Film is the defining vehicle of perception in this post post-modern world. Since the ontological dilemma of the existence of a recording of reality that is not reality itself, but a deludingly objective-looking representation of it, i.e. film, human culture has come to be held like a semi-conscious prisoner in the prism of the multiple representational realities that are our global media construct.

It is a terrifyingly solipsistic black hole of meaning: the media, through news, documentary, film, fantasy and reality tv, re-frames, re-presents, records real people, real events, real life as we know it. but it does so in a highly constructed, highly targeted, highly self aware and manipulative fashion, designed as it is to stimulate our amygdalas, our sense of self, identity, nationality, our deepest and darkest desires and dreams.

It looks real, but it is not. it looks objective, but it is not. it looks 'ready made', the constructions are seamless, the 'reality' looks and feels real, but they are not.

But our brains, on the neurological level, and in the emotional response system, respond as if the images are as real as the physical world around us. this has been proven time and time again in scientific research that is actually used to manipulate us further, in this era of neuro-marketing, with the use of 'jolting' techniques for example, or the use of subliminal imagery and sounds. many decades of both social and academic research have created a highly sophisticated machinery for manipulation.

Not only do our physical and mental 'brains', and our physical and emotional 'hearts', as they are colloquially known, respond to the simulation of 'reality' in the media, but our votes, our political responses, our societal and even personal choices are very much defined by our reception of what in the end is very much a form of propaganda.

Our media system cannot avoid this definition, given the inherent bias involved in the construction of a filmic representation. Everything from the news, to documentary, to fiction and entertainment, represents a distillation and expression of a set of beliefs about the world, a set of codes of meaning that serve as a kind of hidden matrix of social navigational tools.

It is so easy to recognise propaganda from another culture, because its' visual norms, its' audio visual lexicon is so different from our own; the prejudice, the supposition, the cultural constructions are very apparent. Watching communist films from the last century, or nazi propaganda, it is easy to see how theatrical and persuasive it is, how inherently prejudicial.

A right wing, i.e. intellectually predisposed, american watching Fox news, or even more mainstream footage of coverage of the Iraq war for example, sees and receives it as 'normal' and in implicit ways, 'real'. they don't, unless they've received some media training, see all the thought, conceptual framework, cultural codes and conscious or unconscious assumptions that make up every part of every broadcast. They cannot see it as propaganda or persuasion because it is so normative to their sense of reality.

I have a very strong sense of this cultural and conceptual 'programming' because, with my extremely peripatetic background, moving countries every 2-3 years or so throughout my childhood, and continuing this 'reflex' throughout adulthood, i've never stayed long enough for one country to feel 'normal' to me.

Going to local schools in different countries, watching television and news as they shifted perspective depending on where we watched it, and speaking different languages while growing up and moving around, in France, in Spain, in America, in Belgium and so on, I naturally recognised the great cultural differences, and the way one country would represent even history with sometimes subtle differences, but often with vastly different conceptual frameworks. This shifting perspective, though difficult and even traumatic at times, gave me the gift of cultural detachment and a profound intellectual consciousness of how reality is constructed.

Even my birth name, Heather, changed with every country where it was unpronounceable, mangling and becoming more of a sound reference, i was called ezzur, ayven, eva, henriette even, ellur and finally Ella, my nickname to this day, catalysing the early realisation that ‘I am not my name’.

Early on, I realised that my name is just a sound formation, chosen by my parents for identification purposes, and annotated for bureaucratic reasons, much as written music is an annotation of something far more ephemeral and essentially uncontainable. This early realisation caused me discomfort as a child, as I wondered why this sound, so often repeated throughout the day, was somehow 'me'.

I remember too, vividly, sitting in an italian restaurant in Paris as a ten year old, noticing the italian themed decorations, having just been to a french shop next door, and suddenly realising it was all a 'stage setting', that the furnishings and decorations of each outlet could easily have been stripped and reassembled in each other's geographical space, with the physical shift representing no more than the collection and redistribution of objects that represented ideas of something: a french mirror in the 'french' space, an italian 'painting' in the italian place, a smell of french coffee in one, italian in the other, even french typeface in the one, and italian typeface in the other.

I was unable then to express how disturbing this was for me, but from that point on, with every move, i saw more theatre, I recognised the way culture represents itself in almost theatrical fashion, the uniforms of each place, the invisible 'borders' with their 'actors' wearing culturally proscribed clothes that indicated adherence to a set of societal norms and beliefs that were almost entirely unquestioned.

This is probably when I was born as an artist, standing uncomfortably outside the frames, with a kind of permanent state of cognitive dissonance that brought gifts as well as difficulties.

