(2023, 56 minutes)

Artist Statement:
This was the first precision-made motion picture camera, the Bell and Howell 2709B — first modelled in 1912, made with a weighty cast in one piece aluminum body, all shafts running in ball bearings, plus a four-lens turret. Many of the classic Hollywood silent films were shot with this camera. Chaplin owned one.

The 2709A , Bell and Howell’s first attempt at a motion picture camera, had been made of wood and leather. Bell and Howell decided to upgrade the camera after they had received a complaint from a documentarist in Africa that termites had eaten his camera.

I don’t believe in images and I don’t even like pictures. Though raised a Catholic I am inclined towards iconoclastic agnosticism. You take a picture and the picture comes out on top. You take a picture of nature and the result is a smirk of inconsequence, nature looks passively back and shows you one for.

The gall of this or that frame, imperious view of a naked ape, the artist first skill is in sham and because we are each and everyone an artist we go along for the con.

But it’s too easy, the confidence man as artist plays off vanity, and vanity is a well leavened loop, a baker’s puzzle of folds and folds, and the bread of all our half baked meaning is all in the eating. All human all the time, the original sin of noisome existing and persistent self congratulations; identity.

Identity, a blindness and a deafness chock full of self congratulatory energetics.

Remember the termites that ate a camera? Termites lead an unexamined life, they don’t take pictures, they have no vanity, no sin, no missing of the mark, they scurry in no doubt and live without remembrance.

But here we have the precious ring, each moment no more no less than now, light infused—for how else could we see—and it is up to you to see nature, to see nature as our nature, nature as determined and plain as a thought, as a mountain, a valley, colour and shape, and the weave of time that sums up a panoramic view.

Dependence on a click to complete as rounding as the final vibratory disappearance of a bell announcing an end.

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Half of the film was shot using a hand cranked black and white 35mm film camera, a 1912 Bell and Howell 2709. The other half of the film was shot in HD. The film was hand processed and using the colour matrix and gamma of a hand made emulsion (using my own tinted blood cells for photographic grain — based on a 1930’s patent) the film was then transferred to high definition video.

The work is about representation today — analog & binary — electricity & hydro power —
British Columbia — the beginnings of cinema via Eadweard Muybridge — the energy
certificates of the Technocracy party — the absolute value of noise — the year 1957 — regional
Vancouver modernism — the Big Bang — Vermeer's “Milk Maid” — Poincaré recurrence
theorem — the great Canadian cowboy singer Wilf Carter — the concept of Grace in Catholic
painting — the Tathāgatas of Buddhism — Boris Karloff as Frankenstein reaching for the light.

Director and Producer: Oliver Hockenhull

Quality Digital Print available for screenings, gallery presentations and exhibitions.