Near Real Time

Intrinsically circular and episodic in form, Near Real Time reflects on our contemporary relationship with images, seen through the historical prism of a pioneering community television project. Their last surviving taped broadcasts provide the starting point for Pickering’s portrayal of a collective imagination and the ways in which it crystallised a relationship to camera. The depicted characters seem adrift as they mouth a shared monologue, looking to understand their status as images in situations that appear mutable and plastic. In timeless staging or re-imaginings of fragments, forms reproduce themselves and wander from scene to scene. A hanging lab coat becomes a white sheet, a costume, a ghost, a grotesque sculpture of a leg. The voiceover describes focus, volume and light, as if to understand its own mediated appearance in an emphatic present.