“The black box recorder, a small, commonplace piece of aviation technology, records the activity within the cockpit of planes throughout the duration of their flight…
The black box provides a pertinent metaphor with which to parallel the levelling eye that the video cameras has come to possess in contemporary culture. As commonly found in the hands off the amateur or the artist as the new gatherer or film maker, the video camera records everything, regardless of its status, producing an overwhelming flood of moving images from the most mundane to the most dramatic… Therefore the concerns and methodologies we encounter repeatedly in the works…are the same preoccupations we are familiar with throughout contemporary practice: the no
The contemporary position of video as an artistic medium is one that is explicitly in step with this multiplication and democratization of image production…
This capability of single screen works is primarily due to what could be described as one of video’s inherent characteristics – its potential as a universally flexible medium. As a medium with the ability to record sound, image, space and form and allow these elements to undergo endless potential change due to its time-based nature… Therefore the concerns and methodologies we encounter repeatedly in the works… are the same preoccupations we are familiar with throughout contemporary practice: the notion of identity, the use of appropriation, the investigation of perception and psychological states, the idea of performance, the influence of dominant cultural forms such as film, the arena of relationships…
The artists in the exhibition belong to a generation that was mainly born just before video was first being explored as an artistic medium. For this generation and those that have followed, the presence of the moving image through cinema and television has come to be completely pervasive establishing itself as both the predominant visual culture and also the predominant mode of information transfer.
Simon Morrissey – Black Box Recorder
The exhibition is supported by the British Council
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