Bill Seaman

Biography

The work of Bill Seaman evolves in the context of an already developed aesthetic language of video and uses elements of video in hypermedia settings. Seaman’s work is exemplary for the transition from video to hypertext through the combination and recombination of single elements of image, music, sound, and text. This approach also leads to formats such as video tape, video disc, CD-Rom and interactive installations, which work with the same elements (e.g., the video The Exquisite Mechanism of Shivers, 1991, AUS/USA, and the CD-Rom version in 1994).

Seaman attempts to explore transitions from image spaces to spatial images and to create zones where there is a hybrid merger of different virtual elements and machines in virtual environment settings. Seaman consistently uses passages of text and images in a simulated image space/spatial image as a characteristic creative tool in the production of structural links between the media of video and computer. He translates the concept of flowing movement in the electronic image into deceleration. Gliding camera movements and ‘slow-motion/video stills’ emphasize the unstable, flexible character of a visual mode. Combination is yet another characteristic through which the structure of video is made visible in terms of its potential for expansion and border phenomena. Combination is the result of the logic of a machine operation; it is through computer programs that Seaman creates a ‘recombinant’ video mode.