The Taken Path: a durational project – Carrick Hill, 2025 Adelaide Festival

The Taken Path: a durational project
Catherine Truman & Ian Gibbins

Controls: 2 channel video, HD, 03:43:45, 2 x 75″ screens, silent (2025)
Peripheries: 4 channel video, HD, 00:58:14, 4 x 43″ screens, silent (2025)
Soundtracks: 2 x 2 channel stereo, 01:00:49 and 01:04:33 (2025)

The Wall Gallery, Carrick Hill
46 Carrick Hill Drive, Springfield, SA 5062

Wednesday 12 February – Sunday 16 March 2025
Wednesdays – Sundays 10:00am – 4:30pm

https://www.adelaidefestival.com.au/events/the-taken-path

https://www.carrickhill.sa.gov.au/events/adelaide-festival-exhibition-the-taken-path

The Carrick Hill estate, nestled in the foothills of Adelaide, presents a conundrum of the delicate connections between humans and the greater environment. Here, pure fantasy and the hard reality of both ancient and present life are encountered at once in a microcosm of the wider world.

At monthly intervals over a year, my long-standing artist friend and collaborator Catherine Truman and I used an iPhone and professional video camera respectively to record our walks along a defined path that traverses the natural and altered landscapes at Carrick Hill. This speculative, durational project was inspired by a poetic idea: what would we notice if we walked the same path, once a month over the course of a year and recorded the journey?

This repeated action reveals profound shifts of climate and impacts of human industry. If we keep to the path already taken, what happens to our powers of observation? If we walk it many times, does our awareness shift or is it becalmed? What can we learn anew from this repetition?

Work in Progress – Newmarch Gallery, 2023

The Taken Path: a durational project was first exhibited at the Newmarch Gallery in 2023 as a work-in-progress within a larger collaborative project: A Partnership for Uncertain Times, co-developed by Dr Deirdre Feeney and ANAT (the Australian Network for Art and Technology).

In this version of the project, we presented two video sequences. The Taken Path: Durational Sequence ran for over three hours and had largely unprocessed walking footage from Catherine (right panel, taken with an iPhone) and me (left panel, taken with a Canon XF200 video camera). There was a little animated map and time line along the bottom showing when and where we were along the path. 

The Taken Path: Periphery ran for about 50 minutes and showed examples of different ways of looking, remembering and processing our experience, that are outside our usual lines of sight as we walk along the path, focussing on our camera screens.

Installation view of The Taken Path at Newmarch Gallery.
Left screen: The Taken Path: Durational Sequence.
Right screen: The Taken Path: Periphery.
The installation also included selected texts from Catherine and me, and three wonderful glass objects by Catherine.

Together, the two videos attempted to illustrate the largely unsolvable problem of representing the uniqueness, the ephemerality and perceptual uncertainty of lived experience. We cannot attend to everything that happens around us and we cannot fully portray those elements of our experience that do take our attention, form memories, generate lasting significance.

At that point in time, the project was incomplete. We had not undertaken all 12 months of the walks, and we had only begun to explore our understanding its nuances and implications for how we attend to our environment as we repeatedly traverse it.

The Taken Path at Carrick Hill, 2025

The Taken Path at Carrick Hill Wall Gallery. Controls on the left, Peripheries on the right.

In 2024, we were invited by Carrick Hill to present The Taken Path in their gallery as part of the 2025 Adelaide Festival. This presented us with a wonderful opportunity to take the project to another level. Apart from anything else, we had completed a full 12-month sequence of recording our walks along the Carrick Hill path. We also had gathered a larger library of alternative viewpoints associated with the path: side views, ground views, overhead views, and more. Concurrently, we had developed deeper, broader, richer understandings of the environment we were in, how we observed it, recorded it, and represented it in video, audio and text. Finally, the space at Carrick Hill would give us the opportunity to present the work on a scale and in a location that suitably encompasses the complex nature of the project.

From August to December 2024, we reworked and rethought the masses of material we had. How could we represent the experience of walking the path at Carrick Hill, month after month, deviating as little as possible from our chosen route, despite diverse pressures to do otherwise? How could we use the Wall Gallery space to effectively invoke in a viewer even a small proportion of the alternative views of the path we had considered?

Building on our prior experiments for the exhibition at Newmarch Gallery in 2023, we decided to use 6 video screens and multichannel audio to create a space that both invokes our personal interactions with the Carrick Hill environment and, in some sense, evokes a corresponding set of interactions with the viewers.

