Tom Blake’s project, leaves in the stream, is inspired by the churning and circular movement of water. The work explores Blake’s ongoing fascination with opacity, repetition and fragmentation, drawing connections to the behavioural patterns and loops we experience online.
Made up of live and digital works, leaves in the stream encourages visitors to pause and drift, disrupting habitual scrolling and dwindling attention spans. Blake invites reflection on how we engage with repeated images and fragmented text.
Guided by the swirling features of an eddy (small temporary loops of water), the digital artwork combines videos, text and drawings. Hosted on a website, a series of pages are daisy-chained together, forming a circular path for visitors to move through. Each page in the chain holds a pair of looping videos, a drawing and a fragmentary poem embedded in the URL. The looping videos ask the viewer to linger with a fragment of time as a particular moment is repeated endlessly across a pair of screens. These videos create new versions of themselves as they drift in and out of sync, continuously meeting in different moments throughout the day.
- leaves on the sea is presented as part of PICA’s International Exchange Studio Program and BLEED 2024. PICA’s International Exchange Program is supported by PICA’s Art Ambassadors, North Metropolitan TAFE, Treasure Hill Artist Village, Taipei, and the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries.
BLEED 2024 is presented by Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney, Arts House Melbourne, and Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Perth.