Kevin Hamilton | Department of Rhythmanalysis: On Location

KEVIN HAMILTON

Cinema reduces presence to a change in light or sound. On screen, the slightest shadow or flicker promises arrival, and off-screen sounds announce actions yet to be seen. Instruments of control and surveillance rely on an equally reductive sensorium; events cataclysmic or longed-for, large or small manifest themselves through the same small bulb, a click behind the panel. My work and research has been preoccupied with each of these realms, but this project for Blackbird represents a unique intersection of the two.

Screens and instruments support meaning through the ways in which presence is promised, manifested, or marked as lost. From where and whence do we expect change? Where do we imagine time as stopped or slowed? Where and when do we expect progression? The senses play a role in these questions, perception is how we learn new modes or shape old ones. Even observation changes what see, reveals subjects as capable of being monitored.

Through the reductive representation of states or conditions as “on” or “off,” I introduce the possibility of change. The panels of the Department of Rhythmanalysis mimic instruments of security, industry, or science fiction. They invite skepticism towards trusted monitors, but also introduce new temporal structures, new patterns and rhythms, new synchrony and disharmony. Through these and other works I seek to understand how time and space are structured by screens and machines that promise presence. Like the theorist Lefebvre, I hope to expose what has been obscured by time, the ways in which we construct self and other through mistaking the static for dynamic, and the dynamic for static.