2 channel video, HD, 03:43:45, 2 x 75″ screens, silent

These two screens present the recordings of our walks along the Taken Path. Up hill, to the east, adjacent to some remnant, largely degraded native woodland, stands a large Grey Box gum tree (Eucalyptus microcarpa), dead now, but seemingly holding its ground, like a sentinel against further interference. Down hill, towards the west and the suburbs, there is a Pencil Pine (Cupressus sempervirens), encased in a strange pyramidal iron frame, whose story no one seems to know. In between is the Carrick Hill house, with cultivated flower gardens to the east, a pleached pear arbour to the west. The inner precinct of house, gardens, lawns, and arbour is separated from the rest of the estate by an extensive cypress hedge. An arched passage way through the hedge connects between the arbour and the former orchards further west, its inner walls revealing the skeletal nature of its internal architecture.

It takes about 15-20 minutes to completely traverse the path from one end to the other and back again. Catherine recorded her walks on her iPhone, and I used my Canon XF 200 HC professional camcorder on a Glidecam mechanical (inertial) stabiliser. Over the course of 12 months, Catherine’s phone had several automatic upgrades that changed the way in which the video was recorded. My set-up is very effective, but it is quite heavy (several kgs) and requires practice to work well. For these and other reasons, the quality of the videos improved over the 12-month period.

While recording our videos, we had to keep our gaze fixed on our respective viewfinders to maintain the point of interest as steady and centred as possible while we walked. The built-in image stabilisers corrected some, but not all, of the deviations as we variously slipped, negotiated rough ground, partially lost balance, or simply got tired.

The final sequences are synchronised as closely as possible between Catherine’s video and mine, so that we pass the same points along the path at the same time. Sometimes, parts of my video are sped up or slowed down to match Catherine’s; at other times, the speed of Catherine’s videos is changed to match mine. A small animation runs at the bottom of each screen to show where we are along the path, with icons representing the Grey Box, the House, the Pencil Pine and the Hedge.

These videos are displayed on large screens, side by side. All of the technical flaws and processing artefacts will be obvious to viewers. Sometimes Catherine’s version looks almost the same as mine; on other occasions, very different indeed. But we never recorded our walks at exactly the same time. So the angle of the sun is different, the cloud cover could be different. Although, by lucky co-incidence, the field of view in the iPhone and Canon are almost the same, very little else was comparable in the two recording systems: they have different lens architecture, different recording hardware, different encoding algorithms, different colour processing, different stabilisation methods, and so on. Which of these is closer to the “truth” of what was out there? Which of these better matches our visual experience, our recollected memories of the path we have taken? How can we ever tell?

“NONE OF US EVER SEES THE SAME THING”

We are blind to most of what we see. Our conscious visual experience of the external world is constructed by our brain from multiple channels of imperfect inputs from our eyes. We usually interpret the visual world as a continuous integrated continuum, yet we can only attend to a small part of it at any one time. Only a small central portion of the visual field is detected in high resolution and full colour. Our peripheral vision is largely colour-blind and lacks detail, although it is finely tuned to detect sudden movements “out the corner of your eye”. Our eyes constantly dart around with rapid tiny movements (“saccades”) between which we are effectively blind. What we see is also affected by how we plan and carry out our movements, so the flow of our visual field when walking seems smooth and fluid, quite unlike the marked jerkiness of an unstabilised video recording.

What we consciously see, what comes to our visual attention, is strongly influenced by our past experience, our current focus of attention, and our expectation of what will happen next. By definition, it is impossible for two viewers to see exactly the same scene: they will be in different locations, they will focus on different parts of the visual world, they will bring different past experiences, knowledge bases, and expectations. At the most basic level, the photons entering the eye of one viewer are not the photons entering the eye of another: the viewers cannot possibly be seeing the same view of the world.

“NOTHING IS NATURAL IN A VIDEO RECORDING”

The process of video depends on a series of illusions that play on the properties of our visual system. For example:

• Nothing is moving in a video: it is a series of still images, in this case at the rate of 25 per second, that are fused by the brain as it takes time to process the visual information in each separate image. This process is probably akin to the fusing of visual scenes captured by saccades.

• There are only three colours in a video: red, green and blue. There is no yellow or pink or brown or any other of the thousands of shades most of us can recognise. The right mix of red and green signals in the video produces the sensation of yellow as if we are seeing “real” yellow light. This largely is a result of the physics of light interacting with the photochemistry of the colour receptors in the retina of the eye.

• We (usually) do not see things in and out of focus the way cameras (usually) do. When we focus on something close, items in the background are not only out of focus, but they are also seen as if in double vision, due to the convergence angles of our eyes. We don’t have any of the various flares and glows generated by the optical system in the lens of the camera.

