Tilting the Horizon

Two of the proposed pieces for eventual installation in the airport take the form of digital kiosks, the kind normally used for commercial advertisements.  It’s been tricky to think about what sort of imagery I’ll use for those works due to their unconventional nature both in terms of how the work will be encountered as well as its format – that of a slim, vertical rectangle.  Yesterday, while out on a run through the hills, I started thinking about the earth’s horizon and the symmetry it helps produce when perceived in the form of the traditional, rectangular landscape we are accustomed to – running straight through the picture plane or perceptual field, left to right.  Yet this same type of balance can also be present in the form of an angular line (the tilt of hill against the sky, for instance) or even as a vertical slice, running up and down (gazing out toward the landscape while lying on your side, for instance). 

This line of thought really helped me conceptualize how I might interlace still and moving images together to run on a continuous loop on the monitors within the kiosks.  Initially, I planned to crop vertical segments from horizontal compositions (my preferred framing method for still images, and the default aspect ratio for video).  But I now realize I may be able to present scenes or spaces that were purposefully recorded horizontally as vertical images, playing on the balance and symmetry mentioned above while introducing elements of abstraction as well.

It will be interesting to see how this impacts my work in the field/studio.  For now, I’m going through the archived images to see whether any are particularly suited to this.  A few possibilities are below.