KUNST in de Nieuwe Digitale Wondere Wereld 9
Daniel Crooks
Daniel Crooks is een Australische kunstenaar die opnames digitaal manipuleert om zo de tijd te manipuleren of te verstoren.
Melbourne-based video artist Daniel Crooks
Crooks’ work tests the new paradigms of space, time and vision forged by our ubiquitous digital image technologies. In 2011, he captivated Singaporean audiences with his piece Static No.12 (Seek Stillness in Movement), a mesmerising study of an elderly Tai Chi practitioner in a Shanghai park. For this piece, the artist was honoured with the APB Foundation Signature Art Prize, Juror’s Choice Award. More recently, he took out the digital/video prize at the inaugural Prudential Eye Awards (2014).Recalling the experimental origins of the moving image – the so-called ‘chronophotography’ of the 19th century – Crook’s beguiling compositions explore the fundamentals of human perception. In his celebrated ‘time slice’ series, begun in 1999, he extracts thin slices of moving images and rearranges them, altering the relationship between space and time.
Crooks’ work gives the digital image a new elasticity, employing techniques of angle variation, light diffusion and chromatic patterning to effect uncanny and intriguing mutations of the visible world. His videos reveal its unseen rhythms and patterns; time becomes a spatial, plastic dimension, something that can be moulded and transformed.
For Crooks, the frantic pace of contemporary life gives rise to a new experience of time. Inspired by the bustling metropolises of Asia, he is drawn to diametrically opposed subjects, from high-speed trains to solitary drifters, amid the urban chaos. These intense contrasts expand the gaps between ephemeral moments, amplifying the echoes of human presence in everyday social life.
About the artist
Daniel Crooks (born 1973 in Hastings, New Zealand) is one of Australia’s most renowned contemporary artists. In 1993 he completed his B.A. of Graphic Design at the Auckland Institute of Technology, New Zealand and received a Post Graduate Diploma of Animation, Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, in 1994. Since finalising his studies he has worked with photography and film, where he explores the perceptual change of the moving image using temporal and spatial displacement. In 2014 he was the recipient of the Digital Video award at the inaugural Prudential Eye Awards and in 2011 he received the Juror’s Choice Award for Asia Pacific Breweries Foundation, Signature Art Prize.
Crooks’ work is in the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne. In the spring of 2014 he took part in an artist-in-residence program at the Ars Electronica Futurelab to do research on his project Real Imaginary Objects where he created a series of sculptural works to be exhibited at the Ars Electronica Festival in early September. Recent solo exhibitions have taken place at the Samstag Museum of Art, University of South Australia (2013) and Monash University Museum of Art, Australia (2013). He participated in the group exhibition Australia at the Royal Academy of Arts in London (2013) and Marking Time at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2012).
