‘Tumbledry’
Video Installation
2022
Info ︎



Flattening is a film installation, documenting the moment when an airplane bursts through cloud cover during takeoff.  The work dismantles a 3 minute iphone video shot from the window of a commercial flight - fragmenting it down into it’s 4,320 individual frames.

In this original video, patchy cloud cover means that the sun’s light flares through the clouds at varying intensities. The cloud’s vapour takes on the sunlight to produce a specific hue of white depending on it’s density.


Thinner clouds conduct into a bright white, whilst denser sections of the cloud cover drown out the sun’s rays, rendering themselves in a duller grey tone. Because the plane is travelling at such a fast speed through the intermittent cloud cover, the video cycles through 100’s of these hues every few seconds.
Each frame from this original source video was colour analysed to find the most dominant tone and hue of white elicited by the clouds outside.

In an exercise for reducing this experience down, these colour pallete frames are reassembled to create a simplified or flattened version of the iphone video. A study of it, filtered through the reduced gate of colour only. Once you strip away the other lexicons does this still standup and resemble?
When sequenced, these rgb frames still offer an experience resonant of ascending through the cloud cover. The flickering frames elicit the thin patch or a thick patches of cloud, the speed at which they change suggests the velocity of the plane, you can start to build a picture of the architecture and arrangement of this particular section of cloud cover.

Even when compressed into one restricted scale, this information can still take on the poetic experience described.





Stunlock 2/2

The title of this work ‘Stunlock’ refers to tampering which occured during the edit process for the piece.

The original manufactured ascent sequence can be considered a linear straight diagonal upwards line. Whilst the work does play this sequence through in full once, the captioned duration information also misleads the viewer.

An artwork hidden within an artwork

The term stunlock is a shorthand used in video game communities. It refers to a common glitch in which you lose control of the playable character as a result of a snag in the game world. The game engine still plays the action animations of walking, fighting or jumping - but the character is stuck on the spot.

The process of generating rgb frames from a source video before replacing them in their original order gives the work an artifical surface. one which is one step removed from reality but imitates a real experience. This pixelated cloak opens the door for ideas to be concealed beneath it.
The video playing in the installed environment is in fact a non-stop resampling of the rgb frames created from the original video. The ascent sequence frames are reshuffled like a pack of cards; duplicated, reversed, reshuffled and interspliced creating a looping mesh of ascent and descent.
The guise of the artificial surface is used to examine concepts of disorientation, the bermuda triangle, centrifugal spin and the continually rising shepard tone frequency.

The video remains in this disorientating limbo far beyond the viewers expectation of the work. The viewers sense of time is disrupted, with the removal of any tangible or figurative focal point or horizon line, the are all jumbled, disrupted or recalibrated.



James Turrell - Skyspace




transition moment

pay homage to the iconic window design aspect

something ephemeral undergo a emticulous process

disorientation, slow realisation,

the film is a roulette wheel flipped on its side

discovery easter eggs

The editer comissioned to complete the outsourcing the complex and labour intensive editing process for the piece

its a colliosn of references related to video games, video art, time based media, linear narratives References the bermuda triangle, washing machines as water vapour

Recto verso/ Stage Prison

The elements of the drawing are reorganised by the centrifugal force of the spin
Hans Vredeman de Vries, plate in Perspective, 1604-1605.