CLOSE UP WORLDS UNFOLD
To be touched does not always require direct contact, the stripping back of experience to its most essential, elemental or bare. It is not a case of striving in search of some authentic felt experience, recoverable beneath the layers of mediation that shape our perception of the world. Technologies are a living part of a reality that many together share. Indeed, filmic technologies have the capacity to augment and transform human experience, creating an expanded perceptual field beyond what can be known by the senses alone. Close-up, microscopic worlds unfold, below the range and stretch of human vision. Distant galaxies are brought to life through the reach of a telescopic lens. Slow motion and time-lapse techniques reveal manifold temporalities within living existence, different registers of nonhuman intensity and duration. The frame and the fragment can focus attention on details that would otherwise go unseen. A select edit can shock and startle, exercising the senses that through the laze of habit might have become dull or numb.
From Emma Cocker, How Do You Do? (Nottingham: Beam Editions, 2023)