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Laurel's Handle

2004
Video
8-minutes

 

The materials that construct an image on the screen – light, dark, colour – move in relation to each other, here with sound, to construct a cinematic spectre. The shapes take on form which may have a bearing upon our memory of, encounters with, past perceptions. A hand, a handle, movement, transporting us across the dimensions of the screen, from the space of an image to a place of reminiscence. The banality of everyday activities, operations, procedures interact with memories of intimacy, distance, presence.
The title refers to Brenda Laurel's work in the 1980s with Apple on HCI: "A doorknob is the interface between a person and a door". The person who appears briefly at the end of the video is Darren Tofts who also commented on the matter: "An interface... is any act of conjunction which results in a new or unexpected event." Of course, neither of these people have anything to do with the experience of the movie. But maybe Proust does:
“These shifting and confused gusts of memory never lasted for more than a few seconds; it often happened that, in my brief spell of uncertainty as to where I was, I did not distinguish the successive theories of which that uncertainty was composed any more than, when we watch a horse running, we isolate the successive positions of its body as they appear upon a bioscope.”
Marcel Proust ‘Swanns Way – In Search of Lost Time’.