Jesse Darling

Archive as poem in an age of perpetual witnessing curated by Jesse Darling. The selected one-minute videos for this edition of The One Minutes were submitted from Canada, France, Georgia, Germany, Lebanon, The Netherlands, the UK and the USA.

In February 2005, YouTube was launched and forever changed our relationship to moving images, both as viewers and producers. But even well before then, the web had made a large variety of new materials accessible to see and to download, as well as upload. “From the Cloud” is a video program that looks at found footage “films” in the Internet Age. The proliferation of archived photographs, digital images, and videos made available to everyone online as well as an exponential increase in production has changed the way artists interact with pre-existing material. The artists in this program both pull material from the cloud and implicitly comment on the cloud by doing so.

In this video, artist Jesse Darling and a small film crew go on a road trip across the UK. Passing through seaside towns, container ports, service stations, retail parts and an abandoned airport, this is a journey that encounters at every turn the barriers and borders (both physical and invisible) of modern Britain. It’s a journey without a final destination, but one that hints at just how complicated and connected, how wonderful and terrible everything is.