Het Wezen van de Stad
For a couple of years now I’ve been developing a series of works that engage, each in different ways, with what I propose to call filmic architecture. In these works, I explore the relationships between scale models, sets, architecture, and the moving image. Starting point is was the question: would it be possible to do a remake of a film, let’s say Ridley Scott Alien, with a set that would allow one to do so in one single shot? How to translate the combination of spaces, montage and shifts in size and angle as we see them in the film into the actual spatiality of a set that would allow one to shoot the film in a single continuity without the cut and paste of montage? This brought me to the idea of the Morphed Set as both a potential plan for a work and an intellectual exercise or figure of thought. Sometimes my works are extremely large “walkthrough INSTALLATIONS” – at other times, they are infinite small scale models and prototypes.
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After All
After All is a wooden, robotic interpretation of the Phonautograph, a 19th century apparatus created by the Frenchman, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. His invention predated Edison’s phonograph by 17 years and promised a new kind of visual literacy for those who could learn to read, translate, and recite its mechanically created marks. The air pressure from a voice speaking into a cone pushed and deformed the surface of a sensitive diaphragm to which a boar’s bristle was attached. Inflection in the voice moved the diaphragm and the bristle touched a revolving soot-covered wheel, scratching marks in response to air pressure changes. The marks could be ‘read back’ by those literate in a sound-to-writing technique.