datableed

Slow Machines is the result of an artist’s residency that I undertook in Skolkovo, Moscow, on an AHRC-funded research trip to Russia in April, 2015. It is a series of three-second clips that have been stretched, slowed and datamoshed together. The film concerns itself with the concept of change-over-time in relation to society, translation and poetics. The work seeks to create a hybrid digital text that produces an infrastructure of textual language, imagery and sound in a dynamic and plastic suspension. Slow Machines mixes footage of the residential buildings of the community in Skolkovo with the more famous landmark architecture of central Moscow. The work is underpinned by a sequence of poems and it is felt that the site of interaction, where translation takes place, is in some way represented through the morphing and moshing of the English and Russian versions of the text. The film featured as an installation in the ‘Inspiration + Algorithm’ exhibition at the Skolkovo Gallery in Moscow throughout May, 2015.

 

Images, text and music: Daniel O’Donnell-Smith, 2015.

 

Russian translation by Natalia Shipakina.