brook hinton
selected recent work

 

SHATTER No. 1
(2008, continous multi-channel digital video installation, Color, Sound

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Site-specific installation for the Bay Area Video Coalition. A computer classroom is transformed into a tool for dissecting its seen and unseen surroundings.

RECEPTION
(2008, 6 minutes, Color, Silent)

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Lobby installation for the Bay Area Video Coalition. A simple transformation and reflection process using the lobby window to create temporal dissonance.

A TRIP DOWN THIRD STREET BEFORE THE UNKNOWN:
SCENIC HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE SFMUNI T-LINE
(2007, 8 minutes, Color, Silent)

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San Francisco’s new light rail “T-Line” navigates 3rd Street through the south city neighborhoods that are home to many San Franciscans yet have remained invisible to many others. The real meaning of this new transit link is debated throughout the city, but most particularly in the southern neighborhoods. A Trip Down Third Street,  like the 1905  A Trip Down Market Street,  is a silent meditation on contemporary life seen in the context of a street and a transit line, in this case 3rd Street prior to the launch of regular T-line service, recorded from the train on one of its inaugural “preview” runs in February 2007.



THE PUBLIC RECORD (2006-2007)
An online video project consisting primarily of straightforward video images taken in public and semi-public spaces. The piece is in some sense about art's essential need to work with the unmediated, unpurchased, uncleared world  in an era of privacy and intellectual property concerns. But at it's core, it's about seeing, about celebrating the present moment and the small but resonant things that are often missed in the course of the day.


SHIMMER CRASH (2006, 8 minutes, Color, Sound)
This visualization of the memory-infected aftermath of an unseen (or perhaps merely imagined) accident moves through a series of visual transformations to become a meditation on the chaos of a landscape ruled by the automobile. Shimmer Crash  is the second in a series of works based on the concept of introjection - the unconscious internalization of external phenomena.



TRACE GARDEN (2006-2007)
A videoblog by ghosts.
Some years ago I had the task of  examining and cataloguing many hours of home 16mm footage dating back to the 1920's. The reels were found in the basement of the recently deceased and last member of a wealthy San Francisco family. As I continue working with this footage on my own, it seems almost to force itself into new configurations, all of them feeling like the memories of people who are no longer here. A vlog seems, at least, the right place for these voices to communicate.
Viewable at www.brookhinton.com/tracegarden.
Requires Quicktime 7.


SLOW FORCE GLIMPSE (2004, 4 minutes, Color, Sound)
Images glimpsed from a train window become lodged in a dream-like world of menace and beauty.
This is the first in a series of works based on the concept of introjection - the unconscious internalization of external phenomena. In psychology the term usually refers to the incorporation of external personalities or ideas (i.e., parental voices) into the personality: these films are more interested in the psychological impact of the things we encounter in passing.

TRANSIT (2004, 9 minutes, Color, Sound)
A moment on a windy day in San Francisco's Union Square is reconfigured through temporal manipulation to reflect different levels of presence - of both author and subjects - in that same moment. 


MOMENTUM 1-3 (2003, Multichannel, Variable Lengths, Color, Silent)
3 triple-channel video pieces exploring movement in various contexts. Momentum 1 places temporally manipulated and abstracted images of a river against  a frantic, raw, direct and gritty  approach to moving through the land immediately adjacent to it. #2 plays with the interlacing of video, the expected and thwarted movement of the same river (this time fully unaestheticized) and the appearance of an unexpected visitor within the frame. The third piece moves away from the aquatic thoroughfare to a night highway.


WAVE/WAKE (2002, 7 minutes, Color, Sound)
WAVE/WAKE examines emotional states before and after a cataclysmic event. Beginning with the suggestion of ocean waves braking and receding, the piece places ordinary phenomena in the shadow of the 9/11/01 attack on New York and Washington DC through temporal manipulation of both media coverage and street videography. The piece functions as an emotional record and as a critique of mass media response to tragedy.
FAMILIAR (1999/2002, 100 minutes, Color, Sound)
A self-styled community leader and hypercontrolling "head of the household" to a despondent, defeated family tries to redeem himself in their eyes with a vacation to a suburb exactly like their own, where he instead faces his own demons in this dark and oblique absurdist narrative.



SEVEN SILENT SKETCHES  (2001, 9 minutes, Color, Silent)
These seven haiku-like digital sketches resulted from an attempt to break a "dry" period of inspiration through sheer force: a self-imposed sentence to construct a film a day, each consisting of only three shots, from previously discarded footage.  These shorts range from pure abstraction to simple meditations on home life.

FLOW (2000, 3 minutes, Color, Silent)
An abstract, silent consideration of water in time.
HACK (1999, 3 minutes, Black and White, Silent)
War and cruelty through the filter of language. A silent text film constructed from internet searches revealing benign and violent contexts for the word "hack".