Plot Against Time

Toronto International Film Festival Program Book
2011

Plot Against Time
David Rokeby
2007–2011
approx. 27 minutes (total)
Video

Throughout his distinguished career, Governor General’s Award-winning artist David Rokeby has experimented prolifically with a variety of new media. Unifying all his work is an insatiable fascination with the recording of motion, and, in turn, of time. His new series, Plot Against Time, consists of four exquisite videos, each set in milieux in which figures’ and objects’ movements are meticulously tracked, creating gestural streaks across the screen. The vignettes vary widely, with marked seasonal modulations: bugs flitting about in the artist’s sun-soaked backyard; snowflakes vibrating in the turbulence created by Mies van der Rohe’s TD Centre skyscrapers and an Al McWilliams sculpture in Toronto’s financial district; tourists and pigeons forming searching paths in Venice’s Piazza San Marco; and, in the most recent work in the series, which receives its world premiere at this year’s Festival, gannets swooping off the coast of Newfoundland. Brilliantly suggesting precedents from Whistler to Pollock, Plot Against Time’s interest in kinesis is as sociological and technological as it is philosophical and painterly.Mies Van Der Rohe’s