#Truth unveiled by time series#

#Truth unveiled by time series#

Having experimented with these systems by tracking his own movement, Crooks has produced works that converse directly with his earlier Imaginary Object videos, and his ongoing series of photographic self-portraits that are made by joining the stilled frames of a moving video camera.ĭespite the specifically synthetic mode of manufacture of these first sculptures by Crooks, using intangible data to shape plastic and polyurethane, the finished materiality evokes a range of more familiar, organic substances such as porcelain, milk, or bone. The actual, physical objects describe discrete points of the artist’s continuous motions in space extruded through time. The resulting data was then accumulated into a model, a kind of time-stack, to be realised using computer controlled fabrication techniques.

This research enabled him to record, at high speed, a sequence of detailed cross-sections of a moving subject. Earlier this year, Crooks was invited by Ars Electronica’s Futurelab in Linz, Austria, to work on producing a new kind of ‘ 3D slicing camera’. The initial research for this body of work was developed over a number of years, before the technology required to achieve it was available. As in the video works he is known for, here Crooks has gathered from life a set of data, isolated and reconfigured in a way that reveals the motion of a plane as a three-dimensional volume. The 3D-printed and CNC-cut objects in ‘Truths Unveiled by Time’ are the manifestation of movement, captured and reproduced. Descriptions of any form of time invariably involve the illustration of particular kinds of movement, and in Daniel Crooks’ elegant sculptures, time is likewise located physically, materially, in space. This of course requires the steady evaporation of time. Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise describes the impossibility of the swift runner’s attempt to overtake even the slowest opponent who started earlier as the first to begin will always hold a lead. To question this experience quickly raises existential problems, to which science and philosophy offer a variety of consolations.

The understanding of time as a constant, unified and quantifiable phenomena is a convenient one.