Warm Impermanence

Note: This project is being exhibited at Natlab in Eindhoven as part of my solo show Time Frames, from 22 June – 3 October 2024! More information here.

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”

Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices

Have you ever lost yourself looking at ripples form in water, or waves crash on the shore? This work presents slow motion footage of water, shot around the world for the past decade, alongside a version of the David Bowie song Changes slowed down to a hundredth of its normal speed.

This film presents time as fluid, continuous, mysterious. It embraces Kairos, the subjective, malleable experience of time. The title and subject are inspired by a line from the song Changes: “I watch the ripples change their size… but never leave the stream of warm impermanence.”

The film embraces the artefacts of its creation: pixelation, noise created through h.264 encoding. All of these are unmistakably contemporary artefacts which we have become used to in daily life, Netflix films switch to low-resolution temporarily, WhatsApp calls glitch, your Zoom meeting freezes, but which will look increasingly alien and exotic to future generations.

5 channel video installation, with 6-hour soundtrack