Left Write, 2009 from Callum Strong on Vimeo.
Left Write, 2009
Digital video installation
ACAF Workshop Investigation
Collaborators:
Callum Strong (NZ), Hunter Causey (USA), Mark Henley (NZ)
Left Write explores the inversion of foreign experience within the Arab world. Utilizing a hybridization of photographic mediums, a digital camera coupled with a twin lens reflex box camera, a visual inversion of the urban experience is realized.
Through the idiosyncratic image inversion of the twin lens reflex's viewing frame Left becomes Right. Iconic sights are visually mirrored and Arabic text is explored in a western manner of panning from left to right.
The marriage of analog and digital technology creates a nostalgic super 8 like aesthetic, displacing time to unsettle the familiar aspects of the Alexandrian coastal urban environment.
The mirroring of cars on the 'wrong side' of the road, with their drivers appearing to drive right-hand-drive automobiles reconsiders geographic orientation. Combined with the hand-flipped summoning / 'shoo-ing' gestures so strong in Arabic culture promotes a sense of calm to aspects of the collaborative's homeland experiences.
