Daniel Crooks: Phantom Ride

Milk Bar Mag recently sat down to speak with Daniel Crooks about his upcoming exhibition Phantom Ride, commissioned by the Ian Potter Cultural Trust.

Can you tell me a bit about Phantom Ride?
What I’m doing is taking a series of shots from what appears to be a train or on a train looking down the train tracks, then taking little boxes or cubes that encompass a tiny section of that world and then stacking them all together so you get this seamless, never-ending passage through each of those little worlds, going through a portal or doorway that connects them all.

What are your ideas/ inspiration behind this piece?
With this piece, I guess what I wanted to do is to connect what would have appeared as disconnected spaces and time from my older work and to take these locations and seamlessly connect them to a single new valid space.

The craziest thing that I’m doing with this one is, not only is it a view out of the front of the train, it is also the view out of the back of the train. For the exhibition, there will be one screen hanging inside the space where one side is the forward journey and the other side is looking at the backwards journey. So it’s kind of like one screen is looking into the future and the other screen is looking into the past and the screen itself becomes the threshold between the past and the future. The screen becomes like this thin slice of the untouchable now. What I love about that idea is the way the train tracks work with the sort of vanishing point that disappears at the centre of the screen, and then you imagine it popping out the other side. It also has this really nice echo of the hourglass with grains of sand coming through, converging the future and the past.

You’ve used trains in your work a few times. What is it that fascinates you about trains?
Oh wow, don’t get me started on trains. The birth of cinema came not long after the birth of trains. I was quite inspired by the first ever tracking shots, shot off the back of a train leaving Jerusalem Station. I love that moment. We all laugh at that moment now, but it was quite a profound moment, it was the first time a camera ever moved!

There is this incredibly dense nexus where cinema, trains and our ideas of time all come together. The whole idea of time zones and the standardised, mechanised view of time came about because of train travel. Trains are so intimately connected with our ways of imagining time.

How long has this project taken you to complete?
It’s been about a year and a half. I’ve been working on it solidly for about the last nine months.

Congratulations on receiving the Ian Potter Moving Image commission. How did this commission help you?
It was incredibly generous of the Ian Potter Foundation, it’s a great vision of theirs. The commission has enabled me to spend a chunk of time to approach something as ambitious as this project is, so I’m very grateful for this opportunity.

What were some of the challenges you faced with this project?
There’s been some logistics involved with getting access to some locations. Full props to Yarra Trams for allowing me to shoot at a couple of Yarra Tram depots.

Another huge yet rewarding challenge has been managing the content. In the final edit, the clips go through 60 different worlds forwards and then backwards, so there’s 120 worlds to manage. So just even keeping track of that stuff on your computer is difficult. I’ve pretty much had to write a new interface for the compositing software that I use. You need a level of automation just to make it possible.

What will people get out of seeing Phantom Ride?
The aim of a lot of my work is to destabilise that concrete assumption of internal models we have of the world. We like to think that everything is fixed and very solid and time goes in a straight line and there is only one world and this is it and we are the same person that experiences this moment as we did the last moment, but I kind of think that’s not entirely real and that by using the moving image to step out of time we can offer these alternatives which make people stop people thinking that the world is as concrete as it is.

Daniel Crooks’ Phantom Ride
ACMI, Federation Square, Melbourne
Tuesday February 16 – Sunday May 29 (free entry)
acmi.net.au/exhibitions/daniel-crooks