SIMON PAYNE
Simon Payne studied Time Based Media at the Kent Institute of Art and Design, Maidstone and Electronic Imaging at Duncan of Jordanstone, Dundee. He received a PhD from the Royal College of Art in 2008. His work has been shown in numerous festivals and venues including: Anthology Film Archives, New York; the Rotterdam International Film Festival; the European Media Arts Festival, Osnabrück; Pacific Film Archives, San Francisco; Media City, Windsor, Ontario; the Edinburgh Film Festival; the Serpentine and Whitechapel Galleries in London; and at Tate Modern for whom he also curated a series of programmes, entitled Colour Field Films and Videos, in 2008.His videos are distributed by the artists' film and video organisation LUX, and they are also kept at the British Artists' Film and Video Study Collection at Central St. Martins College of Art. He is Senior Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at Anglia Ruskin University, and lives in London. Simon Payne is also editor of Sequence published by no.w.here
New Ratio, 2007
(2007, 1min 40 secs,
16:9 anamorphic, colour, stereo sound)
The colour fields
that comprise New Ratio involve a tense relationship with the edge of
the screen. The piece explores the move from the 4:3 screen ratio to 16:9,
which is now effectively the standard for broadcast television and video. In
the construction of New Ratio each colour was assigned a particular
tone: white was attributed a standard 1KHz test tone; the pitch of the tone
attributed to blue was half that of the test tone; and each of the colours in
between (in descending order of luminance) were attributed tones at intervals
between these values. The video comprises two simple repeating sequences, which
are fundamentally the same duration. However, one sequence includes an
additional frame of black that throws them out of synch causing a phasing that
effects different mixtures of colour and a range of tone combinations. In commenting
on this piece Sean Cubitt has suggested that the equal mixture of additive and
subtractive colours is effectively a 'democratisation of colour'.
Cut Out, 2013
(2013, 16:9, 3mins
33secs, colour, stereo)
A largely hand-made
piece in comparison to my most recent videos. Cut Out involves different
coloured cards, with apertures cut out of them, superimposed in combinations
starting from opposite ends of a simple spectrum (from yellow to blue). The
method of superimposition is more complicated than it might at first seem,
adding to the instability of the various planes, edges and colours.
Not And Or, 2014
(2014, 18 mins, silent)
Not
And Or involves black and
white quadrilaterals spinning in virtual space that alternate with the same
static shapes re-filmed from a screen in real space. The second half of the
piece is the same as the first, but flipped, reversed and re-filmed again,
through successive generations - adding while taking away.