In March in the year 2000, Daniel Crooks was sitting on a train, travelling to a teaching job in Berwick, Victoria. He did this twice a week, Footscray to Berwick. A total of three hours a day; six hours a week travelling on the train. Crooks would use this time to read, research, plan his courses, do some paper programming, do some more paper programming, and think about making new work. But he felt there must be a better way to spend the time; that, rather than just thinking about making work, he could perhaps somehow use the time to actually create work. So he started taking photographs out the windows of the train, creating time-lapse videos, and wondering about motion and time, space and relativity. It began him on a trajectory that he has been travelling along ever since.

As it happens, although this was a coincidence of circumstance for Crooks, it was actually not such a coincidence at all that his first works experimenting with time took trains as their subject. The numerous historical connections between trains and motion pictures form a story that Crooks has subsequently devoted a significant amount of time to exploring. With his latest commission, Phantom Ride, Crooks wanted to create a work that referenced this history and drew together threads that he has been weaving through his work for several years.

Time, both thematically and materially, has always been at the heart of Crooks’ practice. Rebecca Solnit, in her book River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, traces how the latter half of the 19th century marked a period during which photography, railways and motion pictures came together in a web of invention that radically changed our experience and perception of time, and contributed to what people living through that era experienced as the ‘annihilation of space and time’.[i] The first passenger railway opened in England in the year 1830 and railways quickly became one of the most tangible symbols of the momentous changes affecting society as a result of the Industrial Revolution – changes that saw people travelling at speeds previously thought impossible, clocking-in at the factory and structuring their days according to what might be called ‘machine time’, and consuming goods “that seemed to come from nowhere.”[ii] The opening of the railroads was soon followed by the invention, in 1839, of photographic techniques to capture and reproduce reality, with different methods created almost simultaneously by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot.[iii] Then in 1872 Eadweard Muybridge – a photographer born in the UK and by this time living in San Francisco – had advanced the film and shutter speeds of photography to allow him to conduct a series of photographic motion studies that broke everyday movement down into increments of time and laid the foundations for the creation of motion pictures. In 1879, using the principles of pre-cinema devices such as the zootrope, Muybridge created a device he called a zoopraxiscope to project his motion studies on a screen, thereby creating what can be considered the first movie projector. By showing the motion of a horse galloping or a gymnast leaping, Muybridge created a stop-motion view of reality, or, as Solnit put it, “he is the man who split the second.”[iv] His motion studies made it appear that any movement could be broken down into a series of discrete steps that, when sped up to real time, appear to us as fluid motion. “It was as though he had grasped time itself, made it stand still, and then made it run again, over and over.”[v]

According to one version of film mythology, the Lumiere Brothers’ film L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, showing a train pulling into a station, was the first film to be publicly exhibited, causing panic as the audience rushed out of the Grand Café in Paris to get away from the oncoming train. While this is not quite an accurate account of film history (the first public film screening took place at the Grand Café in 1895 but this Lumiere Brothers’ film was not screened until January 1896), it does demonstrate the very early connection between trains and filmmaking, and the incredible impact the new motion pictures had on the public. The first time a film camera was placed actually on a train, however, was in the Lumiere Brothers’ film Le Depart de Jerusalem en chemin de fer, shot by Alexandre Promio in early 1897 and showing a rearward perspective from the view of the train as it pulls out of the station.[vi] The placement of the camera on the train itself was a device filmmakers began to use as a way of creating movement with cameras that were incredibly heavy and fixed in one position. It created a momentous shift as viewers went from simply watching objects move across the screen (which, in itself, was both shocking and delightful) to having a moving point of view that allowed them to feel themselves in the position of the subject. This Promio film, which was soon followed by Haverstraw Tunnel (1897) by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company and for which the camera was placed at the front of the train, marked the beginning of a wave of extremely popular films that came to be known as phantom rides.

These phantom rides were thrilling to experience; they not only provided an otherwise unattainable perspective along the train tracks, but the positioning of the camera, combined with the moving image, also challenged traditions of viewing that had been developed over centuries through painting and, more recently, photography.[vii] With our 21st century sense of time, it is difficult for us to imagine the impact of experiencing these films. One reviewer of the day wrote that these films put the viewer in the position of “a passenger on a phantom train ride that whirled him through space at nearly a mile a minute.’”[viii]  This speed, which we would find almost impossibly tedious, gave viewers in 1897 the sensation of “being hurled and flung through space, of a loss of stability and physical grounding.”[ix]   Running at about one minute in duration, these phantom rides were the most electrifying entertainment of the age.

