Split Seconds

Description

"In the installation ‘Split Seconds’, a small monitor is placed in front of a slightly larger one, with both monitors showing the same recording of wood being chopped. The image on the small monitor even includes what remains covered up in the larger image. The movements flow from one screen to the other, turning them into a whole. The wood-chopping image freezes for a ‘split second’ before and after each blow, too briefly to be perceptible to the human eye. A few stills from the video accompany the tape in an installation, perhaps as a compensation for this human shortcoming. Various levels of perception of reality are introduced indirectly – the perception of the human eye as well as that of the camera. The limits of these two means of perception are unrelentingly called into question: on the one hand, the human eye, which is unable to register each movement, on the other, that of the camera, which, with its limited scope of perception – the frame – turns out to have a much smaller range than the human eye. Split up as they are, they complement each other. The play on words implied by the title, ‘Split Seconds’, refers to the wood being split, to the image being split up, and ultimately also to perception being split."
(Source, website, LUX)

"This video is a single channel version of a video installation. It shows two monitors, one large and a smaller portable one to the front, both of these displaying the same video feed, in which a log is being chopped. Both monitors are wedged in some soil to recreate the angle at which the action was shot by the camera (30°). The installation was accompanied by a series of photographs, which analysed the videotape. The smaller monitor partially obscures the larger one, but at the same time reveals the entire scene. Different symmetry and shift effects are produced, creating a sort of reversed mise-en-abyme, evoking the effect of video feedback.
The disposition of the monitors also creates a visual effect like the axe in the large monitor is hitting the small monitor. This suggests a critique to broadcast television.
The act of cutting wood also references the renown Jan Dibbets’ piece, 'TV as a fireplace' (1969).
The installation evokes and conveys in various ways the concept of splitting: the material chopping of the wood, the ‘split second’ where the image briefly freezes before and after each strike that our eye is not able to perceive and the splitting of the image in the monitors. Our perception and the notion of the ‘video eye’ to capture reality is questioned and analysed."
(Source, website, EWVA)

Additional Informations

Made in De Appel, Amsterdam

View a still image of the work on LUX's website

View a still image of the work on Stedelijk's website

View still images of the work on EWVA's website

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