Video Sue Rees

The video footage in Swept Away is predominately concerned with images taken from various modes of transport and with people moving to and from some undisclosed location: the images becoming ambiguous in the layering. The intention of the videos is to evoke a sense of journey in disparate parts, more as a dream or sense of memories of places rather than of a specific journey.

With regards to the content of the video pieces, there is a reference to the early filmmakers in particular the Lumière Brothers and the Skladanowsky Brothers, as well as DzigaVertov. The footage is concerned with anonymous bodies and gestures, of urban surfaces and movements and ones witnessing of those actions as well as a viewer traversing through them. In a couple of cases the camera records the world of buildings, factories, roads, hoardings, an ocean going by from trains with the distance train tracks give to the fabric of a city or a landscape; in another a city is recorded from a taxi ride and in a more intimate journey an isolated moving road is shot from a bicycle. The other shots concern the world of the inhabitants of cities moving through the fabric of an urban landscape: steps, bridges, streets, and road crossings. The use of some segments in slow motion allows me to give a sense of the figures appearing to hover rather than to walk, as though the figures or cars are not quite touching the ground.

The other triggers or inspirations come from various narratives, which evoked a sense of detachment, and observation. Still images from video shown at South Hill Park, Bracknell, England Thailand New Media Festival -2004, Raffles Interfaces Bangkok -2004Digital Showcase South Hill Park, Bracknell, UK – 2003

Produced whilst in residency at the Museum of Modern Art in Dublin

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2004