It is unclear where the name phantom ride came from, but “the combination of the camera’s ‘subjective’ view and its conventionally inaccessible position suggests disembodied consciousness.”[x]  These plot-less films sustained interest in the absence of any characters or human drama, however it was not long before these conventions of storytelling began to make their way into the films. By 1899 filmmakers were beginning to experiment with creating longer sequences by joining together two or more strips of film, and began to insert story elements by editing shots together. The first instance of this being done within a phantom ride was G.A. Smith’s The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899) which took two shots from a phantom ride travelling through a tunnel (shot by Cecil Hepworth) and inserted a studio shot between them, showing two characters inside a train compartment, to create a sense of drama and continuity of action. As such developments continued, the novelty of the phantom ride wore off and, in some instances, filmmakers turned to increasingly elaborate forms of staging to enhance the impact of the films. This is typified by the experiences created by George C. Hale, initially in the USA and then in the UK. With the title Hale’s Tours of the World, these were something of a cross between a cinema and a fairground ride. They involved spectators being seated in a train carriage with a screen and projector set-up at the end of the carriage filling the entire field of view while sound effects, wind created by fans, and a rocking carriage created the sensation of actual train travel.[xi]  It was an experience very similar to that described by H.G. Wells in The Time Machine (1895), and also in a patent application, submitted in the same year by Robert W. Paul, for the creation of an actual time machine.[xii]

For Crooks, this period leading up to the end the 19th century and the turn into the 20th is critical to the way we perceive time in the 21st century. The explosion of railways across the UK and the US saw an increasingly urgent need for a coordinated system that would enable the creation of accurate timetables for train travel. In the UK in 1840, British company Great Western Railway began using ‘London time’ at all their stations, and by January 1848 all British railway companies had adopted Greenwich time as the standard for coordinating their train schedules in what came to be known as ‘railway time’. In the USA, Standard Railway Time was adopted throughout all states on the 18th November 1883. By instigating the change to a coordinated time system across whole continents, train travel had not only diminished the time it took to travel between places, thereby seeming to decrease distance itself, it had also significantly contributed to the process of globalisation.

Moving in parallel alongside these industrial developments was the impact of the effects of train travel on both the arts and sciences. The forward momentum of train travel depicted in the phantom ride films reflected the progress-oriented focus of the Modern era. While Marinetti was writing about the “greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents”[xiii] in the first Futurist Manifesto (1909), and Duchamp was transforming painting through the perpetual movement of his mechanical nude figure in Nude Descending a Staircase (No.2) (1913), Albert Einstein developed his theories of special relativity (1905) and general relativity (1916) in which he used train travel to illustrate his theories of the relationship between space and time, matter and gravity. Yet, while trains were a symbol of speed and progress, anyone who has taken a long train journey will know that they also open up a space for reflection. In 1896 Henri Bergson published Memory and Matter, a treatise outlining his theory of memory as existing in time (or duration), in which he used railway metaphors amongst his illustrations; and in 1907 he published Creative Evolution in which he employed the ‘cinematographical apparatus’ as an analogy to describe his theory of how our intellect processes reality by breaking it down into static segments and then recombining them to create what is an artificial view of reality.[xiv]  Similarly, at the beginning of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (the first part of which was published in 1913), the whistle of a train conjures an image of a traveller “hurrying towards the nearest station: the path that he followed being fixed forever in his memory by the general excitement due to being in a strange place,”[xv]  creating a lasting association between memory and reflection as the enduring experience of such travel.

This sense of reflection and contemplation is strongly present in Crooks’ Phantom Ride. Like the early phantom ride films, Crooks’ work positions the viewer seemingly at the front of a train travelling along the railway with only the tracks and the surrounding landscape in view. The camera travels forward at a measured pace, allowing for close inspection of the rocks, branches, or concrete flanking the tracks. Within the frame, a doorway approaches and, as the camera passes through, we are suddenly in a new landscape, with the tracks continuing to stretch before us towards the vanishing point. The work travels through tunnels, paddocks and bushland, over bridges, down urban alleys, along the docks and into repair depots, showing the forward journey on one side of the centrally-positioned screen, while on the reverse the landscape recedes, as seen from a camera placed on the rear of a train.

