View

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Sometimes a fictional book review saves you the trouble of writing the book, and sometimes a fictional art review serves in place of the art you can't make yourself.

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Re:View
by Nabil Tarkovski
Published 2113, Journal of Temporal Art

Reflexive timelapse films have become an established minor genre in the digital arts. It perhaps started with JKs Living My Life Faster, in which the artist simply took one picture of their face a day for 8 years and played them in rapid sequence. Then Noah Kalina's similar but unnamed project became a lifelong artwork, inspiring dozens of related ideas including one where we see a baby girl's face change literally from day one.

Suzan Webb's work is slightly different. At age 18, in the first week of her first art degree, having just moved into student digs, she found an old laptop and webcam in a skip, plus a battered camera tripod. Later in interview she said the idea came to her instantly, but she didn't expect to continue it for more than a week, let alone twelve years later.

Her room had just one window, and she set up the camera and computer to take one snapshot of her view every hour - but only when she was in the room. When she later moved into a place with two windows, she begged another cam and laptop from a fellow student, and continued her project in stereo.

This timelapse would most likely have little merit if Webb didn't change living space quite so often - and indeed didn't now stay in quite so many cheap hotels in so many countries.

As it is the vista changes from the initial scene of derelict factories, to a split screen of park and kebab shop. to a back garden going through the seasons with occasional bouts of highspeed rain, split with clouds seen through a skylight, to views from homes of friends in New York, her mother's holiday home in Scotland, and a building site somewhere in London.

Occasionally there are black frames, sometimes one or two, sometimes as much as three month's worth, and these I think give a clue to the real meaning of the work. Webb only shows us her life through her views from windows. The black frames are from hours and days when she isn't behind any windows, or in any building. Occasionally she sleeps under the stars, and sometimes she hikes through hills and valleys - in Australia, Canada and the Hindu Kush.

Some use cameras to record their holidays and time outdoors. Webb records what she can see of the outdoors, when she's indoors. This is a record of a person's homelife - one that never shows the home or the person.

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