Zoom Test (excerpt)
found video, 5:26, 2016
Zoom Test uses a camera zoom test shot from several stories above street level that slowly settles on a hooded person paging through an erotic magazine. The lens drifts—searching, overshooting, correcting—making the act of looking uncertain and unstable. Over the image, a man reads from Freedom From the Known (1969) by Jiddu Krishnamurti.
The work holds together surveillance, desire, and instruction without resolving them, allowing technical adjustment to remain visible rather than disappear into clarity.
“In all of our relationships, each one of us builds an image about the other… The actual relationship between two human beings completely ends when there is the formation of images.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti, Freedom From the Known (1969)
— cited by Ariel Evans, Research Fellow, African and African Diaspora Studies, UT Austin