Watching a video involves multiple steps of mediation: from a selected view of the external world to the original recording, from the recording to the screen, from the screen to our conscious experience. Any attempt to reproduce this process can only ever be a rough approximation. So how can we represent or emulate our experiences around the periphery of the Taken Path?

 

4 channel video, HD, 00:58:14, 4 x 43″ screens, silent

By splitting four channels of video across four screens, separated by significant spatial gaps along a long wall of the gallery, we make it impossible for a viewer to attend equally to all screens at once.

How can you tell if the same thing is being shown on each screen if you cannot see them simultaneously? How do you decide where to look? What if the content on one screen seems to move across to another? Do you follow it? Or do you stay and continue watching the screen currently before your eyes? Regardless of the decision you make, how does this process, contrived as it is, match the process of observing a complex, ever changing environment that surrounds you as walk the Taken Path?

There are many possible answers to these questions: The “Peripheries” offers some of them…

rotations

Four locations each along the west and east parts of the path. A full 360º rotation at each site. Each rotation displayed across four screens. Is this what is happening behind our backs?

[WEST]
seasonally rotating
the sun floods in
our attention captured
a flush of recognition

an elegant expanse
promise and expectation
eastward or westward
always reconfigured

[EAST]
so it unbecomes
appearances conjured
a lot goes missing
to continue or turn around

waiting unseen
these different views
positions exchanged
another direction

overhead

The camera traces an arc from one end of the path to the other, passing overhead, as the body slowly twists and extends. At the end of each walk, the viewpoint rises from the landmark trees to the ever-changing sky.

a dance between up and down
a highway framed by a cathedral of trees
the weather alters everything
gathering dissolving refocussing

embodied over time
inside the repetition
our sense of the seasons
these transitions and translations

no sky is repeatable

artisans

Out of hours, behind the scenes, the estate is managed, manicured, machined, maintained. Amongst the sounds of birds and wind in the trees, the noise of humans and their engines at work dominates, creating the fantasy we desire, the reality we get.

peripheral vision

Out of the corner of your eye, beside the taken path, towards the north, towards the south, how much do you really see? What will take your attention?

adapted for low light / colourblind / lacking detail / sensitive to movement

house

We walk around the house to move from one part of the path to the other. Everywhere along the path, the house is a focal point. Built of ancient stone from local quarries, whose history does it really hold? How does our prior knowledge inform what we see?

the old and the new
this is how we feel the blending of time

embedded in stonework
so many stories, so many lives

these slippages of perception
the gaps in our knowledge
the familiar and the formal
the surprise of repetition

underfoot

As we walk the path, we cross ancient histories, the stories belonging to generations of people before us. We traverse artefacts of long-gone environments. We must be careful where we place our feet, yet we cannot avoid trampling the past.

the steps we take
ground ancient washed away
we overlooked our history
cover again paths displaced

the order and disorder along the way

GPS

We could have counted our steps.
We could have tracked our GPS.
We felt the path by footfall.
We mapped the path with peripheral vision.

East: “the bush and a sentinel gum”
Eucalyptus microcarpa

West: “an encased pencil pine and the urban sprawl beyond”
Cupressus sempervirens

We stick to our rules.
We maintain a steady pace.
We turn back on our trajectories.
We inevitably must change.

sapling

On the path near the old Grey Box, self-sown eucalyptus saplings fight for existence against changing climate and on-going construction. They are fragile. They are resilient.

(H)EDGE(D)

A boundary. An icon. An edge detected, enhanced by process and design.

arbour

Nowhere are seasonal changes more apparent than the pleached pear arbour. But at any time of year, it is visited by birds. The arbour needs constant care and attention to keep its growth under control. If we let it be for a year or two, what new forms would it take?

It is a ribcage. It is a weave of life and death.

ghosts

the light we cannot see
the shadows we conjure from air

these remnant memories
such ghostly reminders of loss

TheSoundtracks– 2 x 2-channels, phased

We could not avoid being affected by the sounds around us as we recorded our walks: birds, wind, rain, distant traffic, overhead aircraft, nearby radios, and, always, always, the machines. We were usually at Carrick Hill out of hours, when it was closed to the public. This was when all the maintenance was done. Meanwhile, a new building was being constructed on site.

The audio samples have not been processed in any way other than to overlay and sequence them, with some levelling out of the loudest peaks. One loop is slightly longer than the other, so over time, the loops gradually shift in relation to each other, generating a soundscape that slowly changes in time and space.

We are not at the centre of everything in existence.
We are not the reason nor the solution, but we are here at the same time.
We do not exist in isolation.
We are colourblind at the edges until we change direction.