Empire

Welcome to the empire where the death-ray of vision and its image-making machines are always on. Where seeing is believing.

Collected over four years and two continents, the footage used for empire was filmed entirely from television. With watching television now making up for almost a third (1) of the average person’s waking life, those electric images have become our most communal experience – it is both the modern campfire and source of mythology… it is our waking dream.

As impassive or inhuman the stare of the CCTV camera appears to us, there is a compelling similarity to a viewer watching television. Like the camera, the television viewer has no control over the stream of images presented to them. What is shown, and how long it is dwelt upon, is decided by the anonymous editors of the forces of greed and control – the corporate creators of reality. Nothing that is not sanctioned, will appear in these myths.

These myths are created for their political and commercial expediency – reflected in their platitudinal, placative simplicity and banal iconography; but still, images have a life of their own, which sometimes escapes the contingencies of narrative or political programming. From almost 100 hours of footage, collected over four years, I distilled these images – many featuring animals. An attempt to rekindle some atavistic memories.

The final scene of Empire, is of a barn owl, ascending into the night – then blackness, accompanied by an electronic tinnitus – like the sound of a central nervous system.
The fire has gone out and the darkness draws nearer. The shadows on the walls are gone and the cave is pitch black. The viewers, blinded, become listeners. What was a picture machine, a magic portal, is now a dead black box.

This is a slightly adjusted commentary text from 2004

(1) While TV viewing times have obviously declined, the viewing of commercial streaming services has drastically increased.