Swimming animistic is a three channel video projection that encourages a re-thinking and re-experiencing of the public environment of the Portside Wharf.  The work, which incorporates moving images shot onsite at Portside, draws on Walter Benjamin’s concept of the flaneur – a figure who walks the streets slowly in order to more carefully observe the environment around them, as well as techniques used in the 1920s City Symphonies film genre – a movement which sought to explore film’s potential to engender new visual and sonic practices of flaneurie.  Assuming the role of film-maker as flaneur, I wandered through Portside over a period of days, documenting built and natural landscapes and activities of people going about their every day lives.

But more than relaying gentle stories about Portside, the work explores the notion of film as a form and surface that can be manipulated via electronic and traditional (painting, printmaking) art making processes. In this way most of the frames used in much of the Swimming Animistic footage have been exported from initial drafts of video footage as TIFF files (with as many as 10000 frames for five minutes of footage).  Some of these frames have been digitally manipulated while many of the files have been printed on photographic paper and drawn and painted on before being scanned back into the computer and reassembled as a film.  The result is a kind of moving painting that encourages viewers to re-interpret the Wharf landscape that surrounds them.  In this way, it was hoped that the work might represent more sensitive and deeply experiential relationships between people and their environment, encouraging viewers to think about the way that built landscapes, natural environments, and the man made objects that inhabit them are things that possess their own souls.