The landscapes and abandoned, uninhabited environments evoke an eerie sense of the ghostly or otherworldly, alluded to in the early phantom ride films; and also, perhaps unintentionally, gesture to imagery from Australian cinema history such as Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), Love Seranade (1996) or even Romper Stomper (1992). This representation of the world creates a distance from reality that evokes a sense of nostalgia, just as the increased speed of travel (and life more generally) towards the end of the 19th century bred in the Victorians a longing for nature as “an ideal landscape [that] seemed formed of a wholeness that was no longer theirs.”[xvi]

The melding of film and train travel in Phantom Ride’s succession of collaged worlds presents film as a kind of memory in the sense that Bergson wrote about: not as subjective imagination, but memory that exists in the world itself and feeds into every present moment; it captures something of Bergson’s description of the present as “the invisible progress of the past gnawing into the future.”[xvii]  For Bergson, “movement is reality itself”[xviii]  and is something we can understand only through intuition. Phantom Ride is a journey through – or rather into – both space and time, but the viewing journey takes us out of our daily experience of these dimensions. This is partly due to the gallery being a place that, like the cinema, “allows for attentiveness, absorption, and receptivity;”[xix] yet it also comes from the mesmerising effect of the composited images that carry us continually forward from one world into the next. The encounter is closer to Bergson’s sense of intuition which, unlike the segmenting process of perception, allows us to experience the constant flux of reality.[xx]

As a fundamental question – is it discrete or continuous? – this enquiry is at the base of all Crooks’ experiments (a word he uses often to describe the work he does).[xxi]  Since his early days studying photography and video at Auckland Technical Institute, Crooks has been directing this question towards studies of movement as a way of interrogating more deeply into the nature of the universe. Conceptually, his questioning follows lines of enquiry stretching back to Hindu philosopher Kanada’s theory from the 6th century BC of the atom as an indestructible particle; in a practical sense, Crooks’ work also belongs to a lineage that began with those early motion studies by Eadweard Muybridge in the 1870s. This trajectory follows a history of technological experimentation leading to new scientific and artistic discovery that profoundly changed the way humans understand and exist in the world. It is a path of enquiry that has allowed us to discover an immense amount about the nature of the universe and our place and participation in that universe; yet the question remains, for Crooks as it does for many others, as to whether the convenience of organising space, matter and time in discrete units is in some sense masking a fundamental continuity.

To some extent, from the beginning, Crooks embarked on this enquiry with a handicap because his still and moving images, through which he explores and encourages us to contemplate this question, are created using the human-made binary structure of digital technologies. The digital information that he uses to form his images sometimes produces staggered, seemingly segmented motion, and at others results in smooth flows and smears of space across time, and time across space. Train No.1 (2002), the first moving image work to result from those early train-journey experiments, shows Crooks’ original slicing technique, which developed out of his early photographic work and involved slicing video images frame by frame, several lines of pixels at a time, to create an image edited across both space and time. The effect is of a truncated world, as though the physical particles of matter have been combined together but are moving at the wrong speed; it’s a bit like experiencing what we might have imagined (in the early 2000s) a computer-view of the world to be. The work shows objects multiplying and compressing in time according to their motion and distance from the camera, with the cuts Crooks has made visible as vertical slices through the image. Over the years Crooks’ imagery has become increasingly seamless, with motion that flows fluidly across space and time rather than in discrete segments. Crooks’ technological tools have also changed; like a scientist working with microscopes of greater and greater magnitude, he has seen huge leaps in resolution that have given him more pixels within each frame and more frames per second so that, overall, he is
working with a much larger amount of visual information than he was in 2002.

Technology has always been a central component of Crooks’ process. During many years of experimentation, Crooks has been making motion-control devices that he often refers to as robots. They are small mechanical objects that could be likened (at least the early ones could) to a turntable that would control the camera to allow Crooks to capture a perfectly smooth pan.[xxii]  For Phantom Ride, Crooks worked with Melbourne-based motion-control engineer Gerald Thompson to create his most sophisticated robot yet. This new device looks very much like a standard camera dolly, but has been created specifically to run along train and tram tracks. It has enabled Crooks to move the camera along the tracks at constant speed with computerised precision, producing incredibly smooth footage (allowing only for the imperfections of the tracks themselves), significantly reducing the time required for post-production and thereby allowing more time for the intricate work of aligning the shots to create a seemingly seamless journey. As in his recent work An Embroidery of Voids, the movement in Phantom Ride runs along the z-axis, breaking the x- and y-axis editing that had for so long been a hallmark of Crooks’ work. When the early phantom ride films introduced z-axis motion to moving pictures, they combined photography’s ability to give viewers the experience of places far away with a feeling of being in the picture through the movement of the camera itself. This allowed “the viewer to identify all the more with the thrilling kinetic and visual experience of the hero,”[xxiii]  a shift from spectator to protagonist (albeit vicariously) through which the filmic narrative becomes a more embodied experience.

