Daniel Crooks- TimeSlice

In 1999, New Zealand born, Melbourne based media artist Daniel Crooks began to explore alternative models of spatio-temporal representation in the moving image through a technique he terms ‘time slice’. This involves the extraction of thin slices from a moving image stream and then recombining them using temporal and spatial displacement. He applies this technique to both still and moving images and, while conceptually similar, the visual outcomes are quite distinct. Described by critic Gail Priest as, “photographs that progress through time and videos of frozen moments that move.” His investigation is based around converting the spatial dimension of time into a tangible and malleable material. In his video piece On Perspective and Motion (Part 2), commissioned for the biennial Anne Landa award, Crooks distributes a continuous series of seven 180 degree pans across seven screens. The disrupted time line transforms the busy pedestrian location of Sydney’s Martin Place into a “city folding, reversing, expanding and contracting on itself with perfect fluidity; a city in which pedestrians slip, slide and undulate in a sensuous dance of the everyday.” His treatment of time over the 23 minute piece sees four major sequences emerge, in which different qualities of movement and space are explored. In these sequences we observe an environment of infinite curiosity and urban poetry, through the manipulation of time Crooks reveals choreographed relationships within the crowds. Multiplying individuals, split, meet, erase themselves, simultaneously playing out past, present and futures.Through the Time Slice method Crooks’ creatively rebels against established notions of time and space, engaging with time-based visual technology in a new way. The intricacy of his work ensures there is never a uniform ‘apply all’ approach. This gives feeling of consideration and manipulation of each figure, offering us the opportunity to see ourselves from not just a different perspective, but from another dimension.