NEWS / REEL
REEL
susan pui san lok, REEL, DVD, alternating audio/video loop, 5' 14".
Archive images reproduced with permission from Central ITV.REEL is a short audio and video sequence drawn from footage in the Central ITV news collection held at the Media Archive for Central England (MACE), classified under ‘Dance’, that might variously be designated ‘cultural’, ‘national’ or ‘traditional’; the material ranges from ‘Ballroom’ to ‘Morris’ to ‘Ukrainian Folk’. The piece explores the tele-visual representation and rhetoric of dance as a means of ‘cultural display’, and its repetitions and variations in constructions of ‘identity’ as ‘local’, ‘regional’ or ‘foreign’. Sound and video are separated and looped, accentuating yet resisting the mutual dependence of audio and visual ‘cultural cues’ in the evocation of an ‘other’ time and place. Audio clips are re-arranged to offer a compressed, chronological, cultural soundtrack, while shots are re-edited to focus on moments of anticipation and distraction, synchronicity and absorption: looks, glances, poses, gestures, leaps and turns that prescribe the spaces and boundaries of ‘cultural performance’ and consumption. Layered upon the archived gazes of audiences and performers are our own, as voyeurs of the seemingly archaic, whose easy nostalgia is disrupted by uneasy juxtapositions.
Both NEWS and REEL were conceived as starting points for larger works. Extending the residency with MACE into 2007, the project will continue to explore the visual and textual rhetorics of the Central ITV news archive, and possible artistic/archival tactics of collection, documentation, annotation, retrieval, and re-presentation. REEL will be developed into a series of audio/video sequences that correspond and play with the classifications of the news index, as well as those of NEWS.
susan pui san lok, REEL, 2005, DVD, 5'14", alternating audio/video loop
(audio clip) [COMING SOON]susan pui san lok, REEL 2005, DVD, 5'14", alternating audio/video loop
(video clip) [COMING SOON]susan pui san lok, REEL, 2005, DVD, 5'14", alternating audio/video loop
(stills) [COMING SOON]REEL has also been screened as part of Arcade (2006), and two Bigger Picture programmes curated by Cornerhouse, Manchester, Collective Rhythm (2006) and Artists in the Archive (2008).
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