Locked Groove

Locked Groove is based on daily life choreography, an investigation of movements in public space - life rhythms within the context of urbanity. It features close-up shots of the most often executed movements of people with the most common jobs in the city of Hull, UK, where the video was produced. The result is a dense collage made from these different motion fragments (sometimes less than a second long). Extracted as mere gestures, they reveal hidden messages and allow possible links to other movement fragments. Once they are placed in sequence, they seem to amplify themselves--a trajectory resembling the theory of the butterfly effect.

Locked Groove was produced by EMARE and Hull Time Based Arts, UK, 1997.

"Cycling through images of repetitive manual labour, the artist digitally compresses each shot temporally and accelerates the sequence, until all the workers' hands morph into one grotesque movement. Stracke creates a parallel between the fragmentation of labor and the fragmentation of the image, suggesting that labor has been "digital" since the invention of the assembly line." --Laura U. Marks, OUT OF TIME program notes, Oberhausen 2001