The first artist I researched was William Raban, an artist and experimental filmmaker known primarily for his landscape, performance and multi-screen films.

Raban seeems to explore the landscape around him by utilising different camera techniques, revealing hidden elements within them.

View (1970) is one in a series of films of a river taped over one whole day in winter using a static camera shooting one frame every 10 seconds running through the camera at 24 fps. According to Raban, the film was made in a 'continuous heavy rainstorm', and throughout the film, the lens got wet until it obscured the view. However, the bursts of film at normal speed were wiped  dry so that between the smudges of a blurry view was a perfectly clear, unspoiled view.

One interpretation of the film, from Peter Gidal, suggests that the film is a 'pure documentary' about how the camera copes with time (and how this mechanistic process is more important than the specifc image content), because without the means to capture the image the art would never come to fruition and the unique nuances of the landscape around Raban would not have been captured




sources

http://www.lux.org.uk/collection/works/view-0

http://www.opengallery.co.uk/video-art/william-raban

http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/586498/index.html