Minute Waltz is a ballet performance recorded on a time-lapse VHS security surveillance recorder borrowed over a weekend from a local bank. Laurie dances in slow motion for twenty minutes to create the three-minute video, the recorder capturing two frames of video per second, thereby compressing “real” time (a conventional video recorder records and plays back at thirty frames per second). When the time-lapse video is played back, at 30 frames per second, her slowed movements appear to be “normal” speed. However, movements performed at normal speed during recording appear dramatically accelerated and frenetic, reminiscent of the comics of the silent era. The music is Chopin’s “Minute Waltz,” a nickname (from “Miniature”) the publisher gave the work, but Chopin never intended for his composition to be performed in a minute. If only time lapse video recorders had been available in 1847!
Minute Waltz
Laurie McDonald
1977 00:02:41 United StatesEnglishB&W and ColorMono4:31/2" open reel videoDescription
About Laurie McDonald
Laurie McDonald is a media artist, writer, graphic designer, and photographer. In 1972, she began exploring video as an art-making tool and was a founding member of the video art collective Electron Movers, Research in the Electronic Arts, based in Providence, Rhode Island. Her early work was exhibited at The Kitchen (NYC) and included in the 10th, 11th, and 12th annual New York Avant Garde Festivals, and at venues throughout New York and New England.
She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship and four American Film Institute/NEA Fellowships. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Pierre du Chardin Gallery (Paris), The Gallery of Modern Art (Rome), and at festivals including the American Film Institute’s Film/Video Festival, the Tokyo Video Festival, the Festival du Cinema in Montreal, and at Filmfest (Berlin, Budapest, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Moscow).
As a writer, her experience ranges from novels to screenplays to instructional/informational writing. Using the pseudonym Eva Rome, she has written and published three books: Travel for STOICS; What It Means: Myth, Symbol, and Archetype in the Third Millennium, Vol. 1; and Location X: A Quest for Place. She has served as a screenplay consultant to the National Endowment for the Arts Media Grants Committee, as a contract screenplay and script writer/consultant, and as both a book editor and book cover designer. As a graphic designer and photographer, she has designed and built Web sites, graphics for print, and graphics for video. She has published two books of her own photographs: Chair, and Fotocollées.
Laurie is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and holds a Master of Literature degree from the University of Houston. She lives in Evanston, Illinois, USA, and in San Miguel de Allende, México.