Crooks is interested in how such technological leaps – those in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as well as those he experiments with in his own work – affect society and contribute to the development of different perspectives. The various innovations of the late 19th century fed into an industrial, economic view of the world and its history that prioritises continual progress and a linear, singular view of time, and continues to dominate contemporary perspectives of the past, present, and future. In 2012 Crooks created a work called A Single Path, A Single Past, an inkjet print showing a single solution to a Hamiltonian Path problem[xxiv] for which there are thousands upon thousands of possible solutions. The work, which looks like a labyrinth, references the limitations of this Modernist, economic perspective that collapses the immense complexity of events that occur in time into one single historical path. Labyrinths have been a recurring theme within Crooks’ work. In 2012, Crooks also created A Garden of Parallel Paths, a video work that stitches together horizontal pans across different laneways in Melbourne. Inspired by Jorges Luis Borges’
A Garden of Forking Paths, the work depicts a labyrinthine cross-section of simultaneous presents. In 2013 Crooks took a step into the labyrinth itself to create An Embroidery of Voids, an endless journey down a collaged laneway constructed by stitching together numerous shots of different laneways to create one seamless alley. 

For Phantom Ride Crooks has employed this same stitching technique to again cast doubt on the notion that there can be a single path through history, or through time. A singular view of history very neatly divides time into past, present and future, and, while the tracks in Phantom Ride create one central, continuous path through the various landscapes, there are also forks that diverge from the central line, tempting us with other possible journeys, other possible stories; and there are segments in which parallel tracks suggest the existence of simultaneous presents – as though we do in fact live within the kinds of worlds imagined by science fiction authors such as Greg Egan or Neal Stephenson.[xxv]  We also see both the forward and rearward perspectives so that the screen itself, the projected image, becomes the moment of the present. This present moment is both eternity and the void: it is the moment in time that we perpetually inhabit, and yet it slips away at every instant to become the past – like a photographic image forming as memory. Crooks likes to think of the screen becoming the lens so that, in viewing the work, the viewer occupies the position of the camera or the filmmaker – or the train driver.[xxvi]  With the exception of Le Depart de Jerusalem en chemin de fer, all the early phantom rides looked forwards along the tracks, taking viewers along a very Modernist ride into the future. But because Crooks’ Phantom Ride also allows us to look into the past, it encourages us, as Proust did, to think about our own position in relation to the future and the past – to feel ourselves as an element within time; to remember and reflect. It encourages us to feel ourselves existing within a particular notion of time that is evolutionary, or rather revolutionary. With the forwards and backwards perspectives installed back-to-back, the viewer must physically move in order to fully experience the work, looping around and back, again and again, to see both perspectives. Phantom Ride thus creates a sense of time in which there cannot be one single historical path but loops within loops that constantly feed into our experience of the present. As Bergson said: movement is reality.

Reflection and contemplation are encouraged not only through this reference to memory but also through the unhurried pace of the camera which travels, not at the speed of a contemporary train – even a slow one, but at what is much closer to walking pace. It echoes the longing the Victorian’s felt for an idealised vision of nature not only as a place but also as “a kind of time or a pace, the pace of a person walking, of water flowing in a river, of seasons, of time told from the sky rather than electrical signals.”[xxvii]  There is something very human about this ambling pace (written about by Friedrich Nietzsche, Virginia Woolf, Bruce Chatwin, and many more), so often associated with creative thinking and reflection – and coming perhaps, in part, from it being Crooks’ own walking pace, embedded in the work as he walked behind his motion-control device along the tracks. Yet Crooks tilts the effect of this stroll towards the non-human – the technological – by producing such ‘perfect’ motion with none of the rambling, uneven qualities of an actual human gait.

