Clockwork
multi-channel video installation exploring work and intimacy

“The images [of Clockwork] serve as indices for ideas surrounding our relationship with time, work, leisure, and self, while foregrounding the ambivalent role of technology in human culture since the dawn of the machine age.” —Peggy MacKinnon, Net Art News

Clockwork is a series of four short multi-channel video works, each shot in a location where physical touch between individuals is routine yet highly charged: a dentist’s office, a hair salon, a massage therapist’s studio, and a teenage boys’ slumber party.  For each piece, multiple cameras are used to record a half-second of video every thirty seconds over a 16-hour period.  The resulting works restructure the long arc of these intimate relations, revealing otherwise invisible habits of work and play.

  1. Drill  (2-channel)  Over the course of a long workday, a dentist shuttles back and forth between patients.  Bursts of classical music compete with the sounds of drilling, suction, and light banter.  TRT 5:13
  2. Shampoo   (2-channel)  Around a salon chair, two hair-washing sinks, and before a maze of mirrors, a stylist attends to her many clients.  TRT 5:00
  3. Massage (2-channel)  A masseuse works on her five clients.  Between massages she has a few meals, talks on the phone, stretches, and prepares for the next client; the time she spends on others frames the time she takes for herself.  TRT 5:03
  4. Birthday (4-channel)  At a slumber party seven boys stare into computers and game consoles, wrestle, play ping-pong, and eat birthday cake.  TRT 5:08

Read the blog posts tagged Clockwork.

View Clockwork on The Patricia Sweetow Gallery page.

Project/Exhibition dates

Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco, 2006
Dallas Video Festival, 2006
Headland Center for the Arts, 2007