The Trembling Giant as Hyperobject

Abstract

The Trembling Giant’s tremulous technique emerges form a direct engagement with the experimental films and ‘Nervous System’ and ‘Nervous Magic Lantern’ performances of Ken Jacobs who has spent many decades projecting images through a spinning propeller, with depth cues being a key consideration in that, and other, efforts. My innovation is to invert his process and record images through a spinning propeller, that propeller, moreover, being the ready-made propeller that is represented by a film reel as it spins on a 16mm projector. By using a film projector my technique demands consideration of the mediating effects of cinema in our lives (especially in our understanding of landscape) and introduces such phenomena as depth effects, intermittence and a kind of movement that Jacobs calls ‘eternalism’. This effect is apprehended as a rolling, or rippling, movement in my film, caused by, but different to, the turning movement of the film reel.