Eoin Killigrew

There are qualities inherent in older technology that have long since been ironed out of our modern reality, the rough edges have been smoothed away, the quirks, normalised. These quirks always interested me, so I began experimenting with how to coax them out and show them. I’ve used Gameboys streaming video from cartridges, I’ve fixed up super 8 cameras, shot footage of the internals of these cameras and projectors in motion, made my own developing tanks, hand developed my own film, and shown it on projectors that I’ve also repaired. I’ve repaired the small, thin film loops when they got mangled by said projectors.  

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I enjoy exploring different formats and their individual problems. I enjoy learning to navigate around those problems and eventually, hopefully, how to capitalise on them. 

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CRT televisions are a fascinating, complex, and fragile technology – it’s literally firing three beams of electrons that are directed by magnets at reactive phosphors to make an image. That’s so cool! How do I do things with that? I initially wanted to get some of my own magnets to distort the image in (hopefully) interesting ways, but you’d need a black and white television to be able to “reset” the changes you made easily, and I couldn’t find one.  
 
So, I thought back on my previous projects –I had my film loops from Reruns. I had a video display on a Gameboy Advance that was recursive, and it so happens, so were the projected film loops – they both showed the inner workings of the equipment being used to run the moving image. So, I have recursion and loops.  

I had an idea: feedback loops. Also known as a howl-around, it’s where you point a camera at a screen that’s displaying the camera’s output. The camera is showing what it’s seeing, and seeing what it’s showing, over and over and over and over. This creates some interesting effects and doubly so if done with analogue technology. On top of spontaneous generation of patterns, colours and other effects, if you can find a way to superimpose and image onto the screen as well, you can generate some really unpredictable results. Results that change with camera type, TV size and display technology, ambient light and even local temperature!