Extraordinary Rendition. Lisa Steele & Kim Tomczak. 2012. Video, colour, silent. 1:20
The Miniatures is an on-going series of small-scale video installations featuring imagery drawn from the natural world in combination with political slogans, a juxtaposition that lends instability to both systems of classification and representation. In each work, a text fragment crawls slowly across the image as both commentary and directive, a clear politic for conscious thought and considered action.
We began to produce this series in 1998, using newly available digital cameras for recording. They started as technical and conceptual experiments. We wanted to make works that were very, very short – not a format we had worked in previously. And we wanted to see if political slogans from the past could be seen in a new, more contemporary, light. We asked: would they be “read” differently out of their original context of protest?
Most of the imagery incorporated into each of The Miniatures is playing at very slow speed, resulting in dream-like dissonance as the often blunt slogans (“Free Speech”, “Power To the People”) pass over the surface of flowers, animals, fish and insects. Standing in for those struggles of the past – still unresolved for the most part – can they be pretty and still resonate politically?