Scape

Scape, a seven minute digital moving image piece, examines the way in which architecture and geography can be subsumed into a suggestible surface of abstraction, with the still image being used in terms of the moving image to become a space which dissolves the distinction between the real and the imagined. In practice, Scape develops a versatile flatness that shifts in its exploration between modernist surface and the visual interface of post-modernity, as the specific aspect of the contemporary city is conveyed (transported) through multiple layers of the architecture of the imagination. Research questions: how can still images as moving images deconstruct the three dimensional built environment into images of flatness? How does this process re-construct a critical sensibility toward the concrete, rationalized spaces of urban cartography as mediated through digital photography? Research context: Scape is informed by the Situationist experimentation of Joyce, Murdoch, Gysin, Sommerville, Burroughs and Sinclair, yet it responds creatively to Keenan’s (2009) concept of hypnagogic music as exemplified by Philip Jeck, The Caretaker, Broadcast and The Focus Group. Like hypnogogic music, which takes existing cultural artefacts and transforms them into new aural landscapes, Scape transforms original digital photographs from the London Underground and Berlin U-Bahn and sounds from Berlin’s Hauptbanhof into sequences of moving images, which were developed into complex visual and aural layers. Using images of light sources, Scape explores how our relationship to our surroundings can be re-mapped. Scape has been screened at various prestigious film festivals, including The Collectif Jeune Cinema Festival of Experimental Cinema in Paris, The Lausanne Underground Film & Music Festival in Switzerland, Da Fest Digital Art Festival held at the National Academy of Art in Sofia Bulgaria, and the Berlin Directors’ Lounge. Scape has gained a couple of awards including second prize at this year’s Videoholica Film Festival.