Stairmaster

Stairmaster offers a fresh take on the exploration of movement and space, standing in stark contrast to earlier ‘art of movement’ works by artists like Eadweard Muybridge, Marcel Duchamp, Gjon Mili, the Futurists, and even Gerhard Richter. While these predecessors captured movement from a single, stationary vantage point, Stairmaster disrupts this approach by using a camera in motion. Focused downward, the camera aggregates the sequence of spaces I move through, creating a continuous narrative that reconfigures both time and space.

In the images of spiral staircases, stairwells, and escalators, Prolongance transforms these architectural features in unexpected ways. By keeping the shutter open while ascending or descending, the image sensor blends frames together, obliterating the natural curvature of a spiral staircase and rendering it as a linear composition. In angular stairwells and multi-floor escalators, this process opens up strange, liminal spaces, where transitions between 90° or 180° turns become warped and fragmented, yet still cohesive.