Local Time

Local Time 13:50, 2001

Today I stumbled across an almost forgotten video I made in 2001 when I was interested in the material properties and qualities of digital video. It was shot on miniDV and then time stretched with a progressively granulated music track. It would then have been 'printed to tape', mastered back to miniDV, as was my practice at the time. 

That period in the late 1990s, through to the mid 2000s or so, before High Definition, before the necessity to distinguish digital video as Standard Definition, when we were still in the glow of the idea that digital video offered a superior quality to analogue video; when digital video as represented by the various DV formats, and available as a domestic format in the form of miniDV, seemed to offer the possibility of the same resolution and quality as broadcast; when briefly in a golden egalitarian moment everyone was able to achieve the holy grail that had eluded many in the bad old analogue days, that of 'broadcast quality' image, with the consumer level miniDV camcorder format, and the early days of video editing software being made available for free on entry level Apple Macs; the means of video production without compromising technical quality, indeed digital video production, no less, was finally in the hands of the artists, the amateurs, the masses; surely the revolution, whereby we would throw off the shackles, revolt against the repression of the hegemony of the professional classes was just around the corner... but I digress.

I don't recall how I produced the sound and the treatments, I may have some notes about this, most possibly buried in a box somewhere. 

The video documents the first day clearing the house of a recently deceased friend of the family, and seems now redolent with a kind of melancholy, perhaps that was the intention.