Standing Ground

Standing Ground is a reflexive landscape work, which reveals its own production process, technology, and media. The work is designed to bring into focus the differences between the analogue and digital, in particular in terms of indexicality.

This video piece consists of three interwoven strands. In one strand, a series of landscape images shows a dilapidated, abandoned farmhouse, threatened by encroaching cliffs. The filmmaker enters each image, and uses a small pinhole camera. The exposed still appears onscreen after the landscape, a rough analogue still. In the second strand, the filmmaker builds the camera used in the landscape strand, a simple pinhole apparatus designed to hold analogue media. In the remaining strand, the filmmaker digitises the negatives exposed at the farmhouse, using a computer and scanner. We move between the three strands through the course of the video. The piece is bookended by short montages of the farmhouse.