on subjectivity lies at the heart of my practice. We want to take a closer look at the genesis of your video: how did you come up with the idea for The Cloud? This work was conceived to evoke ideas around the physical nature of ‘the cloud’. The concept of cloud computing underpins the infrastructure behind much of contemporary visual culture. The ‘cloud’ is becoming the archive for our memories where remote distributed computers store our photographs and videos through a combination of private online drives and public websites such as Instagram, Flickr, YouTube and facebook. In one sense, this latest step in technology completes the move from the physical storage of family photographs in dusty albums to the remote hosting of our images, films and videos where the borders dissolve and everything becomes indexed ‘digital content’. Through the widespread marketing of a name which evokes the idea of an ethereal space, our conception of ‘the cloud’ has become massively abstracted from the physical reality of huge data centres consisting of thousands of computer servers in air conditioned hangers. In addition, as well as providing data storage, such spaces have also become central to image production, providing the ‘render farms’ used for much commercial image processing, computer animation and CGI. What interests me about these spaces is their massive hidden complexity coupled with the collapse of all media specificity into purely numerical data. Such complexity is hidden at several levels. The physical location of such places will always be completely unknown to us – we have no idea where our digital artefacts are stored - they will always remain sites that we have to imagine. The technology itself conceals the ‘work’ going on – computers tend to look the same whether they are actively processing or merely on standby. Further, the synthetic manner of the representation seemed apposite given the ‘virtual’ nature of its subject and the difficulty that we encounter in its visualisation. In a sense, this work is both a product and a representation of ‘the cloud’ being overwhelmingly ‘digital’ (a few pixels fluctuating on and off being the only ‘action’) and depicts another layer of fiction that does little to really advance our understanding of cloud’s true nature.
At the same time I had been also been thinking about call centres. I have a particular bugbear when it comes to call centres when one has to hold online for minutes on end, stuck in some kind of digital purgatory. During this time you do not interact with real people, but with automated voices who attempt to apologise and reassure. In a sense, such interactions are also a product of the cloud as, for this period, our calls and our interactions are held on a compute server somewhere waiting to be routed to some back to the ‘real’ world, albeit again in some unspecified location. From the first time we watched your work, we were impressed with your refined animation style. How did you develop your visual imagery? Working with digital animation inevitably raises questions about mediation in modern society. Advances in imaging technology have the potential to stretch the limits of our senses and what we are capable of perceiving. However, much CGI and game technology instead appears directed towards anthropomorphism and a pre-canned form of wish fulfilment, the spectacular effects holding the spectator in thrall of the screen. In contrast, I’ve developed a body of work which often combines elements such as a static camera, restricted viewpoint and repetition to create something that has sometimes been described as ‘anti-animation’. The durational experience of viewing such a work, with ample to time to explore the unchanging areas of the image, is more akin to viewing a photograph than a conventional film or animation - the image ‘posing’ rather than ‘passing’ in front of our eyes. When installing work in gallery spaces, I will often structure works as continuous loops rather than conventional films, so there is no real beginning or end – one can start watching at any point. Indeed you could say that a defining characteristic of digitally generated film is the ability to create a seamless loop where the start and end conditions are identical. I also think that this ‘flat’ narrative structure leads to work that seems well suited to what Walter Benjamin referred to as ‘reception in distraction’ where multiple fragmented viewings allow casual passers-by to build a view of the whole loop over time. Let’s speak about influences. We have previously mentioned the French anthropologist Marc Augé, whose theories