I was watching my brother eat lunch at the crest of a hill in south Wicklow when the question first came to mind. The large format field camera stood beside us, its sensitive film hidden away in a satchel by the car’s rear wheel. I was shooting digitally – asked to document his photo-making process as he meandered across the countryside. The question concerned my role as an active observer; did my footage have value independent of the subject it aimed to depict? If I edited together the recordings but did not show the images that my brother obtained, would it be incomplete? This question of ownership brought about another; did I own his image simply because I was the one who made the recording? Your Image is Mine is my interdisciplinary investigation of these concepts. The work is influenced by theories in the field of film and sound, namely; the ideal observer, spectromorphology, cinema as a verbocentric medium, embodiment on-screen, and documentary as art. Filmmaker Lois Patiño’s work exploring the relationship between humans and landscape informed my initial compositions and Ben Russell’s strobing montages are incorporated in my edit. Other influences include the music of Suzanne Ciani and Marcel Weber’s treatment of light and material. For clarity, this essay will first break down the components of the work. It will then explore the visual, audio, and projection treatments independent of each other. From this, I will detail the interdisciplinary approach I took and the dimensions I believe it added. Finally, a reflection will be made on the documentation process itself and the realisation of the final film.

Your Image exists in multiple forms but is in its most evolved state a documentation of an installation. To break the work down further; at the core are the images taken by my brother, the film's character. I recorded and edited his image-making process into a short collection of scenes. The scenes are scored and the character’s comments on my methodology are reintroduced, creating an audiovisual meditation on the concept of image ownership. The resulting audiovisual piece is projected into a sheet of plastic in a gallery space, donning the guise of an installation. To complete the process, the projection itself is filmed. In recognition of the contemplation that instigated the work, I decided not to include my brother’s images in the final film.

Patiño situates himself in the centre of the frame in his short film In Landscape’s Movement (2012), surrounded by an expansive environment barren of people. The scale of each scene combined with the incremental changes within the landscape results in a video that imitates a photograph. I believe that in his work Patiño found a method of authentically recording the act of observation. As the early stages of Your Image were concerned with this idea, I decided to incorporate this technique in my compositional framing. Pat Collins’s documentary Silence (2012) does something similar, with a further emphasis on noise. Vsevolod Pudovkin’s theory of the ‘ideal observer’ suggests that the camera is best placed where it can successfully deliver a scene to the eye of the viewer and that this objective should be supported by the edit. Ben Russell’s short film Against Time (2022) problematises this by rapidly intercutting scenes and disorientating the viewer. A spiralling fairground ride becomes a silhouette on a wall, and then a close-up of an infant’s face. The ‘observed’ image is corrupted as a result; each frame merges and is therefore redefined. I imitated this technique in the pre-projection edit of Your Image. Stacking layers of video and then cutting at regular intervals, I removed sections of the upper video to allow the underlying frames to occupy the screen. I found that the effect was achieved most effectively at a rate of three frames per scene, with clips containing high-contrast colours and steady movement.

Suzanne Ciani was an important artist during the scoring phase of Your Image. Her work Concert At Phil Niblock's Loft (2017) offers a mirage of soundscapes punctuated with syncopated chords and rhythms articulated through a synthesiser. Denis Smalley posits that listeners categorise sounds as either gestural, a ‘sense of forward motion, of linearity, of narrativity’ or textual, one which concentrates on ‘internal activity at the expense of forward impetus’. This distinction can be made when listening to Ciani’s work. This component of the theory of spectromorphology was kept in mind when I sculpted the score of Your Image. As the film opens with an image and sound of the sea, an F-sharp chord played by a reversed digital organ slowly bleeds into the background. The atmosphere is established by the textual instrument and then disrupted by the repetitive, gestural beat of an electronic drum machine. This occurs simultaneously with the rapid-cut editing to augment the new phrase. Further manipulation of the score came from careful automation of the tracks. By controlling the tonal parameters and volume, I was able to blend the instruments and external sound elements into a unified composition.

Composer Michel Chion argues that cinema is a verbocentric phenomenon that 'almost always privileges the voice’. The first half of Your Image falls prey to this, with audio recordings of the character’s musings not only mixed into the score but embedded as subtitles. As the words pertain to the theme of the work, I wanted to give his reflection a certain significance. However, in keeping with my experimental treatment of edit and score, I attempted to end the film with a subversion of Chion’s claim. Influenced by Paul Lansky’s nonsensical track Notjustmoreidlechatter (2005), I manipulated a sequence of audio (02:39), my response to the dialogue, through a step modulator. This allowed me to convert my voice into indecipherable noise. From this, I mapped the sound onto the drum machine and corrupted the film’s verbocentricity. It is worth considering that it is at this point when the work’s title begins to flash on-screen, so one could argue that rather than decentralise the film from a verbocentric position, I merely translated its message from a verbal to a written state.

