Urban Episodes

For these six urban capsules filmed in Minneapolis, Steina attached different lenses and mirrors to the camera. She also used a turntable to create a pan shot moving from left to right. These works are part of the Machine Vision (1975-) corpus and reproduce elements of Allvision (1975-). A platform was set atop a turntable, and the camera and the optical devices were placed at opposite ends. While the pan shot was being filmed, the camera, equipped with mirrors and lenses, also rotated vertically and moved sideways. Certain capsules present an unusual arrangement of the urban landscape by showing both the space that the contraption revolves around and the images reflected by the mirrors or deflected by the lenses. Overall, the capsules offer a typology of the angles that a camera can adopt to break the visible world down into its different components. – Fondation Langlois