Film · 2011 · Music

8 switches (Part 6)

With 8 Switches, Tim Wright presents six black-and-white microcinematic vignettes of retina-searing, hard-edged, epilepsy-inducing sound and vision; digital hallucinations drained of colour, synchronized to a soundtrack that is relentless and unsentimental. Each new section presents a variation on the same sleek, kinetic minimalism. As each section progresses, the razor-sharp line between a host of binary oppositions—black/white, figure/ground, silence/sound, here/there, on/off — dissolves through sheer velocity. The rapid-fire alternation between these binary oppositions acts like the flicker of film frames, accelerating until sound and sight are wed into a synchronous whole in which neither the visual nor the sonic takes primacy. Instead, each acts as mutually constitutive literalisation of the other. — Joseph Clayton Mills