TRANSIENT MODES OF DESTRUCTION

ABOUT THIS PROJECT

‘The need to create alternative forms of expression out of the very technologies that impact our lives’, Helen Clemens.

Transient Modes of Destruction is an artwork series where the body of work has been created by a selection of individual video frames and presented as a print collection. Each frame has been selected from the video recordings of Helen’s early work as a video artist and her live video performances.

These artworks embrace an anti-technology look and feel. The abstract images are colourful yet corroding shapes and forms are painterly and lo-fi. The colours are bright, hyper and acidic. The aesthetic inherently rejects today’s artificial perfection which new media technologies enforce and influence their audiences into thinking we should consume media and technology the way they intend.

The artworks depict moments of natural disasters combined with space technologies and incorporate mystic visual inferences and samples from media culture. Indeed, the speed at which society can update technologies for new ones, nature can destroy in that one moment too.

These artworks represent one moment in time, one frame, where by there is harmony amongst the constant visual stream of consciousness. For Helen, these frames are visual temples of harmony. Hence, when Helen is making her films and artworks, she lives by her motto ‘every frame is a temple’.

The live video performances have been created by Helen patching multiple video sources which are overlayed and ‘vision-mixed’ in an improvisational fashion, on-the-fly. Real-time effects are applied through analogue hardware and software, cascading through video channels where the final single video stream is an unstoppable new generative image sequence.

It is a unique visual synthesis and the process feels like a stream of consciousness creating order out of chaos.

© Helen Clemens. All Rights Reserved.

DIRECTOR Helen Clemens
TITLE Transient Modes of Destruction
TECHNOLOGY  Multi-Channel Video Installation / NatoMax MSP / X Pose / Videotape / Fairlight Computer Video Instrument / Panasonic MX10 + MX12 /