Part of my practice involves using video in ways that are sometimes perceived to be proprietary to film. In my 2003 series Downtown, the images on billboards are literally positioned as ‘the thinking image’ [1] as defined by Gilles Deleuze in Cinema 2: The Time-Image. The images of people, laid out by marketers to sell condominium lifestyle, are juxtaposed with texts that speak thoughts for those future residents. The subjects contemplate existence and the videos end with the revelation that it is the voice of an image that speaks over time, in what is literally a 2-dimensional world. On close inspection of the text, it is evident that a few subjects have acquired doubts associated with the experience of high-density living, doubts that are sometimes attributed to ‘real’ people. For example, in Splitting Image, the young Asian male on the balcony actually appears to be more in the headspace of committing suicide than ‘Living the Dream’. When viewing the image closer, it becomes obvious that although this character has the fully developed imagination of a protagonist, he is working with less than a full image. Constructed from a face and shirt pulled from a marketers’ catalogue, he nevertheless has everything he needs to sell inner-city condos. Not many, if any of the GRP’s (Gross Rating Point) passing audience members, will probably notice that he has no hands and no lower body. The ‘half-man’ is floating above the balcony wall. Yet, with a quick drive-by, he appears complete, the man who ‘owns’ in a desired real estate market. In the same Downtown video series, Pastimes features a text that speaks for the thoughts of a woman seated in a coffee shop. At first it is not obvious whose thoughts are carried by the text. It could be any of the characters we see depicted, but it is perhaps owing to the woman’s disillusioned expression that we may come to think that the words reflect her thoughts. The contemplative words in the text question the meaning of (her) existence and a camera close-up links her expression to the bleakness of the text. As the camera zooms in, we see that she is built of dots (standard 4 colour process) mimicking the pointillism painting style of Georges Seurat. The camera pans over to a couple looking up to the balcony where the young male star of Splitting stands with his face split by a carelessly matched seam. Suddenly the camera veers left to shatter the reality of what we have been looking at. True to what we might have already suspected, we now see that the camera has framed our gaze on a marketing billboard in the middle of a construction site. The portrayals of condo residents in the videos juxtapose the billboard messages into possible future states of mind that the 2-dimensional representational images might possess. They remain trapped in scenarios, suspended on construction site billboards. They become virtual beings locked into the framing of the marketing strategy of the billboard and the video camera’s wandering perception. They are the virtual in opposition to the actuality of the movement-image. [2]

[1] Deleuze, G. (1989). Cinema 2: The Time-Image, tr. H. Tomlison and R. Galeta. London, England: The Athlone P. (First published as Cinema 2, L’image-temps, 1985, Minuit, Paris). 22-23.

[2] Deleuze, G. (1989). Cinema 2: The Time-Image, tr. H. Tomlison and R. Galeta. London, England: The Athlone P. (First published as Cinema 2, L’image-temps Copyright 1985, Minuit, Paris). 41.