fields

Casting Time #2

Casting Time #2

Chris Speed, Margaret Stewart, Jules Rawlinson & Jane Macdonald

17th – 28th June 2013, Tent Gallery, Edinburgh College of Art

Part of the Cast Contemporaries exhibition in the 2012 Edinburgh Art Festival, Casting Time #1 presented a ‘real-time’ digital representation of a live nude model that was transmitted from a painting studio within Edinburgh College of Art to an LCD screen within the gallery.

The scenes transmitted across the internet, were based upon historical tableaux’s that featured Graeco-Roman casts and poses that recur throughout art history. The final tableau recalls the Trustees Academy – the forerunner institution of the Edinburgh College of Art. It also recalls the end of the classical tradition and the beginning of the modern period in art history.

The intervention of the computer mediated the speed at which images were relayed from the studio and created a temporal disruption that placed the live model out of ‘real time’. Rather like the casts themselves that have changed little in 100 years throughout the life of the college, the model was rendered as a statue, cast in time.

A year on, recordings of the original stream are being replayed in a research studio within the College and are being streamed in real time to this gallery. The process of webcasting a copy of the original documentation is similar to the method of making copies (casts) from original sculptures, a process that results in minor degradation from the original form and applies a further temporal layer to the age of the work.

With the second layer of time, the image of the model features slices of the past video and a further slice captured in the present, making for some unexpected glitches in the representation of the body.

The work is part of the CAST ECHOES Exhibition by ECA Alumni Christine Clark & Rob Davies in the Tent Gallery Evolution House.