Video Hits

Storytelling takes shape in bizarre, interesting and powerful ways in digital spaces.

Six artists have collaborated to create new video works. Paired up to respond to each other’s work, see footage compiled by one artist collide with an audio track created in response to the visuals.

Magdalena x Annelyse

Visuals by Magdalena Ball, Audio by Annelyse Gelman

Magdalena: This work (“Eternity in Time”) was a meditation on time and its many permeations: the ticking clock, the life of our species, our planet, and our bodies in conjunction with the artistic process, the seeing eye, and perception from which time is made and through which it is transcended.

Annelyse: This type of elemental, archetypal imagery – prototypical representations of big abstractions like Time and Nature – is something I usually shy away from in my work, so I tried to tackle that hesitation head-on through aesthetic contrast. What makes the sun, the mountain, or the clock pleasurable to look at, what does this pleasure consist of, and what does that mean?

Annelyse x Magdalena

Visuals by Annelyse Gelman, Audio by Magdalena Ball

Annelyse: Exploring the territory of occlusion: a viewer (the equivalent of the speaker of a poem?) blinking in and out of different scenes, following a figure but never glimpsing her face. I shot this footage with my friend Emily at Tempelhofer Feld, a disused-airfield-turned-public-park in Berlin.

Magdalena: (provisionally titled “Perception is not a science”) I was guided by the video, which showed children playing coupled with a slow walk through decaying relics of the past, punctuated by black gaps like a groping for memory. The music, written by my daughter, worked with my words to draw out the nostalgia and create a narrative thread.

Sarah x Sarinah

Visuals by Sarah Walker, Audio by Sarinah Makusor

Sarah: Every now and then, I have one of those moments of coming to – when you’re suddenly conscious of where you are, and have no idea how you’ve got there. And those days where your dreams seep into your reality and you can’t quite extricate yourself. Featuring the excellent Lucy Hotchin.

Sarinah: Handmade sounds to respond to surreal images. Working with what you have on hand. Relentless machine hiss.

Sarinah x Sarah

Visuals by Sarinah Masukor, Audio by Sarah Walker

Sarinah: A scene recreated from half memories. Record players replaced by laptops. Camera tests. Silent speech.

Sarah: We’ve all had those days. The ones where everything feels underwater and you’re trying to shut your brain up, trying to find the point between anxiety and despair. The ones where everything’s just wrong. That’s what this video brought up for me.

Chloe x Nathania

Visuals by Chloë Callistemon, Audio by Nathania Gilson

Chloe: Putting together the video, I was thinking about the micro movements that happen around us or to us as a result of our intended movements – the small motions that we rarely pay much attention to – and whether they are purely superficial.

Nathania: When the world ends, will we hear it coming? Perhaps in the rumble of a hydrogen bomb. Or followed by the blistering delirium of a fever dream. We can’t help it: our survival instincts are at war with our grounds for hope.

Nathania x Chloe

Visuals by Nathania Gilson, Audio by Chloë Callistemon

Nathania: “Never forget”, they said. And so we commune with unfamiliar faces; rub shoulders with the past. We invite them into our homes and memorise the way they walk. We speak to them, but they don’t speak back. Still, we hope. We try not to make the same mistakes.

Chloe: Writing the text and putting together the audio over the archival footage, I was thinking about what it means to communicate or tell stories as a human, particularly over long distances – how misunderstanding is guaranteed but something is always transferred or echoed across.