The Eye

by Alex Hetherington, 11 Feb 2008

I spent extended periods of the weekend looking at, videotaping and drawing silver foil. I guess it has something to do with Janie’s gold. I found some footage I made a while ago of silver foil that I had sped up to see what it looked like; it looked like I had animated it. It didn’t look real. These flimsy rubbish mirrors will be added to the show at Park gallery and also form a seam in a new video I am developing. Or rather made, because I have edited a work together than I recognize as something I have wanted to make. It looks like I’ve projected found footage onto silver paper. I see it everywhere now: silver foil in cigarette packets, silver foil for the wrapping for the Macs, silver foil used in vacuum packing for expensive perfume. So I added Olga’s House of Shame to this video ‘animation’ of silver foil; I like this surface for its failure to reflect. I always need to synchronize this with something else and all the found sound I have downloaded form the soundtrack for this process: all the gestures, movements, fades, long shots and close-ups in the edits are given specified sounds like a foley artist as a replacement voice-over. I have sounds from video games, hisses, electronic beeps, crows, dogs barking. Also a real voice-over from a lecture Larry Rinder gave at Triplebase in San Francisco in October last year, sped up so it doesn’t sound real. Rinder by the way curated the Whitney Biennale a few years ago and is now the Dean of the CCA in San Francisco. His exploration of a show at Triplebase Gallery in the city during his lecture works perfectly with Olga’s House of Shame. The resulting work is so noisy and visually full it’s difficult to listen to, difficult to look at…It has the effect of a terrible mirror denying any real way to look at and own the images. Kinda what I am all about. Gillian Smith and I talked about this today: all the references and an inability within technology to capture.

Meanwhile in Falkirk the Village Voice went back to the printer. And I have noticed the emergence of the “eye”. A look I am given frequently in Falkirk. I feel like the Man Who Fell to Earth with my contact lenses out and my androgynous alien body glowing in the dark of Falkirk’s gloom. I expect I’ll be looking at Tony Oursler next. His gigantic eyeballs gazing without emotion at these fields of introspection and suspicion. Glasgow suddenly feels like New York here.

House/Lights moves apace as I am searching for a black box and then I have Olga almost in place. More conversations. And the “eye” and the endless CCTV cameras.

Also the B-Sides program of videos curated by New Media Scotland has a new screening in Paris. (It has now shown at sites across Europe and North America). I may go. I need to look at Galliano Dior couture if Tilda Swinton’s outfit at the BAFTA’s is anything to go by. My film in B-Sides is called A FILM FOUND IN A DUMP.

It’s full circle.