Calum Walter
2021Terrestrial
Calum Walter
“The observations of an object in motion: A mobile device captures the trajectories of objects liberated from and bound to earth, against a backdrop of uniquely human dissonance. Terrestrial is in part an attempt to articulate a desire to transcend bodily limits with things like mobile devices and machines etc. while acknowledging an unavoidable level of dysfunction.The film was inspired by an incident in 2014 where a Blue Line train in Chicago failed to stop at its final destination, the O’Hare airport, and eventually came to a stop halfway up the escalator at the airport’s entrance. Terrestrial reimagines this crash as an earthbound machine’s failed takeoff.”—Calum Michel Walter
Terrestrial
Relief
Calum Walter
Relief revisits footage gathered at the scene of a car accident. Using the moving image in various states of transformation, the piece looks at the ambience of a violent event, and imagines itself as its sole artifact. Images are presented as rogue data, perhaps unreliable, with both human and mechanical origins. The process involves printing (often many generations in) and rephotographing stills from digital video, as well as manipulations with light during the photocopying process. The piece is part of a series of films that explore a hybrid of digital and analog moving images.
Relief
Meridian
Calum Walter
Meridian follows the last unit in a fleet of autonomous machines sent to deliver an emergency vaccine. Through a robot’s agnostic eye, the film looks at how human dramas are inscribed onto the inanimate, searching for possible parallels between automation and purgatory, depression and malfunction. The film is inspired by a real event that occurred in Washington, D.C. on 17 July 2017, where an automated security robot from the company Knightscope was found floating in a fountain at the building it patrolled. It had plunged into the water while on a routine patrol, spurring speculation about whether the machine had chosen to end its life or if this was just a glitch in an otherwise reliable new technology. Perhaps more interesting than the fate of the machine was the desire to see its death within a human context.
Meridian
