Robert Turner Collective

L I V I N G   S T I L L

LS Pourangahau



The unchanging nature of a still image means it can never be a true reflection of the living world as life is never perfectly still. There is a hint of oxymoron in the English expression Still Life, which is perhaps better described by the french Nature Morte. LS Pourangahau is a Living Still, a work which inhabits the space is between still and movement: at first it appears fixed, but has life breathed into it by continuous slow evolution. It breaks the dichotomy between still and motion, retaining the serenity of the motionless while introducing the change and variation of the living. The work is based on a single image of a forest – sometime discernible, sometimes not – and passes through a myriad of colours and moods reflecting the calm, but often magical activity, found in a real forest. In its original form it is an infinitely varying projection – breaking with the finite and giving the observer a genuinely unique, but ephemeral, experience; in this online version two opposing points in the infinite cycle of day and night are captured by two video segments of forest life.

















The two videos in LS Pourangahau are accompanied by meditative soundtracks created with Scape, the generative music app by Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers.