Duncan Higgins part of group exhibition in Berlin

The work is a sculptural installation involving projected mobile phone videos and a servo arm which reproduces the gestures of the body. Higgins is collaborating with Frank Abbott on the project.

The visual content of the work consists of short 10 second videos captured on mobile phone and extracted from a larger ongoing 6 year dialogue between painter Duncan Higgins and film maker Frank Abbott.

In 2005, without an agenda, they began to regularly send hundreds of short video messages to one another to see what would emerge. The videos from mobile phones show not only the scene and the sound of the moment but also embody a memory of the place in time and the location of the person holding the camera. This information is usually documented in meta- data which accompanies the image as a text file. However as the two correspondents viewed more of the videos in sequence,  a very visual pattern of classification began to emerge and it is from these observations that this new piece is generated.

"Muscle" has chosen to isolate particular videos which share a gestural flourish- a movement of the arm holding the camera- the emergence of which suggests a common reactive response to noticing the scene before you. The emergence of this visual trope embodied in muscle memory derives from using the camera as a casual conversational device, an extension of the body rather than a creator of fictive or documentary images.

An electronic servo crudely reproduces the path the camera traced in the air when the shots were originally taken. Wrenched from the continuity of the screen and stripped back into sculptural objects, these wandering projections of around 2500 short video clips, across the wall of the gallery return us to a common remembered physical gesture of standing before the world, camera in hand, tracing mobility.