dead time

2017
single channel video, HD, 12:09

A collaboration with film theorists Catherine Fowler and Claire Perkins. I used eye-tracking equipment to follow the gaze of 20 participants watching a seven minute shot from Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975). I then reanimated the data to help explore the idea of labour in slow cinema, playfully reimagining the viewing process through three phases in the video: look, labour and body.

With Dead Time, we were attempting to make a double intervention. On the one hand, we wanted to respond to debates about whether media scholars can discover anything new by using eye tracking methods; on the other, we wanted to contribute to discussions as to the balance between the expository and the poetic in audiovisual essays. We came to the realization that what eye tracking methods and audiovisual essays share is an interest in how viewers are ‘grasped by’ (as in seized by) moving images. Both eye tracking methods and audio-visual essays offer responses to the problems posed by the movement of moving images for those who study them.

Read an essay and review in the [in]Transition film journal here.