Developed from a previous partnership inbetween the 2 artists, 3000 Mirrors uncouples videofootage of the sun from its digital footprint, changing ghosting and lens flare into independently self-governing digital entities.
In the work of Mark Prendergast the world is seen inadifferentway. Using numerous techniques of digital image control, the artist focuses in on the peculiarities of the kind of images that is inextricable from the modern minute. From mobilephone image stabilization algorithms to element ratio rotates and movement tracking, in works such as EYE FALL and his video for Holly Childs and Gediminas Žygus’s collective track ‘Hand Axe’, Prendergast playfully overturns the conventions of digital imaging tools and the languages that govern them, enacting an continuous interrogation of the complex textures of digital aestheticappeals. This approach is continued in 3000 Mirrors, his most current cooperation with Joeri Woudstra, muchbetter understood as the manufacturer and noise artist Torus. Taken from his current EP for Tresor Records, 333 Mirrors, the track is a spiritual follower to ‘300 Mirrors’, which started life as part of an audiovisual cooperation inbetween Prendergast and Woudstra entitled These Cars Do Not Exist. In that work videofootage of the sea and the sky, clouds and concrete, pigeons, seagulls and bats is distorted and refocused to carefully lysergic result, approximating a smartphone lens eye view of daily things and animals. In 3000 Mirrors, videofootage of the sun is uncoupled from the artefacts of its digital footprint, transforming lens flare and ghosting into independently self-governing digital entities.
“I was outside on a warm day taking a photo with my phone, I pointed my videocamera at the sun and observed that blue-green dot, an aberration of the lenses of the current iPhones,” describes Prendergast. “The flare was extremely present since the image of the sky and sun was so easy. This worried dot is on a lot of our images however it has kind of been folded into visual language and is now something we puton’t see. It fades into the background, or infact foreground, of the image and I desired to provide it some existence.” Opening on rolling clouds, expressive of the unlimited scroll and the imperceptibly smooth relationship we have with our screens, the radial flare of the sun shows a highly allowed flattening of the star, it’s image digitally replicated as visual result. Just as Woudstra’s arpeggiated bliss starts its serotonin spiking ascendency, the sun and its iPhone caused visual artefacts are apart, moving as tracers detached from one another, as though manifesting the stress inbetween silence and sonic swell that drives Woudstra’s production. “As I was shooting I was thinking about the concept of mediation,” Prendergast continues, “how by putting a cam inbetween me and the sun there was kind of a videogame I might play. The electroniccamera offered me a brand-new, enhanced relationship with the sun.”
“The sun and the dot endedupbeing something like a paintbrush, so there was a procedure of figuring out how to work with it as a brand-new medium, how to draw with it and what kinds of marks it can make,” he continues. “I am playing with light and how our eyes view it, I believe the video feels really intense however it is no brighter than anything else on your screen, which likewise comes with the undertones of the sun. I believe both the images and the music are checkingout abstraction and atmosphere. There’s a brightness to the track, and likewise a sense of attempting to gottenridof or push forward which I feel is encapsulated by digital techniques enabling the sun a brand-new kind of firm. It endsupbeing alive in a various kind of method.” Just as Woudstra reconfigures the heavenly charm of the track’s environment through stroboscopic loops and remote percussive crashes, Prendergast transforms the visual experience of pointing your phone at the sky into a generative procedure, transforming an abstraction of the sun into the raw product of his visual structure. In 3000 Mirrors, the image of the sun and the ephemeral blue-green dot that, through