This moment

Made as part of the "one minute" series for bbc 2 television's The Late Show, Cunningham, who is known primarily as an experimental musician, deconstructs using a series of phonetic representations of fragments from the utterance "this moment". The system traces the evolution of the broken sound into the complete word. Cunningham is also addressing the experience of tape loops of speech seemingly changing to the listener even though they are only being repeated. "This moment" develops a relationship between two different levels of communication - the raw material of sound produced by the human voice and the system of representation in which it becomes endowed with meaning. Cunningham eschews narrative and conventions of that medium, and instead chooses a fragment and development within that frame of a formal system which is necessarily implicated in linguistic understanding. The video produces a simple minimal image of rhythms at work both visually and aurally.