Locked Groove

 

VERSION I/II 1997 DV/Beta 10 min, color, stereo

VERSION III 1999 Betacam / DVD 7 min, color stereo

 

Locked Groove is based on daily life choreography, an investigation of movements in public space - life rhythms within the context of urbanity.
It features close-up shots of the most often executed movements of people with the most common jobs in the city of Hull, UK, where the video was produced. The result is a dense collage out of these different motion fragments (sometimes less than a second long )
Extracted as mere gestures, they reveal messages on its own and allow possible links to other movement fragments. After those were put in sequence, they seem to amplify themselves - a trajectory resembling the theory of the butterfly effect . - C.S.
"Locked Groove" was produced by EMARE and Hull Time Based Arts, UK 1997.

"Cycling through images of repetitive manual labour, the
artist digitally compresses each shot temporally and
accelerates the sequence, until all the workers' hands morph into one grotesque movement. Stracke creates a parallel between the fragmentation of labor and the fragmentation of the image, suggesting that labor has been "digital" since the invention of the assembly line."
                     
                    Laura U. Marks, Ottawa, Canada
        (OUT OF TIME program notes Oberhausen 2001)