Empire On/Off

…

Aleksandra Vajd & Hynek Alt Empire On/Off (archival inkjet print, 2005) re-photographs Andy Warhol's film Empire (1964), which comprises 485 minutes of film capturing a single view of the Empire State Building in New York, from early evening until nearly 3 a.m. the following day, in two stills ta-ken from a television screen. What really matters in the two photo-graphs, with the titles On and Off , is the sign, familiar to television viewers, of the video pause method (that stops the playback of a video, while render-ing only the current frame on screen).These two photographic stills show how electronic media capture experimental and neo-avant-garde films and make them "profane." This video pause sign is a mark of what happens to photography and analogue moving images when captured by digital tech-nology. It reveals the perfect conceptual transformation of the medium of photography....

Marina Gržinić

in: Not-quite/Not-right: Histories, Bodies and Concepts in Contemporary Photography,

Novo Mesto, Slovenia, 2006