THIS, TOO

THIS, TOO: You have to pay attention: only that tiny something in the distance moves within the image.
The film is a photograph stirred to life. A minute movement revealed.
An urban blink. A wide shot, and nothing immense.
The whole, a fluid carousel, a city mechanism, a quiet, rhythmic clockwork of faces, cars in line, power lines swaying in the wind.
But there are four screens, and the images compose themselves in relation to one another:
the carousel extends further still.

THIS, TOO: There are written texts.
Generated at random, apt or absurd, they caption the images on display.
Title cards, a wink at the innocent beginnings of cinema, before post-synchronisation had been invented. There are spoken texts: the characters’ voices, off-screen? What they say?
What they say to one another?
What they might say?
What they cannot manage to say to one another?
Their inner voices?
We do not choose.

THIS, TOO: He has not chosen.
For a long time now, he has been composing images, music, sounds and texts together.
They must coexist: that is their duty, and the viewer’s duty is to draw connections, to seek meaning in what is read, heard and seen.
For a long time, he has resisted choosing… Fortunately, the times are catching up with him: “multimedia”, “boundary-crossing”, the age makes room for those who, like him, create as a “one-man orchestra”. So here he is, running a modern factory, alone at home,
and the machinery hums: sound, music, image, voice, editing, mixing, composition.
His studio, a white room; his instruments, the mysterious synapses
of machines with screens.

THIS, TOO: He says, “It’s too heavy.”
He says, “I need to compress it.”
Is he bringing computing back to physics so that I can understand?
Does he need this himself, to dare work with this almost invisible, scarcely existent matter of icons, code and files?
None of it takes up space, yet he is forever complaining: “I’m stuck.
I need another external hard drive”—there are already four—“it won’t run on a G4…” He is at the limits of the technology.
He chafes at the engineers’ pace, impatient for things to move faster:
more capacity, fewer cables, fewer plugs, more files.
He wants more of everything, so that he can slow things down still further, hold them still, frame the emptiness of movement.