I am an AHRC-funded Fine Art postgraduate at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne. I graduated from Sheffield Hallam University in 2001 with a first class degree in fine art, and subsequently studied ‘intellectual revolution’ at the Courtauld Institute of Art.

I am currently working with moving image hybrids, having a particular interest in the earliest methods of photography and changing techniques of observation.

La Maison Dieux is a 13m journey through the history of the moving image, and is a visual proposition of the archaeology of a site. Using the three conflictual and interdependent media of photography, film and digital video to exaggerate the cinematic fabric- the individual frame and interstice- the work alludes to the moment when the modern learnt to see. The complex processing technique historicises the image, whilst the frantic rhythm evokes supermodernity, setting up a discourse of duality between our experience of the present and the romanticised echoes of our memories.

Originating on Kodachrome 40 super8 mm film, the material passes through still photography, photogram, digital stop-frame animation, and projection, before returning to super 8 film and the telecine process. It is then either viewed as a Super8 projection on a film projector, or as a digital video projection, with the sound of the piece made by the projection process.

-Isabella Streffen, 2007