Other Spaces

"Other Spaces", single screen video tape (1986)

Other Spaces (1986) was made as a companion piece to An Imaginary Landscape (1986), and uses some of the same video material, recorded in the interior of my home in Brixton, London in the mid 1980’s. My intention was to make a break from the image-processing techniques I had been using previously (working with video devices which included the Videokalos Image Processor, the CEL Frame store and Gemini twin TBC) and to develop a new work using only straight “cutting”- no mixes, wipes or other electronic image transitions.

The themes of the tape were closely connected to those of An Imaginary Landscape and involved working with ideas related to personal perceptual experience and the illusory nature of the electronic/televisual space. These themes were common to my video work in general , but additionally I was reflecting on issues relating to identity and gender, which were not only in line with my preoccupations at the time, but were also re-visited in later video work in the early 1990’s.

The use of texts is also something I explored in other tape works in this period, but in Other Spaces I attempted to make longer and more ambitious uses of words and phrases, with specific references to gender, sexuality and personality.

In this tape I also wanted to investigate the potential possibilities of acoustic space, making use of only “natural” ambient sounds, and this was a new departure for me, as most of my soundtrack work at the time was more heavily layered and often included the use of non-diegetic music.

"Other Spaces" (1986)