Plastic Time: Daniel Crooks

2006

Published in MESH#17: Media Art in the Asia Pacific, 17, McRae, E. & Rizzo, M. (Eds.).

The beautiful elasticity of the works of New Zealand artist Daniel Crooks expresses a deep fascination with both the materiality and theory of video as a visual medium representing movement in time. In Crooks’ work we see cars and trains stretched into smears of colour one moment and then retracted into miniatures of themselves the next; people move through streets or enter lifts like viscous fluids; and objects paint their own time-form paths through space. This work is called Time Slice, and with it Crooks is experimenting with physical time – taking a mere sliver of a regular video sequence, and then stretching this slice, through time, across the entire frame. Dispersing time across a flat plane in this way, time, space, and motion combine to reveal relative realities within the video image that defy our general understanding of movement and perception.

Our physical world is based on a sense of familiarity in which the behaviour of objects, our relationship to them, and perception of them can be predicted by our laws of physics. By manipulating time as a physical substance in our environment, Crooks unhinges this familiarity and shows that these laws, while reassuring when time is a constant, become unreliable when we begin to play with the plasticity of time, as we have for so long played with space. The neat categorisation of solids and liquids melds into a slippery, unstable reality of objects that refuse to remain faithful to their projected forms. The dramatically stretched, smeared, and truncated people and objects that populate Crooks’ work undermine our perception of a fixed reality and reflect our contemporary experience of space and time expanding and contracting convulsively through global communications and digital technologies.

Crooks has been experimenting with video for over 10 years, pushing it both conceptually and materially to explore its potential as a medium and as an expression of contemporary thought in scientific and social theory. During an Australia Council New Media Arts Board Fellowship at RMIT in 1997, Crooks developed motion control systems and began exploring non-linear time-lapse, experimenting with how the manipulation of time alters perception. This interest in physical time led Crooks to the development of what is now Time Slice. With this work, Crooks creates polyocular visions of the world in which perspective vanishes and we watch objects as though through the laser-point vision of multiple eyes. The wild, astonishing, fluid, and sometimes humorous effects of Crooks’ practice are like visual representations of Einstein’s theory of relativity, as we see objects and people warping through different speeds of motion within a flattened depth of field. As the depth of a 3D environment is brought into the 2D field of video, objects are drawn in different ways depending on their distance from what Crooks calls the ‘plane of cohesion’. The POC is the point in space at which objects draw themselves as we normally perceive them. In the foreground objects are squashed and truncated, in the background they are smeared and elongated, but at the POC objects appear like cardboard cut-outs of our perspective of reality amidst this rebellious confusion of objects flowing through time and space.

Crooks is currently undertaking a residency at Rijksakademie in Amsterdam where he is taking his Time Slice experiments to another dimension. Working with the latest technology in high speed cameras (normally used for industrial analysis) to dig further into time and reveal a world our limited vision cannot perceive, Crooks is extending his practice into the realm of 3D in an attempt to discover how far the infidelity of objects to our learned reality extends. As they slip and slide through the manipulated time of a three dimensional video image, objects behaviour is likely to be surprising and revealing, allowing us to see through what we perceive as the solidity of space in time. Following the 6 month residency at Rijksakademie, Crooks will spend 3 months in London as part of the Australia Council’s artist in residency program. This will provide Crooks with the opportunity to bring to new audiences his unique perspective on the possibilities of perception and the diverse ways of inhabiting – living through - time and space. In a world that is both shrinking and expanding simultaneously thanks to new technologies, Crooks is finding forms of expression that employ such technologies to represent both the uncertainty and unpredictability, but also the beauty and humour of our movement through, and relationships within, our world.