One-Minute Wonders #1–6

Olive Grove, Zakynthos

The One-Minute Wonders movies I shot at Zakynthos (the Greek island) back in October 2010 are now on show at Perth Theatre as part of the Encounters II: With Time exhibition.

Time is subjective and the way we experience time depends upon how much seems to be happening. These six one-minute movies have no soundtrack at the exhibition. I purposely stripped out the audio tracks hoping to fool people into thinking that the movies were still photographic images, as there's very little action except for the slight movement of leaves and grasses and the occasional flying insect, and I didn't want the soundtrack to give the show away, particularly as I'd gone to the trouble of presenting the movies in a digital frame which looks at first glance like a traditional picture frame.

This version of all six one-minute movies has acquired a soundtrack which I recorded at the official opening on Sunday 26th June. It's as if the movies have acquired the sound through experience.

There are now three layers of time – the time at which the footage was taken (October 2010), the exhibition opening time as represented by the new soundtrack (June 2011), and the timeline of the online viewer.

Related Posts

On this Blog

Encounters With Time;
Adventures with a digital frame.

On BAD info

Exhibition Opening by Genie Dee;
Encounters With Time by Fanny Christie.

Encounters With Time

I'm happy to report that my first "one-minute wonders" video series (olive grove 1–6) will be exhibited at Threshold Artspace, Perth Theatre, from 26th June—14th October, as part of the Encounters With Time exhibition.

Encounters With Time features works by 24 members of Perthshire Visual Arts Forum selected by Maria Devaney, Senior Curator at Perth Museum and Art Gallery, and Guest Curator of this exhibition.

Other works on show include those by Aileen Stackhouse, Alison Leeper, Anita Hutchison, Ann Coomber, Charmian Pollok, Clare Yarrington, Claudia Wegner, Darienne Tosh, Douglas McBride, Genie Dee, Jackie Smith, Katy Galbraith, Kay Hood, Kyra Clegg, Lesley Mcdermott, Lorna Radbourne, Malize McBride, Mary Golden, Marysa Lachowicz, Rosemary Bassett, Su Grierson, Tricia Anderson, and Bruce Shaw.

At the opening (or shortly thereafter) I'll be recording the ambient sound in the exhibition space and this will become the soundtrack for a new version of my "one-minute wonders 1–6" which will be posted on YouTube.

Here's one of those "one-minute wonders" with no soundtrack, pretty much as it will appear at the exhibition (along with its five siblings):



For more information, visit Threshold Artspace
and Perthshire Visual Arts Forum

Coming to terms with the death of a close friend

When my friend Gordon McNeill-Wilkie passed on, I had a sense of unreality. How could this great man have left us so soon? He was 50 years old. He was my Reiki master and teacher. We'd worked together very closely as dry-stane dykers, I'd assisted him on courses he gave in advanced healing techniques and psychic self-defence, and now he was gone.

Both Gordon's partner and his ex-wife had asked if I had any footage of Gordon, and I remembered that Genie had shot some footage of the two of us back in the winter of 2007 while we were demolishing and rebuilding a retaining wall out at Enochdhu.

Editing Genie's 50 minutes of footage, taken as a means for her to learn the workings of the video camera, was rather arduous. Not that the footage was bad, but rather the experience of seeing it again was not an easy thing for me. When you are editing a movie like this you watch certain scenes over and over again, and it was a couple of days before I started to feel good about what I was doing.

In the end it was a healing process for me, and I am happy with the result. This is how I want to remember my friend, and I know that many of those who knew Gordon feel the same way.

Adventures with spam

I've had a very frustrating week. I have two videos that need editing but have been distracted by a spam attack on our community website, BAD info.

This WordPress-powered blog had been running without a glitch until last Thursday when I suddenly started to receive email notifications of new subscribers. Hundreds of them. Every day. They were all spammers, sorry, "marketers".

The bots are easily identified and removed from the equation as there's no user device. Known spammers are also easily excluded using the various plug-ins available for WordPress.

I've ended up removing the "Join us and subscribe" widget altogether, and am asking new contributors to email me so I can set up their user accounts myself.

Yet new spammers are still managing to register. I must be missing something here.

Rats!