Slow News...

This is a work in progress building on a larger photo installation entitled Flux, in which I created a fusion of technological and organic imagery. Here I am continuing that process but also inscribing it within the specific volumes of this gallery.

These images are driven by the idea of paint, my aim being to create abstract light paintings from figurative media images, without entirely losing sight of their original political and social context. I wanted to explore the way in which this information is presented to us, and reflect on how we process and understand it.

News is often fed to us as sound bites, usually from limited perspectives so that it can be accepted at face value then forgotten. This has become standard practice in television and visual media, although print media can be much more informative.

A good example of this reductive vision is the reporting from the Gulf war. It initially appeared credible, with journalists actually on the front line with the troops, accompanied by images of miraculous guided weapons, the promise of minimal civilian casualties and so on. But in fact the news released was highly selective and controlled. We had to wait for the slow news to filter out, and when we finally saw it we discovered the high number of civilian casualties and the violent senseless reality of war. Perhaps the most interesting information is that which is never featured in the news at all.

In a sense I am transforming, changing and liberating specific information and therefore producing new information, simplified but also more complicated information in that it calls for interpretation and personal thought and emotion to release its significance. Frozen in time, these images reject the culture of fast media turn-around, the demand to move on to the next image, the next news. With so much information of every type and form coming at us from all directions, I have tried to take time to think, to understand and so these images are meditative, slow news.