Derek Hunter's most recent piece Time Machinefeatures 65 disposable cameras fixed to a 350 degree rail made from reclaimed lumber, activated by electromechanical solenoids. The photographs, which feature Hunter's wife Mira who is a second-generation whirling dervish, are animated in a sequence, giving the audience the visual experience of revolving around a whirling dervish, caught in a single moment. The images, often displaying unusual exposure disturbances and anomalies, are scanned and made into two films which will play simultaneously within a wooden yurt, installed at the SFU School for Contemporary Arts exhibition space at 611 Alexander Street in Vancouver. He is currently working on a companion piece to Time Machine, working title Time Bomb. Time Bomb is a different look at reparative/restorative potential in art. Inspired by Fischli/Weiss and Mary Mattingly's future human Navigators, it will playfully document a moment when nature and the common animal will raise a malakoff cocktail in the name of environmental injustice, through bullet time photography, stop motion animation, super 16 film, video and a rotating tripod machine.
'With Time Machine I am looking to create a new visual language to discuss Islamic mysticism in a contemporary context. Four years ago, I began studying the ancient mystical form of dance known to the Mevlevi Sufi order, as whirling. Through my wife, Mira Hunter and her father Raqib Brian Burke, who founded the Open Secret School of Whirling in 2003, I began an intense fascination with the traditional Turkish form of physical meditation. By using a circle of recycled disposable 35 mm cameras positioned on a curved rail I am looking to create a bullet time visual effect. The dervish is completely surrounded, enabling the capture of a single momentof the total movement instantaneously. The cameras are triggered electronically with a series of solenoids. Each series of images is developed, scanned and then animated. I want to address the common public image of whirling, the stoic bearded man in a formal weighted 18th century tenure, by eclipsing it with an image of my partner Mira, a female second-generation dervish, raised in Vancouver, BC. With the bullet time photography I am looking to express the essence of the eye of the hurricane. There is a space that can be accomplished in whirling like no other, the subject becomes this incredible axis of motion, and at the centre there is only stillness. Through this potent series of images of whirling, I want the spectator to experience the motion as the point of view shifts across the tripod arc. Time Machine will be shown as an installation in a structure based on the yurt tents of the nomadic cultures of Mongolia, Turkey, and China.' - Derek Hunter.
The Happiest Molecule of All (duration 8:13), a tiny stop motion animation loop of an imaginary sequence of Sema, the traditional ceremony of the Whirling Dervishes. The soundtrack for the installation of this tiny loop was a zikr from the stunning album by Oruç Güvenc & Tümata, called Ocean of Remembrance. This film was created for Time Machine. It was viewed on a tiny screen through a crack on the exterior of the wooden yurt in the installation.
