Three Studies

Claus Lucas’ Three Studies (2024) began life as a cellphone video taken of the Emerald Pool in the Te Hoiere Pelorus River, Nelson. This may not be readily apparent to you the first time you see the video; a prism of black, white, and blue pixels pulsating in a luminous, digital abstraction. As white waveforms spawn and stutter across the screen, behind the pixels, water haunts the image as a kind of shimmering, a presence made so illegible it is felt only as an absence. Three Studies is, to borrow Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's term, a "hypermediated" video of water. Watching data mosh and subsume the screen, water has likely left your mind, as the paucity of pixels has cast doubt on all but the very materiality of the video itself. Wave-like forms have become waveforms. The medium eclipses the object in visibility. — Matthew Whiteman, 'shards from a broken mirror,' CIRCUIT, 2025