Static no. 11 (man running)

Contemporary experience of sport is shaped by televisual effects: broadcasts, replays and endless media commentary. Because television so dominates contemporary consciousness, it is easy to assume that the fusion of sport, photography and spectacle is a contemporary phenomenon. The shared history of sport and the moving image goes back to the stop-motion sequences of athletes taken by nineteenth-century photographic pioneers. The shared history of sport and the moving image goes back to the prehistory of cinema; it was the nineteenth-century stop-motion photographic sequences of athletes taken by Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge that propelled the development of the movie camera. Daniel Crooks explores this heritage in his processed video footage. Crooks slices a video image into columns of pixels which are then spliced and staggered across a screen. In motion, the collaged pixels become lyrical animations. Like an eerie photo finish caught up in a time warp, the video turns an imperceptible moment into an abstract ballet. But Crooks' videos are also a reminder that modern sport is inseparable from science and technology; they are close cousins of the high-speed videos used in the laboratory analysis of high-performance athletes.