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First published in Australian Art Collector,
Issue 40 April-June 2007
Time Lord
Over a century ago the first cinema
audiences leapt to escape a train
that rushed at them on the screen.
The train in Daniel Crooks’s digital
video is equally miraculous. It warps
time. Edward Colless leapt at the
chance to take the ride.
Photography by Kirstin Gollings.
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First published in Australian Art Collector,
Issue 40 April-June 2007
O
nce you’ve seen a Daniel Crooks’s DVD you’re not likely to forget
the experience. Confronting and captivating, these digital video
works provide a truly altered perception of the world – altered as
much by technological innovation and by analytical intelligence as by an
aesthetic imagination. They’re usually short, perhaps only a few minutes in
length before they loop back to the start, but the more time spent with his
work the more it feels that you’re encountering a surprisingly new way of
seeing the world. Something as bewildering perhaps as the tessellations
and facets in Cubist paintings, and as unearthly as the first X-ray photographs. It’s not just the bizarre shapes of his pedestrians who hover
mid-step on city streets in eternal moments or the grotesquely distended
office workers gliding into elevators that make his movies so alarming.
Crooks’s digital videos give us an experience similar in kind to the one
reported by audiences of early cinema who, back in the 1890s during a program of “actuality films” by the pioneering Lumière brothers in Paris, leapt
out of the way of an oncoming train flickering on the screen. We don’t jump
in fright of Crooks’s trains (he’s done eight with trains so far), but we can
be just as beguiled and fascinated by the strange and novel space they
inhabit.
One of the most spectacular demonstrations of this has been the
installation of his video projection Train No.1 in the immense
subterranean screening hall of the Australian Centre for the Moving
Image during its 2005 exhibition of contemporary digital media, World
Without End. Crooks’s piece was a single continuous tracking shot, taken
from a Melbourne suburban train as it travelled from one station to the
next. But what could be a prosaic, even banal, subject had an
astonishingly complex outcome, as exhilarating as it was perplexing. To a
reverberating techno-ambient soundtrack, seemingly derived from the
steady rhythms of the train on its tracks, narrow vertical slices of the
video footage were multiplied smoothly a hundred times along a screen
at least ten metres in length down one wall of the darkened gallery space.
The vast rippling surge of a moment in time travelled like a Mexican wave
along the screen, as the fragmented moving image in each slender strip
repeated itself a split second later in the next slice. It was like seeing a
hundred ribbon-like slivers of the same movie simultaneously, yet with
each copy running a fraction of a moment apart. In a sense this was a
time-lapse movie of the original video tracking shot, but one that repeats
the time of the shot in a feedback loop, hypnotically and elegantly
attenuating it.
“I’ve had an obsession with time-lapse photography since
experimenting with still photography back in high school in New
Zealand,” explains Crooks. “Shots of night skies with arcing trails of stars.
And I loved those famous nature documentaries with sequences of plants
spiralling up and out searching for light. With that sort of time-lapse
photography you gain a different perspective on life, on the real,
obtained by stepping out of your normal sense of time.” This interest
became a passion for animated film and after finishing a degree in
graphic design (much of which, he reflects, was spent exploring the uses
of Super8 and video), Crooks moved in 1994 to Melbourne to do a
graduate diploma in animation at the new film school in the Victorian
College of the Arts. Ren and Stimpy may have had cult status at the time,
but Crooks’s mentors were underground surrealists and maestros of stopmotion animation, like the Brothers Quay and the Czech Jan
Schvankmajer. “I wasn’t so interested in hand drawn cell animation,” he
adds. “I preferred the richness of real objects: the three dimensional
form, the texture of things in space that you can’t ever adequately draw.”
I think of myself at Tokyo’s Shibuya
train station, in this dense weave of
spatio-temporal beings, and I’m crying
out, ‘Where’s my reality scanner?!’”
Daniel Crooks, Train No.1, 2005. DV/DVD, 3-channel, 4:10
minutes,16:9, stereo video still sequence.
COURTESY: THE ARTIST & SHERMAN GALLERIES, SYDNEY.
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First published in Australian Art Collector,
Issue 40 April-June 2007
Time is stretched out in an excruciating
delay that, to many of us, might feel like
purgatorial punishment.
Daniel Crooks, On Perspective and Motion – Part 2, 2006. Video
still sequence, 7-channel, DV/DVD, 23:00 minutes, 9:16, stereo.
COURTESY: THE ARTIST AND SHERMAN GALLERIES, SYDNEY.
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Stop-motion animation provides this texture in abundance, but it’s time
consuming and hard labour. Crooks produced a seven and a half minute
animation for his major – and, later award-winning – work in film school, which
he figures took him seven and a half months working daily from 8am to 11pm
to complete. Moving objects a fraction each, moving the camera a fraction,
manually snapping a single frame and then doing it again. And again. Twentyfour times to get a mere second of film. Time is stretched out in an excruciating
delay that, to many of us, might feel like purgatorial punishment. Motion is
mapped in microscopic intervals, so fine that in the studio to a normal or
untutored eye it doesn’t occur at all. But he loved it, and even yearns to be able
to immerse himself in such a work routine again. It’s a regime requiring not
only endurance and tolerance, but also rigorous project management. The
capacity to analyse and control complex motion into superimposed series of
discrete instants, and to envision the expressive outcome or synthesis of this
almost immeasurable ocean of detail.
