Hard to tell at this distance: video piece made from found video footage and royalty-free music, which shows the spectacular view from the top of a mountain at the end of a Norwegian cable car journey

Hard To Tell At This Distance (2011) is a video piece made from found video footage and royalty-free music, which shows the spectacular view from the top of a mountain at the end of a Norwegian cable car journey. Captured by persons unknown using the now obsolete Video-8 format, the footage has been digitised and re-edited, leaving the unstable camerawork and prosaic voiceover of the original director intact.

This piece responds to current debates in both landscape art and digital media. The source footage is dated from 1993, at the height of the camcorder boom and a key moment at the beginning of the democratisation of media production that would later reach a peak with the advent of YouTube. The piece is nostalgic for the naivety of amateur production before such efforts had global reach.

The amateurishness of the footage, shot without a tripod references the unmanaged transition from one type of consumer photography to another, but also gives the piece a conflicted relationship to landscape theory. The urgent, searching pans across the landscape suggest a desire to move through the landscape, and therefore an affinity with the idea of landscape as an embodied experience. That these shaky pans are shot from a single viewpoint invokes a more traditional idea of landscape as a morally uplifting ‘view’ that should be admired from predetermined ‘stations’.

Exhibited in the group exhibition Th’Owd Towser, Holmfirth, June 2011. Curated by Alice Bradshaw and Vanessa Haley.
Exhibited in the group exhibition Nothing Ever Happens, OSR Projects, Yeovil, June 2012. Curated by Nia Metcalfe.
Exhibited in the group exhibition Possession(1), Bangkok Arts and Cultural Centre, March 2013.Curated by Steve Dutton and Brian Curtin. (Catalogue)