Three Triangles

Three Triangles_HD video with animation._7:14,21 min_Dan Shipsides_2015Video landscape featuring a concrete retrieval expedition to a summit outside Belfast._Filmed straight and also through a kaleidoscope. Edited in three triangulated parts.A short video from a series of works which have their origins in expeditions (adventures and misadventures) which engage both documentary and experimental approaches to filming and editing. Specially made devices (e.g. cable mounts, kaleidoscopes or a camera leash) used in these works to film the expedition are combined with graphic work, animation and still image editing to render the documentary narrative of the footage ‘useless’ or at least open.These approaches embrace landscape as the living experience of the world around us, here and now, as much as the cultured and framed perspective of landscape as a genre or concept within culture. Within this approach, perception, especially visual perception is a key component. However, here as in other methods I've instigated, I’m keen to usurp the primacy and organising principles of sight in the apprehension and construction of landscape. With these video works I wish to augment or intervene in sight and to develop a form of ‘pata-perception. 'Pata-perception is an emerging concept in my work where one might perceive something, recognise nothing, conceive anything and cognise everything.My work has generally been in pursuit of landscape – embracing a concept of landscape as the living experience of the world around us here and now as much as the cultured and framed perspective of landscape as a genre within culture. Perception therefore is a key starting point. However, I’ve often set out with some opposition to the primacy of sight in the apprehension and construction of landscape. Even if it’s distant, divorced or obscure, some form of fidelity to the experience or encounter is important to me, at least as key to starting a creative process. I’m less convinced now in the direct lens or pure observation as being adequately faithful - it’s too trapped by the organizing principles of the cultured eye. So I have successively tried to intervene in that process and let a wider flush of real-life contribute – life with all its contextual contingencies and geometries. So I utilize bespoke devices along with lateral and open approaches such as climbing, falling, repeating, layering, colliding, juxtaposing, trashing, living and laughing to render a twisting, synthetic, plastic, messy, but always correlative and equivalent perceptual force or material. The perceiving of this work might be sometimes painful, sometimes pleasurable but I hope the viewer might be faced with a set of live, pulsing and contingent material around which to hold their own encounter and dialogue. These works feature geometric shapes (stars, triangles) in relation to the built and natural landscapes I encountered in making these works. They introduce a possibility of an encounter which might meld the socio-political with the texture of the experiential. Both use captured footage and animation in a way that perverts the sense of the ‘real’ into a ‘new real’ – or a ‘real then’ into ‘real now’.