It has been a long time coming. Well the first version of this video was made erm… 30 years ago now. So obviously a lot of stuff has happened since. Some time ago I rediscovered my ‘when was NOW’ video on a ¾ inch u-matic video reel and had it transferred to digital format so I could ponder it more easily. I wasn’t so interested in much of it, except for the fact that a. I still seemed to be pursuing the same concerns in my work after all these years and b. there was the novelty of a much younger ‘me’ apparent on screen – clicking his fingers in an attempt to stop time NOW and then again NOW etc. There is an obvious irony here as he stared back at me over time.
So… four years ago I decided to make version 2 and use this distant character as a little insert into my present day work. I liked the idea that I might put the two of us on screen at the same time. I devised a whole ‘conceptually sound’ structure that was to make this happen and could almost see the finished piece in my mind’s eye. As it turned out – the sheer predictability of this (in my own head anyway) kind of meant I kept putting it the bottom of my list of things to do. It didn’t have the urgency of some other ideas.
Eventually I was amazed to find some more years had slipped by and I hadn’t actually got very far with it.
I decided it was still definitely worth doing, but that I would take a slightly different tack and use my initial idea as a starting point rather than an end in itself. Thus has been born my new found sense of urgency… and it is this that I will try and document in these postings.
