What can be seen from where you are standing, and what that position costs.
A five-minute film with four characters, made alone. Every puppet, set, surface and light in it was fabricated by hand before a single frame was exposed — armature and moldmaking, carpentry, scenic paint, needle-felted textiles at miniature scale, and the practical circuitry behind the lighting.
An installation built around a fire and the circle of people it illuminates. The fire is never shown — only what it does to faces. Nobody changes position; what changes is how the figures look at one another, substituted so slowly that no single change is perceptible. A viewer who watches once sees a gathering. A viewer who stays sees that the gathering has changed, and cannot say when.
The fire has to be fed. What burns are the pruned limbs of a tree standing in the same frame — branches removed by other branches, at a rate too slow to observe, for the health of the whole.
In developmentTendon-driven articulated limbs, laser-cut and 3D-printed assemblies, armatures, rigs and staged environments. Objects made to be photographed, and objects made so that something else can be photographed — the distinction matters less in practice than it does on paper.
In the films, nothing is photographed that was not first built. The photographs invert the method: the world is already there, and what I bring to it is position. I find the sources; I don't make them. What I decide is where to stand.
They are made almost entirely in low light, because low light is where a source has an edge most clearly — you can see how far it reaches and where it stops. In daylight everything is lit and nothing has an edge.
How far it reaches, and where it stops.
A beam is only visible because something is in the way.
A doorway, a window, a storefront, a fire.
Some of this work is about what lies between a source and the eye — rain on glass, frost, condensation, fog, falling snow inside a cone of light. The same physics produces opposite outcomes: the medium obstructs, or the medium reveals. And again and again, a bright opening seen from outside it. Once I walked into a dark building in order to photograph a lit one through its black doorway. The installation builds that situation; the photographs keep finding it already made.
Fifteen frames from an ongoing edit · Prints and full series available on request
Change is invisible at every instant and undeniable in total.
I work in capture, fabrication and light. The films are built by hand, photographed, and returned to a room as light — analogue to digital and back again. The work lives inside that loop, and in the intervals the loop cannot record.
A single frame contains no motion. There is no moment you can point to where anything moved. The change exists only in accumulation, and only in retrospect. That is also how the most consequential things tend to happen to people, and it is why they are so difficult to describe afterward.
In the films, nothing is photographed that was not first built — sculpture, moldmaking, armature and metalwork, carpentry, scenic painting, textiles at miniature scale, practical lighting and circuitry, cinematography, and the animation itself. An entire manufactured world standing in front of a lens. The photographs invert the method: the world is already there, and what I bring to it is position.
Capture is sampling. A continuous world is taken as discrete frames, and everything that happens between two of them is lost. That interval is where I work. The change I am interested in falls precisely into the gap the medium cannot record, which is why no one can point to where it happened, and why every account of it can be honest and still incompatible with the others.
My work is about perspective — what a person can see from where they are standing, and what that position costs them. I am interested in harm with no locatable moment: damage distributed so evenly across time that every individual instance is innocent and the sum is not. In that structure every account is honest. The person who saw nothing is telling the truth. The person it happened to sounds unreliable. Both are correct, and neither can prove it.
I build with light, because light is the clearest available model for this. One source produces both the warm circle and the dark around it — not as metaphor but as physics. The thing that gathers people is the same thing that excludes. And there are two ways to stop someone from being seen: leave them in the dark, or aim so much light at them that they cannot see anything else. The eye closes either way.
I am drawn to the vocabulary that accompanies these procedures. Warm words performing cold work. Concern. Care. Pruning, which is done for the health of the tree, in winter, by someone who is good at their job.
I hold a continuous multimedia art residency in which children design and fabricate real objects, then film them. Drawings become cut parts, cut parts become working mechanisms, and the mechanisms become the subject of films the children write, shoot and present themselves. The camera comes last: it documents, it doesn't direct. The child is the author, always.
Member, Ed Video Media Arts Centre, Guelph. Earlier production credits in Toronto, 2005–2009: production assistant, script coordinator, assistant to the director, and producer of a feature film.
References available on request.
Write to me directly at daniel@tactilume.studio, or use the form.