Distance and Existence

For a week around the Northern winter solstice 2010, I trawled the web for webcam feeds. Webcams typically have low frame-rates – resulting in very ‘staccato’ image sequences. By dissolving between the successive frames, I tried to re-create the lost continuity or ‘flow’. The resulting sequences, actually reveal interesting visual aspects of the entire process – from camera CCD, to compression and streaming artefacts. Since most of the cameras creating these images were operating in the dead of night, they are operating at their technical limits. The resulting grainy images are therefor as much a creation of the recording/representation process as they are a representation of the objects within the camera’s view. This then is a lyrical meditation on the “Aesthetics of Disappearance” – to borrow a phrase by Paul Virilio.