The convergence of cinema and train travel that resulted in the early phantom ride films marked a shift from the sailboats and barges of the pre-Industrial era to the steam engines and electricity of the modern world. A series of films Promio shot from the Liverpool Overhead Railway (the first elevated electric metropolitan railway in the world) in 1897 demonstrate the ‘temporal heterogeneity’ of this period: “The railway’s moving, cinematic view of the docks appears very modern, and the docks themselves were undergoing continual, mechanized development, but the ships convey the spatial experiences of an earlier, different time.”[xxviii]  The equivalent momentous shift in recent times from analogue to digital technologies has similarly been accompanied by a rush to surge forwards and nostalgia for the past. Crooks’ Phantom Ride references the very beginnings of film at a moment when the move from analogue to digital film is highly sensitive. With Phantom Ride Crooks has produced a work that it would be impossible to create using analogue processes. As an impossible world Phantom Ride is not so much a representation of our world but more closely represents how we experience time and motion within the world. It encourages us to feel ourselves existing in time in a way that we do not often pause long enough to appreciate.

Notes

[i] Solnit, Rebecca, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, Penguin Books, New York, London, Australia, 2004, p.10

[ii] Solnit, op. cit., p.9

[iii] Solnit, op. cit., p.14;

[iv] Solnit, op. cit., p.7

[v] Solnit, op. cit., p.3

[vi] The Railway and Modernity: Time, Space, and the Machine Ensemble

 By Matthew Beaumont, Michael J. Freeman, p.73.

[vii] Gray, Frank, “The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899), G.A. Smith and the Emergence of the Edited Film in England” in Grieveson, Lee and Krämer, Peter (Eds.), The Silent Cinema Reader, Routledge, London and New York, 2004, p.55

 By Lee Grieveson, Peter Krämer, p.55

[viii] Quoted in Nead, Lynda, The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film c.1900, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, p.28

[ix] Nead, op. cit., p.28

[x] Keiller, Patrick, “Phantom Rides: The Railway and Early Film” in Beaumont, Matthew and Freeman, Michael J. (Eds.), The Railway and Modernity: Time, Space, and the Machine Ensemble, Peter Lang AG International Academic Publishers, Bern, Switzerland, 2007, p.75

[xi] Nead, op. cit., p.29

[xii] The Railway and Modernity: Time, Space, and the Machine Ensemble

 By Matthew Beaumont, Michael J. Freeman, p.80

[xiii] Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, “The Foundation and Manifesto or Futurism,” 1909, in Danchev, Alex (Ed.), 100 Artists’ Manifestos: From the Futurists to the Stuckists, Penguin Books, London, 2011, pp.1-8, p.5

[xiv] Totaro, Donato, “Time, Bergson, and the Cinematographical Mechanism: Henri Bergson on the philosophical properties of cinema,” in Off Screen, Volume 5, Issue 1, January 2001, http://offscreen.com/view/bergson1

[xv] Proust, Marcel, In Search of Lost Time, Volume.1: Swann’s Way, Tr. C.K. Scott Moncrieff
and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D. J. Enright, The Modern Library, New York, 2003, p.2

[xvi] Solnit, op. cit., p.22

[xvii] Bergson, Henri, Matter and Memory, New York, Zone. 1991, p.83

[xviii] Bergson, Henri (1946), The Creative Mind, Tr. Andison, Mabelle L., Philosophical Library, New York, cited in Totaro, op. cit.

[xix] Ishii-Gonzales, Sam, “Suspended Meaning: On Bergson and Cinematic Perception,” in World Picture, issue 7, Autumn 2012, http://www.worldpicturejournal.com/WP_7/Ishii-Gonzales.html

[xx] Totaro, op. cit.

[xxi] Author interview with the artist, 23 October 2015

[xxii] Weschler, Lawrence, A Conversation with Melbourne Video Artist Daniel Crooks, June/August 2013, Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art University of South Australia, Adelaide, p.16

[xxiii] Morse, Margaret, “Television, Graphics and the Body: Words on the Move,” Television and the Body Conference, Society for Cinema Studies, Montreal, 1987, quoted in Huhtamo, Erkki, ”Encapsulated Bodies in Motion: Simulators and the Quest for Total Immersion,” in Simon Penny (Ed.), Critical issues in Electronic Media, State University of New York Press, NY, 1995, p.182

[xxiv] A Hamiltonian path is a path in a graph that visits each vertex exactly once. A Hamiltonian path problem determines whether such a path exists in a given graph.

[xxv] See Permutation City by Greg Egan or Anathem by Neal Stephenson.

[xxvi] Author interview with the artist, 23 October 2015

[xxvii] Solnit, op. cit., p.23

[xxviii] Keiller, op. cit., pp.73-74