Document:Q10018

trade stream :::

Running time: continuous live feed, no audio, color.
There are no pirates anymore so we have to be as crooked as hell in order to exist; & we are existing...

A live video feed from a room in my house captures the canal outside my window, a well traversed trade route into Amsterdam. A live web cam sequences at 6 sec time intervals and ftp this to a server , and via the internet, that opens up a portal in Hobart. A counter at the bottom marks the date and time. I ask the viewer to consider the telling details in a scene that might otherwise be consumed in a momentary glance... [for more info click]

At times the canal is completely still, latent. Suddenly a boat comes, then the next frame its vanished, leaving only its wake.
Or there's nothing but a still shot of a canal. There's nothing happening and suddenly two birds fly across. You are entranced into a state of reverie.

It is the time to invent new forms of cultural imaginary. I present another type of view to the political and economic pace of trade e.g. a slow cargo coal boat, embedded within the fast pace of communication technology. Timing is drawing on combination of magic (Vaudeville) show, a collision of times and places within a continual series of tableaux vivants. The work is live and multi-nodal, it calls into question where the 'object' actually is - is it located at the server or as projected on site in Hobart? Or in-between, the interstices of the world? In a sense the work is un-locatable, its point of origin is continually shifting. A cargo boat on a canal, is soon gone as in the next frame we only see its wake. For Foucault, heterotopias are real spaces -distinct from non-existent or "virtual" utopian spaces - that seize and activate the imagination, that "are absolutely different from all the sites they reflect and speak about." These are " counter-sites" within which "all the other real sites that can be found within the culture are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted (1986:24)". Of course, the media I develop is essential to this task, combining attention and distraction in complex ways, I ask the viewer to look critically, upon the object of distracted examination, as a site of reflection upon these meanings and possibilities. The incremental changes are perceptible through refreshing of the frame, also in the light and the mood of the water. At times the canal is completely still, empty. Suddenly, a boat comes. Maybe for hours there is nothing but a dark body of water. There is nothing happening and suddenly two birds fly across, you are entranced into a state of reverie. This continuous live feed gazes at the viewer behind her back, making its own claim on their time. The dialectics of emplacement, attention and distraction is also a dialectics of duration. This is a dialectics of continuity and interruption of rhythm. As such, it is a particular inflection of the process of temporalisation - the production of time - itself. The web-cast, a live succession of stills in the art space intervenes into the temporal dialectic, syncopating the time of the viewer into new rhythms and forms. New reflective rhythms of absorption and distraction, new articulations of duration, interruption, beginning, ending, repetition and delay. In the temporal structure of relationships between action, duration is a dialectical process of continuity, interruption, and beginning again. The fundamental concept of time is thus not continuity but temporisation as rhythm. The fundamental concept of a general rhythmics is the restoration of form.