Make Way For The Machine! (2017)
Single channel HD video, stereo.Digitized archive film, digitized painting, text, sampled sound, animation.
Make Way For The Machine! is a slogan from one of Soviet director Dziga Vertov’s film theory manifestos. Vertov worked with original and appropriated non-fiction footage in a vocabulary that I think of as futurist collage – part propaganda, part film art. In my Make Way I’ve similarly appropriated pre-existing media into a motion collage object, itself a kind of propaganda poster. The (literally) driving visual element is a one-second clip of a rotating machine part from Walther Ruttman’s 1927 Berlin: die Sinfonie der Großstadt. I've set this motion motif against itself in visual counterpoint, a strategy borrowed from music. I used Nicolás Solana’s Passion triptych as the source for the overlaying motion color abstraction driven by the Ruttman footage. The three text "gears" are excerpts from Teddy Roosevelt’s 1912 speech Social and Industrial Justice, recorded by Thomas Edison, dealing with the American transition from a rural, farm culture to a culture dominated and defined by cities.