Watch for Motorcycles
Recent work by B. Tracy
Designed for Gallery 40000

Urban transport and the movement of people and objects through a modern cityscape are at the heart of this exhibition. The specific origins and destinations of these movements are unspecified and open to discussion however clues regarding setting eventually reveal themselves. Whether the direction of movement is linear or circular is an ever-present source of debate and the conclusions of individual viewers have much to do with what each brings to the space.

Watch for Motorcycles includes five looped video sequences, the source footage for which has been taken entirely from the Hong Kong government's transportation website. The main gallery space contains four flat panel wall mounted displays and a large projection with audio screens in the adjoining room. The projection alternates between two unique collections of modified traffic camera footage. In the first, slow motion sequences of ambiguous blurry forms eventually reveal themselves to be motorcycles navigating the curves of a city. The addition of a soundtrack pieced together from recordings of vintage 1960s race bikes reinforces a loose narrative on which most viewers reach a consensus. The second collection of footage focuses on pedestrians as they go about their day, moving down the sidewalks and across the bridges of a bustling metropolis. The pacing of the cuts in both films refers to the amount to time each camera lingers on a particular scene before switching to the next.

The exhibition's other body of work, likely experienced first, is a series of four looped animations made by splicing together still frame images. In the resulting time-lapse sequences, each split second frame represents a minute of real time. It doesn't take the viewer long to realize they're viewing no ordinary day in the life of the city. There are no vehicles, only pedestrians and structures. The eerily quiet streets invite consideration of easily overlooked phenomena such as subtle shifts in light and shadow. Normally such ephemera would be imperceptible, buried by a clutter of taxis and busses.

The one animated sequence that doesn't immediately fit with the others appears as an indeterminate number of blurry images strobing rapidly on the screen. At first the subject matter appears arbitrary but clues provided by other works in the exhibition eventually reveal the source of the content to be anything but. We are looking at images nearly processes beyond recognition. They began as pixels on a large LCD screen somewhere in the heart of Hong Kong. One of the government's traffic cameras happened to fix its gaze on the sign and the moving images were chopped into stills and beamed across the globe. By cropping, enlarging, and splicing them together, I took the most logical steps I could think of to return them to their original form.
The ultimate ambition of each piece, and the exhibition in a larger sense, is not fully realized unless the viewer experiences a particular type of movement through their own mental space. Ideally, that movement is reported by the viewer as being parallel to or induced by the movements through time and space they've observed on the gallery walls. To clarify, the intent is to not simply produce arbitrary and varied responses, but to control what landscape is traversed within each viewer's mind. The strategic use of established cinematic tropes as well as an understanding of the viewer's expectations have been valuable tools in this endeavor. The work's ability to lead the viewer from an "origin thought," through mental space to a "destination thought" is the true measure of its success. Of course one is constantly moving through their own mental environments--back through memories and forward to a hypothetical future. Whether or not the vehicle of that transit can be commandeered, if only for a moment, remains to be seen.