Lossless #3

Removing keyframes from a digital version of John Ford's The Searchers, Baron and Goodwin attack the film's temporal structuring to render a kinetic “painted desert” of the West. The dust kicked up by the movement in the film is pure pixel, unanchored from the photographic realism that used to constrain it.

“Truth, 24 frames a second!” is rewritten according to the odd clock-times of digital processing, splaying movement and transition into the void of machine temporality. In the Lossless series, the artists themselves are the searchers, seeking to uncover differences between the bitstream and the celluloid strip. These differences might be blurry at our historical juncture, but Baron and Goodwin's work leads us closer to the over-coded heart of the digital video image, dissecting its anatomy to expose its entrancing mechanisms.

"In Baron and Goodwin's Lossless series the “materiality” of the digital becomes the source-code for experimental execution. The artists' renditions of appropriated films are certainly not “lossless” (i.e. a copy of the original in which nothing is lost), but rather gainful: through various techniques of digital disruption — compression, file-sharing, the removal of essential digital information — the artists reveal the gain of a “new” media, full of material forms ripe for aesthetic sleuthing."  

— Braxton Soderman