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Travel Through an Unraveling of Time in 3D Landscapes and Digital Collage

Physical matter is digitally manipulated in video artist Daniel Crooks’ new work ‘The Subtle Knife’.
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Three-dimensional reality can be manipulated, and sometimes it’s radically unstable, as when a sinkhole suddenly opens up and drains a lake. Artist Daniel Crooks likes to manipulate reality with digital technology. In his new video The Subtle Knife, Crooks continues his exploration of composite realities, in which he films cinematic simulations of the physical world, which he digitally manipulates to create collaged landscapes with endless vanishing points.

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Released earlier this year, The Subtle Knife begins on train tracks, and it is on the tracks that this reality travels at a slow motion pace akin to Matthew Barney’s work. The new video begins as if the viewer is emerging backwards out of a window or door. The various landscapes of The Subtle Knife all lie along railroad tracks—the countryside, a train station, a seaside route, and so on. The result is that 3D reality—time and space—gets compressed and collaged into a two-dimensional replica, and it’s the slow travel that makes it a truly mesmerizing experience.

Click here to see more of Daniel Crooks’ work.

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