Item 2133 - Ferndale, Western Canyon, Los Angeles

Video

Ferndale, Western Canyon, Los Angeles, is a portrait of an area of Griffith Park in LA. The work explores the contrast of ‘real' and ‘fake' places, and my thinking has been influenced by Baudrillard's concept of simulation. Ferndale is a constructed, watery oasis amongst the brittle aridity of Griffith Park, but is it any more of a simulation than the supposed wilderness of Griffith, or the city itself? In this work, each negative moving image is followed by a corresponding positive still. This is intended to estrange our perception of the positive image, and more importantly, to raise questions about the nature of the video image. Which is the most ‘realistic' or indexical image – the negative or positive? After all, the positive image is simply the result of the programming of video's processor, which is made to react to the signals from the CCD in a certain way, and to reconstruct from the data an image similar to that the eye might see. The positive image is as much a construct of computer processing as the ‘abnormal' negative image. In a way then the ‘normal' video image is a kind of simulacrum of human vision. Thus, the piece's subject matter extends into its formal qualities.

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ovni-archives: Wed, June 6, 2007 11:19 pm

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Copyright Richard O'Sullivan 2006