REDUX
Michael Cousin is a moving image artist based in Wales, UK. He is the Founder and curator of Outcasting an online moving image gallery and is currently Freelance Project Manager at g39 in Cardiff. He has been the recipient of a Major Creative Wales Award (2007) and more recently has won a Creative Wales Ambassadors Award to create a new body of work in collaboration with g39 in Cardiff and Danielle Arnaud in London.Redux
The term has been adopted by filmmakers to denote a new interpretation of an existing work by the restoration of previously removed material.
Anti-Redux
The term has been adopted by filmmakers to denote a new interpretation of an existing work by destruction or removal of previously canonical material.
Redux-Plus
The term has been adopted by filmmakers to denote a new interpretation of an existing work by the introduction of previously unrelated material.
My current practise is focussed on challenging the authority of canonical documents using digital media to manipulate the content and create a reinterpreted version of the original. These reinterpretations will follow the three redux patterns outlined above, one accepted and two manufactured theories on revisiting existing work.
Using advanced CGI, video and sound editing technology my work raises questions about the authenticity of these sources but also questions the authority with which we perceive our own order of things, how memory and perception are malleable in our dealings with our own realities.
To date my practice has explored the misrepresentation of time and space and the possible connectivity between seemingly discrete events. I have also been interested in blurring the divide between fictional events and real events. These explorations have led me to the point of Redux.
Recently this has included a film piece manipulating footage of the 9/11 attacks by stages to reduce the event to a non-event and re-editing landmark political speeches such as Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’.