Gerald van der Kaap: Wherever You Are on This Planet

A week ago Kristi sent me a fax asking me if I could talk about a book I have just finished making, and if I could bend it to the theme of 'speed and new media'. I will try.

This book is about my so-called oevre - this work that happened to cross my path when I was awarded a prize, I decided to make a book to play with this notion of what an oevre could be.

In it are all the images I made - they are all the same scale. Let us say the head is six and a half centimetres, which makes it all very democratic. It means that you can put in a work which like this for instance, which normally you use real fetishist hardware, next to some simple screen dumps. I did this because I wanted to just try it out because I like the concept of image banks.

But also there was another thing ... This is how the book was presented. You can see this is the Stedelijk Museum - I am now looking, trying to get something with speed, something that is....

This is really a slow image, one I could find it in my archive. This is people reading books in a museum, instead of going from one row to the next and just looking at an artwork for five minutes or 30 seconds.

Another thing I came across is the One Moment Please thing. A couple of years ago I made a CD ROM and I was very interested in the time when the next file was formed - sorry for my Dutch-English by the way - and at the time the computer was searching for something, I thought that's the moment which is the most interesting. Normally you can see this image: 'One Moment Please' - normally you see this little clock on the screen. You start hating it after a while and I thought to make it into something beautiful, at least that is what I thought, and change the image.

Another thing that speeds - let us look at some slides. This is also a speed slide. And another one. This is more philosophical, because this is repeated speed. As a photographer, the only thing you can do is kill speed by making a picture. So perhaps these three things are about the same thing, about suspending speed, or time. I'm trying to use the word speed as much as possible...

This is another speed picture which I made in Austria. It also tries to sabotage speed, because it is actually a painting which I photographed and because of the limitations of photography, namely the limitations of shutter speed. You see it in a larger version, because the contrast on the painting you cannot capture in a photograph and some people, when I exhibited this piece, thought that I had taken a picture of a girl, a simple small painting in Austria.

This is really the suspended speed moment. This is what I want to do forever, hanging around like this boy here somewhere in Brazil and that is why I think you take pictures, that is what a lot of people do when they take holiday pictures. To keep this moment forever and to stop speed.

All the images which are in this book, which I can show you a little bit - that is made with an instant camera - (showing pictures to the audience, a lot of laughing)...

I was talking about this concept of the moments when you are waiting for something to happen, which I really like. Especially the Internet - it's the only thing I like about the Internet. Let's play a video, a speed video.....