Secret Machine (2009)

• 76%
• 2009
• Reynold Reynolds

In 2)Secret Machine, the protagonist encounters an antagonist that is studying her, measuring her body and comparing her to units of space and time. Clocks rush and her movements are calculated on a grid: the eye is observed through lenses; her breath is submitted to a resistance rate by putting her under water; needles are used to quantify her reactions and pain: and her voice and motion are recorded. For the scientist measurement is understanding. While human nature appears confined in the framework and efforts of rationality, the aspiration of trapping the soul conduce the antagonist to imagine the improvable.Artists statement on 2)Secret Machine: In this piece I was thinking of the first filmmaker, Muybridge, and his motion studies and relationship to science. He began analyzing horses running and then dedicated his life to his motion studies of humans and animals. In 2)Secret Machine the woman is subjected to Muybridges motion studies. She is treated in the same fashion as in the original Muybridge photography: with Greek aesthetic in a Cartesian grid. Later, Duchamp painted Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) attempting to show time on a flat surface. It was similar to Muybridge, but with overlapping images. I think this is Duchamps most important work. He is expanding cubism and painting into another dimension: time. He is attempting to paint time, something that is a concept, not an object.Time is about movement and change, like our experience of reality. Without change, life does not exist. Photography does not capture this experience. In 2)Secret Machine I compare different filming techniques to the motion of the body. The film camera becomes another measurement tool in a way a video camera cannot. My intention was to make a work from the point of view of a machine, specifically a camera.