Traffic Light
(2010)
makers: Flavia Browne, Julian Dan, Tim Kennedy.
This work is a major departure from the other projects created. I was surprised that no one else played with this as a possibility, where the ability to have thumbnails as videos are used not so much as navigation, as secondary to a main video window, but become the video window in their own right. In this way, and Traffic Light exemplifies this, you have a strong model for Manovich's spatial montage, which is for my money made more elegant as the play state is controlled by the mouse enter and exit.
In this work mousing into any of the three videos will play it. Mouse into the one next to it and the first video stops and the next one starts. Click and it performs the usual Korsakow system search to find matches, generating three more video windows. As yoiu play the work you begin to wonder what the difference might be if this only used photographs, with a continuous soundtrack. Or perhaps videos like here, but a separate soundtrack. The sound could provide some narrative trajectory, commentary, or observation. All the material is observational, and revolves around what I imagine is the commute each of the students experiences from the suburbs to the city campus. They are fragmentary, partial, and the patterns that coalesce seem to be around evening or night, and modes of travelling - the train, a car journey, the tram. Clips seem to live forever here, which I think is meant to suggest certain qualities about the commute (and traffic?) but it makes the one drive in daylight, and what seems to be a linked clip of dirt and grass odd, until you leave the mouse on it and realise it is a road cutting and you're simply at a tram stop.
I think this is an intriguing experiment, that has worked well. It is an observational, fragmentary mood piece about bitumen and rail, suburban all the way down.