Marcel Weber collaborated with musician Caterina Barbieri and visual artist Ruben Spini to create the backdrop for her tour performances of the album Spirit Exit (2022). Weber experimented with fabrics and light to place the audience in an imitation of an elegant ballroom, complete with drooping veils and low-hanging clouds. Paired with the celestial sound of Barbieri’s tracks, Weber aimed to place the audience in an ‘indefinite world’. Inspired by the concept of refracting light via semi-transparent material, I projected the edited version of Your Image through a plastic covering. The resulting image, a bulbous container of light positioned in a gallery space, brought to mind Weber’s description of an ‘elegant’ environment. Standing closer to the plastic, I found that a mosaic of film had been created on its surface. While it appeared flattened in tone and lost the peripheral extremes of the frame, I felt compelled to record a close-up of the film through this view. After taking this footage, I reincorporated a cropped version with reduced opacity in its centre, clarifying the image while retaining the quality of the translucent plastic. If the filmed projection was sped up, the viewer would notice that the plastic droops by the end. Its form appears stationary but is in fact constantly in motion. A homage to Patiño’s films, the earliest inspiration for the work, it reminds the viewer that observation is a complex act.

The manner in which the edited sequence was caught by the material echoes the process of taking photographs on film. The celluloid that my brother loaded into his large format camera underwent a similar treatment as the plastic sheet; light was introduced and imprinted. In his essay on embodiment, Nicholas Chare writes that film, ‘acts as a filter and forms a site of representation’. When establishing my interdisciplinary approach to the work, ‘representation’ became my linking component. The character is initially presented through my observations of his photo-making process and overlayed audio recordings. He is then (re)presented as a voice implanted into a score and a body embedded in plastic. These representations and their interplay support the conclusion that making connections between disciplines can aid the quality of the work and more truthfully communicate the intention of the artist.

My ability to think across disciplines was encouraged by fusing approaches from the disciplines concerned. My knowledge of Russell’s rapid cutting informed my pattern-based treatment of the gestural components of the score. Similarly, knowing about Pudovkin’s ideal observer and Chion’s verbocentric view of cinema created a useful discourse that inspired my decision to treat the audience as ideal and adequately informed at first, before subjecting them to disregard and disorientation. I was fortunate enough to begin this project with an understanding of video and sound editing software as well as possessing the equipment to capture such material. This enabled me to integrate a fused approach from multiple artistic disciplines.

To have an audience in the gallery space where the projection was positioned would be a suitable state for the work to be experienced. I found the physical presence of the projector, surrounded by landscape paintings, to be a powerful experience. Furthermore, having a laptop simultaneously play an unprojected version of the film would allow for an almost complete ingestion of my artistic idea. But as previously stated, the chief version of the work is the documented projection. On top of making the work more easily distributed, the documentary format offers a view of both the projection and the redesigned film. The rapid-cut editing refracted through the plastic material can only be observed when the gallery space is intruded and the camera lens is pointed directly at the light. The documented film cuts from this immersive view and two wider shots of the space. I believe that this final edit allows for the truest consumption of the work. Annet Dekker proposes that, in the field of documentation, ‘secondary and even auxiliary … documents can become part of or replace primary documents’ due to their ability to become ‘artworks in themselves’. This deconstruction of hierarchical methods of categorisation benefits the final form of Your Image. The primary document is unspecified; it could be the images taken by the character, the extracted footage, or the projection of this footage in space. This concern of the source document is alleviated by Dekker, as she places an equal importance on successive documentation of the work.

In an interview with Dekker, Matt Adams states that ‘documentation should advertise its lack of fidelity’. While the initial footage of the character was a faithful depiction of his image-making process, it has since been deconstructed and repurposed. In the video editing, footage deemed unappealing was removed. The audio clips were treated similarly, his words cut short just before they began to repeat or contradict themselves. More direct infidelity is observed in the work’s projection. As mentioned, the plastic was blended with a cropping of the original film to enhance its visual quality. The installation phase was conducted in silence as the score was only finished afterwards. The camera that was positioned in the gallery space was not the same one used to record the projection. Alongside these examples of inauthenticity, there are certain phases of the work that were removed entirely from its final form. An early draft involved situating the character in a natural setting, using the beam of the projector to illuminate leaves and the trunks of trees. The resulting image seemed contrived and ignorant of the natural splendour that the foliage already possessed. Unlike Adams’s documentary practice, these instances of infidelity and compromise were not advertised in my work. They are purposely concealed. In reflection, I support my decision but aim to incorporate the principle of documentary transparency in future projects.

The work is a response to the question of ownership, and therefore it is appropriate that I would be challenged in my handling of its form. Art across the disciplines of experimental film, sound, and installation influenced the practices that were involved in the film’s actualisation, and theories from a range of authors aided the convergence of the final piece. In the end, a simple question became a fascinating interdisciplinary experiment. On many occasions during the original shooting, my brother would forget that I was present. Lost in the creative process, he would occasionally turn away from the landscape and spot my camera, suddenly remembering that he was being recorded. The audio recordings that I extracted from our phone call were similarly recorded without his knowledge. In many ways, he was only included in the work involuntarily, his voice stolen, his image mine. However, through the process of creating Your Image is Mine, I have come to understand image ownership as something more nuanced than this. Interestingly, it is his own words that echo in my head, the final ones uttered before the speech becomes unintelligible. ‘I am also an owner. Not even just by having the footage but by seeing the footage there's an act of ownership.’ I believe there is some truth to these words.