The Moth and the Lamp
16mm film, mute, 10 mins 15 secs, looped.
Commissioned by Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland.
Exhibited at Kunsthalle Bern, 2006, Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven, 2007, and Kunstmuseum Bern, 2008
(Made in collaboration with Pavel Buchler)
Production still, copyright Mark Neville
A moth circles a bright lamp in this unedited, looped film. It was filmed at four thousand frames a second using a camera normally employed in car-crash testing, in a specially constructed interior. The film is projected onto a hanging frame, with the projector also clearly visible in the exhibition space. The lamp depicted in the filmed image slowly becomes a metaphor for the bulb within the projector, and the moth circling that light source thus becomes a symbol for the celluloid passing in front of that projector bulb.