State of Consciousness

Synopsis of work

You drive home from work, the same route you ’ ve taken every day of the year, on pulling up to your house you realise you have no memory of how you got there. Physically you know you drove, obeyed traffic laws but mentally where were you? What happened? What did you think about?

In my practice I am interested in the state of consciousness, the absence of the mind from the body, daydreaming and mind wandering. You can become lost in your own mind appearing blank and void, only realising your state once you’ve awoken from the spell.

When the mind wanders it is as if we leave our conscious minds behind. In these interludes in time the world around us continues to move but we are disconnected from its presence. We presume that time continues relentlessly, the kettle will boil, the TV will play, assuming that normal events proceed as we would expect. These events become beyond our control; in this time we operate on autopilot.

In my piece, State of Consciousness I explore the rift in time where events are allowed to escalate beyond the normal, the mundane become surreal.

Are we seeing the thoughts of the passive subject? Are these events taking place in real time?

Video art has the ability to speak to a wide range of viewers, creating complex and intricate scenarios. It utilises the tools of cinematography to connect with the audience. Just as in the past there was a language of painting understood by the viewing public, today we are all sophisticated viewers of media. We decode images, ingesting an array of editing techniques and special effects to convey an atmosphere.

Films by directors like Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia) and Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunrise of the spotless mind) use the grammar of cinema to enable the audience to suspend their sense of disbelief and view the unusual as an extension of the normal, this results in communicating a disquiet with reality.

My film cannot help but be a portrait that suggests the subject’s stories, offering fleeting glances into their lives. Much like the photographic work of Rineke Dijkstra here I have sought a feeling of unease, a sense of internal isolation that pervades within my individual characters that are only united by their mental absence from the world.