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Steve
Roden
BOOK OF SECONDS, 1996-2001
COSMIC DANCER, 2001
Courtesy of the artist
Steve Roden's work is based on systems, sequences or sets of information
the artist finds or creates for his own use. These systems may be derived
from the proportions of a building, the layout of a magazine, or the first
letters of every word in a book. Following these chosen guiding principles,
usually layered or in combination with other systems, a new visual sequence
is created. Roden's video, commonly shot with a super 8 camera, is edited
on film, then transferred to video format and edited again.
A meditation on one of the most basic of human perceptual experiences,
as well as one of the fundamental concerns of visual art, Book of Seconds
is a silent, subtle aesthetic experience generated by simply filming ten
seconds of footage per day for a year, each time focusing on a found interplay
of natural light and shadow. If schedule or weather prevented Roden from
finding his adopted phenomenon, he filmed ten seconds of darkness. The
timing was done by counting, inserting a human element into the precision
of the program.
Cosmic Dancer, Roden's first video piece incorporating sound, uses the
technique of shooting individual frames of separate images to create a
moving picture, much as animators do. Roden, however, began with a set
of found photos shot through a microscope and arranged in a progression
according to visual similarity. The result is a jittery "motion picture"
in which the still images of old biological specimens are brought to life,
set to a soundtrack the artist composed based upon "Cosmic Dancer", a
T. Rex song about reincarnation.
A Pasadena-based artist who received his BFA from Otis Parsons and completed
his MFA at Art Center College of Design. He has exhibited and performed
at Jen Joy Gallery and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco,
Griffin Contemporary in Venice, California, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis,
and in New York and Osaka, Japan. In addition, he has participated in
group shows and events in New York, Liverpool, England, and Odense, Denmark.
Christopher
Miles 3/2001
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