phytasmagoria
The dreamscape of plants
video
2017
single channel digital video, colour, sound
duration: 7.10
‘Phyta’ is from the Greek for ‘plants’ and is conflated with ‘phantasmagoria’: ‘a sequence of real or imaginary images like that seen in a dream.’ Visual and audio recordings in three acts have had rates stretched, employing a sense of uncanny non-human perception; layers of sound and vision range from the rate of wholly present attentive awareness toward the subliminally slow (although never decelerating to growth time). Combined with the roaming lens of the camera in each location are ghostly overlays of ambient sound and extreme-close-ups of floor vegetation, which shift in and out of focus like mist and at other times seeming to act, like a puppet, as proxy for the viewer.