Le Spectre Silencieux du Mouvement (The Silent Spectre of Motion)

Bridget Walker &

Can animation and reality merge, not just as a film effect but also in everyday life? Le Spectre Silencieux du Mouvement (The Silent Spectre of Motion) plays with this idea when the artist, dressed as a ghost, plays a game of deception using various media. The genres drawing, comics, animation and documentation are literally stirred together.

The three-part video work begins with two academics who discuss and then solve a rebus, accompanied by an abstract series of geometrical patterns reminiscent of an aggressive video game. In the second section of the video the artist transforms herself into a ghost. Walker cuts a piece of material out of her white cloak and changes this into a manuscript scroll. This gives rise to numerous manuscripts, each of which is unfurled. In this way are revealed, for example, the plans of military equipment which animation techniques then bring to life. The final part is documentary and records the experiment of fiction which has become reality. People from the immediate surroundings are interviewed about the artist’s transformation into a ghost, letting the real and imaginary world merge into one another. The question about the possibility or impossibility of what has taken place remains unanswered. (Alexander Pütz)

About the video

Title Le Spectre Silencieux du Mouvement (The Silent Spectre of Motion)
Year 2012
Videonale VIDEONALE.14
Length 00:06:27
Format 4:3
Country France,
Language French with English subtitles
Courtesy the artist and Galerie Rauchfeld, Paris
Specifications color, sound, single-channel video

About the artist

Bridget Walker
  • 1983 in Melbourne, AUS.
    Studied at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, AUS