Untitled (Crystallise),fomapan 100 film onto Ilford MG ART 300 paper, 2015, commissioned as part of issue 15 of The Manchester Review, 2016.
‘Untitled (Crystallise)’ is a photo-series featuring an alarm clock produced by the Jantar company in the former USSR in the years running up to its collapse in 1989. In each photograph, two images of this object intersect at different angles - made by double exposing two negatives from a set of twelve shots of the clock rotating at 30-degree intervals, mimicking divisions of time on a clock face. I produced the series by mapping possible combinations of the different negatives (1 through 12), choosing combinations based on each decimal value that comprises the number pi. The series attempts to give iconographical representation to production under late-capitalism, whose core value of capital extraction forces the compression of productivity into ever-smaller units of time. This situation expresses a lack of social values capable of orienting economic production, a lack that enables capital accumulation to drive our post-historical, post-ideological contemporaneity. The choice of an alarm clock as the central motif of this series emphasises this dominance of work-time. The clock’s modernist curvilinear form also appears as a circulating relic of socialism that endlessly recurs within a regulated photographic series.