition video loop of Movement2 captures the moment of passing by – and above – the object of observation, captured in an endless repetition with no beginning or end. What started as an objective ‘objective’ recording of the event through the ‘eye’ of a camera has been compressed and reedited – collapsed into a limited set of views that overlap and are accessed in a seemingly random way. From the original footage, there remained an idea of direction – a vector – and a subject-object relationship represented by the specific tilt of the Earth-plane in relation to the camera. The seemingly random appearances outside of the airplane window and the limited information about the sights one is looking at allow for an imaginary extension of the image put in front of one’s eyes. When looking at the photographs, I was most struck by the previously mentioned ‘flatness’ of the surface. It is the top-down viewing angle and the reduction to two dimensions that allows us to read a map. Equally one could say that the on-the-ground position and three-dimensionality of our space that is responsible for our difficulty to navigate a real landscape without a map. To counter-act the flatness, I decided to enhance the third dimension within the image, based on the geographical feature in which I took interest. The repeated layering of the rectangular shape is a result of a speculative imaginative process that grew out of the visual memory. It also serves as a reference to other kinds of layering taking place in the piece - based on a sampling frequency (temporal distance between individual photographs) and temporal compression (layering of images). The vertical repetition of the geographic landscape feature can be also understood as an imaginary sculpture that has been inserted into the remembered landscape. The imaginary sculpture seems to be like a compass, easing the navigation through the spatial dimensions of the image. It is like a mirage appearing within our dreams – dreams reassembled by our mind from remembered fragments of our wanderings. |