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Inbetween Cities

I spend far too much of my life commuting as a passenger on mass transport systems. Looking out of the window of a fast-moving vehicle close up all you see are blurs. Further away objects rotate serenely by revealing a good two hundred and seventy degrees of their appearance to you by the time they’re gone. These works are a fairly literal record of this observation. Just with the volume turned up to eleven.

The “Spins” are based on the (in)famous futurist bust of Mussolini, just using animal silhouettes instead of Il Duce’s profile. Motorways are a fascist invention. I was first struck by how strange animals look seen from a moving vehicle on the back of an open-top four-wheel-drive vehicle driven by a madman speeding down a country lane. You tend to notice things like that when the adrenaline kicks in. The silhouettes are spun away from their centre; this maintains the fact of what is seen whilst destroying the literal record. I made a 3D kaleidoscope program of these as well but I’ve lost the source code.

The “Blurs” again started fairly literal. They are what you see in tube tunnels, in cuttings, in underpasses, whenever something is too close. Later Blurs became more Vorticist in appearance or began introducing figures (or animals again) into the landscape. I think I’m the first person to have done this sort of thing, I certainly did it differently.

Click here to see the work.