These are Restless Times

Digital work needn’t be screen based.
Interactive work needn’t mean a CD.
Filmic narratives needn’t be epic.

These are restless times. The first in a series of flipbooks given away free with make magazine resembling the custom of giving away samples of beauty products with women’s magazines. This issue of make coincided with the launch of the Ulay Award for Women Artists in association with make Magazine and the theme of the issue was miniature.

Cover

My work connects miniature with new technology in the form of ‘an interactive digital work’. A one and a half second screening is available to the viewer via flipping the pages, a pre-cinematic technique where persistence of vision gives the illusion of movement. This particular film is of two seagulls. One walks across the frame from left to right, the other pecks the ground behind. Seagulls scavenge at the edges of human activity, in harbours, fishing boats and waste tips, living off the debris of tourism. The territorial cawing seagull undermines the bird as an analogy of the human spirit, wild and free. Instead, the seagull has become a metaphor for urban society

I find it interesting to explore narrative form with a seemingly banal story. I enjoy grappling with visual depictions of time. Seagulls tie in with televisions current obsession with wildlife documentaries, where an illusion of the natural world is presented as entertainment in the guise of education to a post-industrial society with a collective yearning for Arcadia.