Daniel Crooks

Exquisite Corpse was an image and language parlour game played by the Surrealists, which asked players to collectively write or draw a story or picture, with only limited knowledge of the other players’ contributions. Translating the original game into an immersive VR experience creating a composite human body, Exquisite Corpse maintains the rules of the game with artists and filmmakers contributing, each with no knowledge of the others’ work beyond which body part they were representing, with complete artistic freedom.

Daniel Crooks’ Phantom Ride alludes to cinema history to create a seamless journey through a composite reality. By manipulating digital footage as though it were a physical material, the artist has constructed a collaged landscape that takes us through multiple worlds and shifts our perception of space and time.

The film explores the relationship between food, consumption and religion.

In Static No.12 (seek stillness in movement), Daniel Crooks transports viewers to a park in Shanghai where an old man performs his daily Tai Chi routine. The man’s graceful movements begin to fragment and multiply, becoming distended and mutated within the frame.

A short included in Wholphin Issue Number 12

Daniel Crooks plays with space and time in his moving image works using the 'time slice' method invented by Tim McMillan and popularized by the special effects in the science fiction film The Matrix 1999. Crooks dissects a moment recorded with his camera and digitally stitches the scene back together in a way that warps the linearity of the sequence. These works render reality abstract and redefine our perception of time and space in unexpected and mesmerizing ways.