Deceleration: Slowness as strategy in David Claerbout’s Travel, AAANZ 2016

The ever-increasing rise of digital image technologies and platforms is opening up new ways of working for contemporary photographic and moving image practitioners. These new tools and forums for image exchange are impacting not only the means for creating and disseminating artworks, but also reorienting the ‘critical’ strategies through which artists position themselves in relation to popular visual culture. Terms such as the New Aesthetic and Post-Internet Art have emerged as ways to understand the post-ironic and “accelerationist” strategies emerging in such practices. While many of these works mime the communicative techniques of digital culture by emphasising the fragmented signifying modes of music videos and web surfing, others seek new forms of critical resistance by promoting slowness and sustained looking. This paper examines these concepts through a close reading of David Claerbout’s work Travel (1996-2013). By doing so, it argues for “seamlessness” and “deceleration” as potential artistic strategies in resisting the hyperactive tendencies of digital image culture