Keen followers of this blog may well remember the Chronocuts series that started back in 2008. It all began as a happy accident - whilst testing a new web page in 2007 which contained several movie clips I noticed that the movies loaded one after the other, in a sequential order, a one frame gap between each. By using the same footage for each clip an echoing repetitious moving image was created. With 24 clips placed side-by-side one could in effect watch one second’s worth of footage simultaneously upsetting the singularity of the cinematic moment.
Using web browsers proved to be too dependent on the speed of the web connection and indeed on the browser - in Internet Explorer the clips loaded sequentially but not in many others, so a technique was developed to create new single movies built from several slices.
As source footage the Chronocuts used scenes from familiar films ranging from Lindsay Anderson’s If to Hitchcock’s Psycho. Our cinematic memory of the scenes and how they unfold makes the temporal and spatial transformation all the more acute. Rather than glimpse a movement once we see it repeated visually and aurally revealing new relationships and dynamics in the footage.
So why the post now? Well next week - the 2cnd of December to be precise I will be screening 5 or so Chronocuts upstairs at the Memorial Gallery in Hastings. Especially for the exhibition I have made brand new higher definition versions and an extended version of Iffy plus a new piece Where the air is clear.
