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In my videos, I seek to create moments of perceptual disruption, through which the audience may become conscious of the cultural and technological mediation of their vision.

This disruption is focussed on the moment of the cut, as the edit point can push the viewer between different viewing states. When the edit forces a transition from one type of relationship with the image to another, it can create a jolt of self-consciousness in the viewer about his or her forms of seeing. The cut may briefly unearth the nature of the viewer’s relationships with the image, which generally remains unconscious.

This is very clear in Present Tense, which was completed in 2007. The video contains two types of material: tourist footage of the World Trade Centre, presented directly, and shots of this footage playing in the 8mm camcorder on which it was shot.  The first footage carries a strong sense of immediacy and presence, taking us back to the top of the towers in 1999; by contrast, the second type of material implicitly recontextualises the WTC footage as ‘historical’ by showing us the camera used to shoot it. The disorientating jolt of the transition between the two types of material makes us aware of the strong illusion of ‘present tense’ that had enveloped us as we watched the tourist footage.

We can also see the disruptive power of the cut in Fragments of the Los Angeles River (2009), which consists of a long montage of static landscape images, each separated by a short stretch of black fill. With each cut, the audience is confronted with its need to assimilate the new image into some kind of coherent argument or particular portrayal of the river. What is the author trying to say? How can each new shot be interpreted in the light of some assumed overall meaning?  This becomes impossible, as the sheer heterogeneity of images seems to preclude an overarching meaning. The very different images have little relationship with each other; the order and choice of shots seem to be determined by the editorial and visual rhythm of the piece, rather than a desire to make a particular argument. Every transition to a new image of the river raises its apparent lack of relation to the last, and makes explicit the audience’s frustrated desire to find a relationship.

My practice is orientated around the discovery of these moments of perceptual disruption and the kinds of understandings that they generate for the audience. The videos are constructed to generate these moments.  While I am interested in ‘place’, and the meanings of place, the portrayal of place is the subject matter through which operate my work’s formal disruptions.

15/3/2010