You can see these skills and the attitude sustaining them also driving
Crooks’s digital art, even if the results are different. Many of the swirling
patterns and abstract linear configurations in his DVDs vaguely resemble the
sort of bustle and elastic gesturing of the heliotropic plants that inspired
Crooks as a kid some two decades ago. The narrow horizontal slices of action
that compose Static No.9, for instance, track pedestrians crossing a bare
concrete city square, and these appear as flashes of body parts and clothing
which flicker in long chains up and down the screen and twirl about each other
like magnified scaley strands of hair floating in the wind or strings of DNA. But
if there’s an invisible animating force directing these filaments to proliferate
and dissipate, to spin or whip around, it isn’t a natural one like gravity acting
on stars or the sun on plants. Crooks uses sophisticated computer tools in
postproduction, and although he rightly insists that the graphic principle that
drives them is simple – as simple as the footage of a train entering a station or
of waves lapping on a deserted beach – his lyrical abstract whorls and fantastic
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First published in Australian Art Collector,
Issue 40 April-June 2007
“On that plane, the plane of
‘cohesion’,” says Crooks, “things
are everywhere instantly. To
me, that interstitial space is
where the present moment is,
repeated in the same place
across every frame.”
Daniel Crooks, Self portrait, 2007. COURTESY: THE ARTIST.
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First published in Australian Art Collector,
Issue 40 April-June 2007
mutations of space are deliriously generated by automated, machinic
routines.
It’s this important difference – a kind of anti-humanist aesthetic –
that makes Crooks’s images so inventive and breathtaking. The
panoramic still photographs that Crooks produces with this technique
may seem reminiscent of the celebrated time-lapse photographs of
Jules-Etienne Marey and Eadweard Muybridge from the late
nineteenth century. But Marey and Muybridge divided the continuous
time of animal or human motion as a calculus of static photographic
instants or quanta – like the successive frames that you see on a strip
of motion picture film. Crooks’s “time slices”, as he calls them, are
instead composites of time, much more like the lines that build up a
TV image by scanning, or in waves. Crooks creates many of his
composite images by taking a tiny slice – perhaps only several pixels
wide – from the same location in each consecutive frame in his original
video footage, pasting these slices one next to the other to make a new
video frame. Video runs at 25 frames per second, so each sliver in the
composite frame will be one twenty-fifth of second ahead or behind its
immediate neighbour. If it takes, for example, one hundred time slices
to complete a frame of the composite then that one frame (itself only
projected for a twenty-fifth of a second) will contain four seconds of the
real time of the original footage. What is happening on one side of the
screen will be occurring four seconds ahead or behind what is on the
opposite side. There are two experiences of time here, deftly but
hazardously superimposed: the real time of the original footage
scanned into the composite image that is literally the length of the
screen; and the composite time embedded in each single frame that
itself advances with each frame, as if in real time. The second mode of
time – a false version of real time, or scanned time – Crooks calls
“output time”.
In Train No. 8, shot while travelling along an elevated section of tracks
in London, this temporal hazard provokes a dramatically weird
inversion of spatial relations. The buildings directly in front of the
camera seem to shrink and rotate as they slide by, being sucked
violently away off the right of the screen. Bizarrely, the buildings further
away sweep by faster than those closer to us, and they travel in the
opposite direction! Strangest of all, in the cyclonic, turbulent corridor
of the middle distance, where the two spatial flows of past and future
accelerate and converge, the world becomes a thin smear. “On that
plane, the plane of ‘cohesion’,” says Crooks, “things are everywhere
instantly. To me, that interstitial space is where the present moment is,
repeated in the same place across every frame.” Anything there is an
endless, instantaneous and featureless blur. This is where real time and
output time are identical. Where the scanner records reality and real
time in a one to one ratio.
“Imagine,” Crooks ponders, “if this computing could itself be done in
real time with 360 degree coverage and three-d projection. To
materialise time to that extent! I think of myself at Tokyo’s Shibuya train
station, in this dense weave of spatio-temporal beings, and I’m crying
out, ‘Where’s my reality scanner?!’” It seems appropriate, a century after
the Lumière brothers filmed a steam train pulling in to Lyon station,
that Daniel Crooks might be standing at Shibuya’s intersection where
ten thousand pedestrians cross at a time. And where is this “reality
scanner”? “It’s coming,” he declares, “it’s going to come!”
I
Works by Daniel Crooks will be exhibited at Sherman Galleries, Sydney
from 1 to 23 June 2007.
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“I preferred the
richness of real
objects: the three
dimensional form, the
texture of things in
space that you can’t
ever adequately
draw.”
Top: Daniel Crooks, Static No.8, 2004. DV/DVD, 3:10 minutes, 16:9,
stereo video still sequence.
Bottom: Daniel Crooks, Static No.6, 2004. DV/DVD, 3:10 minutes, 16:9,
stereo video still sequence.
COURTESY THE ARTIST & SHERMAN GALLERIES, SYDNEY.
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