Capture

The relation between man and machine has been extensively explored in film, starting with Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera. These works explore relations between the human and captive but still wild animal, and the camera. The images are produced by the interaction of the camera’s eye, the human hand and eye, the instinct of a raptor trained to respond to the human, and the audience. | | This work developed out of the film Valley of Castles (Hunting Eagles. To make a part of that film the artist attached a miniature camera to a Kazakh Golden Eagle, which then filmed its own participation in the ancient practice of falconry. | | Capture juxtaposes footage shot on the miniature camera attached to a Kazakh Golden Eagle with archival footage of an eagle being captured to be trained for hunting, and then later hunting and killing silver foxes. | | Capture draws attention to the materiality of the film image. The textures and washed out colours of the archive film, by the Soviet director Vassily Belyayev, are reflected in the distorted low resolution digital noise of the eagle camera footage. The physical immediacy of the hunt, and violence of the capture – of prey, and of the image – inextricably link human to animal to machine. The resulting perspective is neither human, mechanical, nor animal but caught in-between. | |