Moment Variations

In physics, one definition of a moment is the rotation of an object being acted on by an external force. In this exhibition, we present a set of abstract visual music pieces that together make up a set of moment variations—a series of problems exploring what would happen if different forces were to act on the target object.

In our case, the object is a camera.

Each piece here, no matter what the camera, technique, or medium (in a collection of two artists’ work that in total spans 26 years, from VHS to 4K) was shot with a camera in some kind of continuous motion. Usually the camera is handheld (Dumb Abstraction No. 1), but sometimes it’s inside a vehicle (Traffic Flow I), recording in timelapse (Elegy), using a virtual camera in a game world (Arachnye), or all three at once (Traffic Flow III). Sometimes the technical process being explored is allowed to continuously feed outputs back into inputs (Traffic Flow II), and sometimes it’s deliberately interrupted in order to break the output (Demolition 1). And in all of these, we didn’t know what the end result would be when we began the experiment.

Artist Bios

Nick Fox-Gieg is an animator and developer based in Toronto. Most recently, he’s been working on XR projects at NYT T Brand Studio, the University of Waterloo, Google Creative Lab, and Framestore; his awards include a 2017 Engadget Alternate Realities grant, Eyebeam and Fulbright Fellowships, and the jury prize for Best Animated Short at SXSW 2010. His work has also been shown at the Ottawa, Rotterdam, and TIFF film festivals, at the Centre Pompidou, and on CBC TV; his practice has been supported by grants from Bravo!FACT, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the arts councils of Ontario, Pennsylvania, Toronto, and West Virginia. Fox-Gieg holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University.

Dumb Abstraction is an ongoing video and photography project by Meagan Williams, a self-taught video artist based in Toronto. Meagan holds a BA (Hons) in Political Studies from Queen’s University, an MA in Political Studies from the University of Saskatchewan, and an LLB from Western Law. She was called to the Bar in Ontario in 2013, and practices civil litigation at the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General. She shares her video and photography experiments on Instagram and Twitter @dumbabstraction.