Bloodlines

‘A warehouse full of impossible monsters….’ an idea put forward by the evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins in his book ‘The Blind Watchmaker’. Exploring the theory of cumulative selection, Dawkins asks us to imagine a huge grid, a massive hanger with an infinite number of shelves that stretch off in all directions. Sitting on these are organisms, some of which are familiar and walk the earth; but equally possible are others, sitting in identical shelves to the left, right, top and bottom, etc. The only difference between the two is that the exact genetic sequence required to bring them into being hasn’t been decoded yet. ‘Bloodlines’ emerges from this. We begin with seven forms; parents let us say. Each ‘parent’ form is the result of a gradual construction of an intricate skeletal structure made of individual, manually placed layers of video. ‘Bloodlines’ introduces us to a family tree where each ‘parent’ breeds a set of progeny, which in turn produce offspring of their own. These forms also echo deep-sea, single celled organisms such as Radiolarians and Diatoms, which are distinguished by their unique and intricately detailed glass-like exoskeletons. These natural organisms are another example of self-organisation of pattern in nature, where patterns appear when forces are strong enough to banish uniformity, but not strong enough to induce chaos.

The raw footage for the video was video-feedback. In principle very similar to the old kaleidoscopes, video feedback is created when any ordinary hand-held camera is plugged into a TV and then made to point at itself. The optical equivalent of acoustic feedback, a loop is created between the video camera and the television screen or monitor. Like two mirrors facing each other, the image is doubled and interferes with itself. With patience and certain amount of trial and error it becomes possible to explore a vast arena of spontaneous pattern generation by varying the available controls (brightness, contrast, hue, focus, camera angle etc). The result is an amazing array of spatio-temporal patterns, mimicking those exhibited by physical, chemical, and biological systems, i.e. plant structures, cells, tree forms, bacteria, snowflakes… They are not imposed from the outside in any way and are entirely self generated within the loop.

This footage is then sliced and edited by layering and manually stacking within a video editing software to create the work.

BLOODLINES | Video and Print Installation | single channel video projected onto fabric: duration 45mins | Print: 60 x 60 inches on Hahnemühle Fine Art Baryta paper| 2009

BLOODLINES | video stills | 2009