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 fo …
The result of a visit to the Copenhagen aquarium and a freestyle analogue synth improvisation – channeling the Jesus & Mary Chain, 808 State, and the euphoria of early nineties rave culture. I’ve remastered the video on its thirtieth anniversary.
26 December 1999, Coober Pedy, South Australia
On the 24th of October 2003 I ended up in Kimmeridge bay on the Dorset coast. I took these photos during the last half hour before sunset. With this video I tried to recreate the incredible solemnity of sunsets, and the enormity of being in this world.
This video is part of a …
Recorded in 1996 and first screened in 1997, this is a digital remaster of the original S-VHS production.
Filmed just after a total solar eclipse at a place which saw mass death; this is an uncanny video, exploring the fine line between the here and the hereafter, being and non-being. Never were parallel universes, roving event horizons and fearful symmetries made more visible.
Using a flashlight in a darkened room and a video feedback loop; I set out to create a synaesthetic, electric stream of calligraphy – some sort of ‘direct expression’. The title was inspired by the trance-induced, bleeding noses of shamans and dying animals in Khoisan rock pai …
The Louvre, Paris, France, 19 May 1994
For about a decade centred around the millennium, I was extremely interested in the idea of using my video camera as ’seeing paintbrush’. For a long time I’ve been interested in Buddhism in general, and Chan or Zen brushwork in particular. In this spirit, I was intereste …
Part of my work – February: A Quartet of Videos – first exhibited at Warren Siebrits Modern and Contemporary Art, Johannesburg, 2004.
Original master format: PAL SD 576i
Remastered with slight graphic changes to UHD in 2023.
While en route from Calcutta to Frankfurt during the night of the 19th to 20th of July 2000, I ended up on a five-hour layover at Dubai airport. With my Panasonic DV camcorder I started recording stills of the airport. A year later, I finished and exhibited the resulting video …
In May 1996 I first visited Wat Phra Mahathat Woramahawihan* – the main Buddhist temple in the Nakhon Si Thammarat province of southern Thailand.
Lining the cloister around the main stupa, are many statues of a seated Buddha. All of these Buddhas have the same pose – the so-ca …
Part of a series of experiments I made around the mid-nineties with focus, and the meaning of blurred images.
The Camera as Seeing Brush – Thoughts and comments on my video Concrete Painting
Imagine looking over someone’s shoulder as they use a brush with ink on paper – or spray paint on concrete. Whether it’s for calligraphy, graffiti, delineating a mist-shrouded pine bough, or …
LouvreOver the second half of the nineteen nineties, I became interested in making angular, visceral, ‘short-circuiting’ videos. My videos Electro Nosebleed, Bhumisparsa, Contact and Lone DJ of the Apocalypse are examples of these endeavours.
As part of this process, I s …
From Botch to Norma Jean, Converge and Dillinger Escape Plan; I have always had a soft spot for Metal*. Not least because its adrenaline-inducing intensity always seems to send the courtiers and courtesans of courteous society scurrying away.
Many years ago, I was therefore v …
During March and April 2000, I travelled around the south of Thailand.
I spent many hours trying to record the Being of my tranquil surroundings.
As with most of my recordings, I would lock the camera on a tripod, and then record between two and five minutes of whatever happe …
Let’s say you dream of going to Rome.
You know, those four letters R-O-M-E and the dot, halfway up the boot of Italy.
You know, the Coliseum, Romulus and Remus, the Vatican, La Dolce Vita, the Trevi Fountain…
And then you actually go there…
During June, 1995; my wife An …
Transcription and English subtitles available.
Flying kites from rooftops at sunset. Agra, India, 21 May 1996
Also includes the sky and various types of cloud, frogs, pinkish flowers, the shadow of an ice-cream seller, the hum of the camcorder mechanism, a few static shots, a tropical house, three barking dogs, rusty cars and a caterpillar, a dirt road, banana plants, telephone lines, …
Touching, grasping, being, belonging
Does zooming into an object bring us any closer to it? Does zooming out make the objects in view any less inscrutable to us and to each other? “Nothing is what it seems – nor is it otherwise.” – The Diamond Sutra. “Nothing is stranger than Reality.” – Giorgio Morandi. Recordin …
Recording the world with the detachment of a meditating monk – with a so-called Mirror Mind – viewing things as they are, with no personal emotions or desires projected onto them.
This video explores the complex relationships between looking and listening – the seen, and the …
WARNING: Viewer discretion advised.
Quoting Ronald Reagan and Francisco Goya; based on readily available internet video footage of US Predator drones and Apache gunships in action; this video aims to confront the viewer with the inherently dehumanising and misanthropic nature …
Part of my ‘Curing Concrete’ series towards a New Realism. References to, and resonances with, Duchamp, Dürer and Wyeth are acknowledged. Memories of summer camping trips are encouraged.
Darwin, Australia, 13 December 1999
A punny title which addresses a few of my interests.
In the late spring of 2010, I set out to record a series of audio-visual explorations of the undergrowth.
I simply attached the camera to a tripod and then inverted the tripod with legs folded flat to allow me to record a few centimetres from the ground. I used a lens with wi …
5 December 1999, Kinabatangan, Sabah, Borneo
31 May 2000, Kamalapura, Karnataka, India
26 June 2000, Delhi, India. Image and audio recorded simultaneously – no overdubs.
25 January 2000, near Wiseman Ferry, New South Wales, Australia
Recorded in Darjeeling on the 3rd of June, 1996. Inspired by Chan Buddhist paintings and the plenitude of emptiness.
Recorded on Tuesday, 7 May 1996, Nakhon Si Thammarat, Southern Thailand.
We are so conditioned to unconsciously approach a video as a kind of text which is to be read – rather than really looked at and listened to. In this convention, the shots in the edited sequence are all s …
Recorded in the early morning on the 21st of May 1996 in Agra, India. One take – no effects or overdubs.
The title of this video refers to the iconic work “Ten Thousand Ugly Ink Dots” by the Chinese, artist-monk Shitao (石涛) who lived between 1642 and 1707.
He is an important artist in Buddhist – more specifically Chan or Zen – art history.
This video was originally titled …
Shot in the dead of night in a Malaysian village, this video is an exploration of perception and consciousness. While the people sleep, their village is owned and roamed by the creatures of the night – existing on the edges of (and beyond) human perception. By slowing down the …
In the 1990’s, I was interested in making the camera and the recording process part of the recording – if not the actual subject of the recording. Altering the focus was an interesting way of doing so. Part of my series of VHS ontologies.
Part of a series of video experiments I made during the mid-nineties under the heading: VHS Ontologies. This was a completely un-staged, spontaneous, straight-to-tape recording.
Inspired by the 13th-century masterpiece Six Persimmons by the artist monk Muqi Fachang.
“Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders.” – “Here I stand, I can’t do anything else.” – are reportedly the words of Martin Luther as he refused to retract his statements in front of the Diet of Worms on that fateful day in April 1521.
For various reasons, this …
Giant grids of television
beam God’s exile
The surgeon of the nightsky
restores dead things by the power of sound
From the Whole Megillah by Ira Cohen
It was after 2 a.m on a windy night in January 1997 that I stepped onto a 15th-floor balcony in …
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 …
Thursday, 6 June, 1996. Hotel Garib Nawaz, Calcutta