Macrae’s work manipulates popular iconography in film and video through compression, exploring the modern fascination with speed, nostalgia, information and entertainment. She misappropriates the readymade formats of cinema and television through digital media technologies fixating obsessively on pivotal recurring narrative junctions. These works parody and reconstruct the dynamics of Hollywood clichés, collective memory and the standardisation of film narratives, co-opting the syntax of film language to develop alternative meanings through a post-production remix.
„Sheena Macrae’s videos might best be described as ‘compressions’: her massive feats of editing remix films into miniature, yet unabridged sagas: Pulp Fiction reduced to exactly one minute, Gone With the Wind crunched from 3.5 hours down to commercial break size. Their effect is something like speed-reading: images fly by in rapid sequence, focussing on only the key elements of action… Like a drug or a diamond, a screen-size cosmos for the taking. Ergonomic, perfect, and larger than life.”
We met the Video Artist Sheena Macrae in Ljubljana and talked with her about hacking films.
Watch out Youtube, especially for the video called „Drink”; central topic of this movie is alcoholism in the serial „Dallas”.
Great depressing …
Here it is
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omnH75XtVsU
General Information about Sheena Macrae
http://www.sheenamacrae.com