This is also when I discovered an interest in installation, though i did not know that concept or name as a child. But I did start to experiment with creating 'environments' in my room, painting the walls with different landscapes, pinning materials to the ceiling and walls, making shapes, playing with projected light and sound, imagining ways to transform four walls into an entirely new universe. I was also always fascinated by the myriad film cultures to which I was exposed in each country, french cinema so drastically different from american for example.  

Surely nothing defines our time more than film and our relationship to it, as it is a philosophical confrontation of the highest order and at the same time is part of a loop of cultural solipsism that literally creates forms of reality. But i am also convinced that the relationship between film and installation is an intimate and natural one, a vital kind of response to the multiple projections of reality that characterise daily life now... i love the ephemerality of film, the dislocation of sound and image, in an installation space, taken out of the usual codes of reception, tv, cinema, advertising etc.. and i love the potential for a non narrative 'theatre' that is not theatre, the creation of a culture that is not culture, the polyphony of sound and image and feeling all experienced from the inside, not the outside. confined as we normally are to the position of spectator looking in. Installations bring you into the frame and out of the frame in the same instant..

I perceive every home, every shop, every restaurant, even every theatre, cinema, public space, as a form of installation, coming as it does from someone's imagination, someone's dreams, hopes, from the distillations of cultural norms, the crucible of societal memes and drifts.

When we look to the past, even only decades ago, everything looks very stagey, very unreal, very artificial or constructed. it is very easy to look back on the style and philosophy of the french revolution for example, or the sixties, or roman times, and see how clothes, images, art, politics etc were all intricately intertwined in a semi conscious dance between the imagined and the real.

Prior to the advent of film, and the birth of modern self conscious 'installation art', we used what we call now 'traditional art forms', though they were cutting edge in their time; painting, drawing, sculpture, writing, for example, to represent and interpret the real world, but those representations were very clearly subjective and hand crafted, consciously created, in a way that film, by it's very nature, obscures. Film, in it's omniscient tv, internet, cinema format, looks and feels objective, it looks more real to us than a painting or a sculpture.

Indeed when lecturing at the Sandberg Institute for example in Amsterdam, or at NMIT in New Zealand, or at the Imperial War Museum in London, i noticed a blankness and confusion when underlining that those images, those all pervasive, seductive, 'real' images, were not real, that they were recorded, heavily framed, post edited mini mind bombs, constructs with a very conscious purpose to make you respond in certain ways, to create communication-response curves that have become measurable. That there are myriad interpretations of reality is something recognisable to the mind, but difficult to conjure when faced with the 'reality packages' we consume daily.

Who questions America's involvement in World War 2, it's motivations, it's heroism for example? Who questions the 'power of democracy', despite substantial evidence of it's flaws and corruption even as a central concept? Who questions the interpretation of even recent history as represented and reinforced repeatedly by the mainstream media? Who has the time, the energy, the desire or need to do so, when so utterly engaged within it, our technological addictions far outweighing our commitment to critical discourse, our desire for facebook time, youtube searches, twitter and text 'dialogue', tv or cinema time spent relaxing while imbibing constructed images of other people's ideas, dreams, agendas, inviting the stranger into our living room to 'tell stories' in glamorous seductive irresistible formats that influence us to make real choices in a real world, where, in real terms, the majority of the world, is suffering terribly, living in degrading poverty, despair and desperation, victims of a global economic and social system that has at its root a semi conscious and seemingly contradictory acceptance and denial of endemic inequality and injustice.

These are the conceptual paradigms of my art practise.

Speaking the audio visual language as fluently and currently as i can, I am compelled to use the very techniques and research used by advertisers, marketers and news, tv, film makers. I use 'found' footage from tv, films, the internet, tiny slivers of visual meaning, 2 seconds here, 10 seconds there, outtakes, zoom ins on parts of the filmic frames that are never noticed, sounds sampled and re used for soundtracks, musical cultural forms in which i am well versed, and apply in decontextualised order. Instead of intellectual colloquia on the subject of identity and violence for example, or philosophical essays on the meaning of reality and how it is constructed in a media age, I employ multiple screen edits with rapid frame shifts and recognisable but subverted formats like movie trailers, visual chapters or 'series', and MTV video style sequences.

My installations have veered from the technically relatively simple, as in 'The Wall', to the technologically complex 'Asylum', and into work that involves film, music, spatial/sculptural constructions and the creation of immersive, physically enveloping environments as in the recent 'Vox Lumens' or ‘Oracles’ with Tetragon Project.

I've also been working extensively with public interaction and 'democratic' creations of art works, with new installations based on public involvement and contributions. Works such as 'A Thousand Lovers', 'ID-Me', 'Yes', & 'Anthem', involve first a period of solicitation of involvement in film and photographic work from the public, and then a period of showing of the work, with further interaction. This interaction can be as diverse as 'love letters you wish you had written' being submitted (over 600 'love letters' from anonymous members of the public) to texts, objects, or interviews with self selecting passersby.