chronophotics : census Toronto : instandstillness
John Oswald | Canada | 70 min. | digital video | 2004 | World Premiere
This feature-length cinematic spectacle features hundreds of Torontonians
participating in a literally skin-deep portrayal of a ghostly crowd
which goes nowhere and does nothing but is nonetheless always gradually
becoming constantly different.
instandstillness is the third of a series of “moving
stills”
in which Oswald perfectly blurs the properties and aesthetics of
photography, movies, and televisualisation in a counter-Koyaanisqatsi
universe. (One of these earlier works, Janéad O’Jakriel/Jacko
Lantern, was featured at Images in 2002.)
In 1999, internationally renowned Canadian composer John Oswald,
of Pluderphonics fame, began photographing people. In 2001 he exhibited,
in Toronto, Souls, a large photo-mural consisting of over
100 of his friends and acquaintances, each photographed individually,
gathered into a collaged crowd. In 2002 he began working on census,
amassing a much larger database of strangers and acquaintances for
several video-projected images in which the relative transparency
of each individual in relation to the crowd changes very slowly
over time. The first manifestation of this series is the multifaceted
Arc of Apparitions (starring eighty residents of Québec
City), published on DVD by Avatar. |
