LIVE STILLS

LIVE STILLS are “quotations” from the new filmic language Roland Barthes had hoped (40 years ago) a future theory of The Still would generate. They are screen captured glitch images from 360° spherical views uploaded by individuals on Google Street View.

 LIVE STILLS

For a long time I have been intrigued by Roland Barthes’ proposition that “the essence of the filmic, quite paradoxically, cannot be grasped in the projected film, the film in movement… but only, as yet, in that major artifact which is the still."

LIVE STILLS proposes contemporary stills quoted from the digital image-scape as embodied formulations of Barthes’s new cinematic language.

As a visual artist, I begin where the writer Barthes left off, not with the traditional film, but with a now equally ubiquitous medium made possible by new digital technology: the navigable 360° views posted by tourists on Google Street View. 

Tourists scan a place or space by rotating the camera phone 360°. An app in their phone then selects and stitches together individual overlapping images into a spherical image-interiority with the virtual eye of viewer at the center, a new infrastructure for cinematic experience. We enter the interior of this globe by clicking on the blue dot in the Street View plan of any city. A script propels us into this interiority and we move the spherical surface with our fingers on our touch screen in relation to our fixed eye creating the illusion of looking around.

This spherical image construct is a particularly apt parallel contemporary cinematic experience as it already fulfils Barthes’ condition for the new essence of the cinematic to be “merely the armature of a permutational unfolding” where movement is temporarily suspended.