A third group of works are Cuts, a series of photographic details edited, sorted and collected from larger images over the last few years. These details are usually discovered while preparing the original images for other uses. The process is reminiscent of Antonioni's film Blow Up, where a photographer discovers a murder in the background detail of a photograph he had innocently taken in a city park. The images in Cuts are taken out of their original context, often recombined with other images, and seem to divulge new stories, separate from their original context.
They also hint at a cinematic context, often appearing more like film stills than photographs. Their selection, re-combination and display mirror the process of film montage and editing.
Recent video works have also sought to explore the borders of visual and textual language in the digital age. Several works have used screenplays derived from internet blogs. The video Cordoba was filmed in the Mesquita of Cordoba, a cathedral which was originally a 9th century mosque. Filmed at an irregular speed setting, the static architecture, a series of marble arches, contrasts to the figures of tourists who appear as ephemeral wraith-like blurs. A women's voice, speaking English with an Iranian accent, recites a text collage based on excerpts of blogs written by migrants from the Near East. The themes are homesickness, melancholy, estrangement and the experiences of Muslim immigrants in the west.
A related work, El-Andalus clips, is made up of five short clips, all under two minutes. The clips exist as stand alone works, or together. Three include recitations of a text collage similar to that of Cordoba. The narrator stumbles across the English text. Combinations of takes and breakdowns are used as an editing device for the visual images, collected excerpts of footage from southern Spain - the ruins of a Moorish fort, the view across the straits of Gibraltar, architectural details from Alhambra - which refer to Europe's old cultural connection to the Near East. Image and text, unrelated in origin, combine and influence each other's form to elicit new meanings and relations.
A third video,
Bulbul, combines references to painting, sculpture, early photography
and new technology. Filmed in digital video at low light, using solely
moonlight, the image shows a model in the artist's studio as well as the
night sky. The model poses are based on Titian's Venus of Urbino,
and Michelangelo's Night. The inspiration for filming by moonlight
derives, in part, from Alfred Stieglitz's famous night photographs from
the early 1900s. The soundtrack is the song of a nightingale, recorded
in an urban park on a mobile phone.
-Christian de Lutz, June 2008
i.Introduction
ii.Image and Media
iii.The Text Behind the Technical Revolution
iv.Toward a Post-cinematic Language
