Nicole Cohen: The Future

In Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, he distinguishes between capturing a frozen image and how the actual visual picture and significance of it can alter over time. Susan Sontag expresses her views on photography that it is meant to record and not to intervene. In this new video, both of these topics are addressed and there is an intervention to the past to show the relation between analog and digital technologies.

In this video by Nicole Cohen, The Future, 2017, you first see a photograph of a woman in ephemeral motion, in front of a palm tree. The vintage photograph is collaged with colorful shapes, such as stars, blobs, lines, large jagged shapes and cut out shapes layered on top. These shapes and forms activate the image and shows a relation between previous technologies that might not of been able also describe other layers and connections within the forms and patterns. The video acts like a moving painting to describe a process of innovation in technology as you simultaneously understand your personal history and reveals more about the past.

See a trailer of Nicole Cohen’s art video here:

The Future, Video Clip, 2017 NC, 3:00, Loop from NICOLE COHEN on Vimeo.