Gerco de Ruijter - ARENA
For his hypnotising video Crops, Gerco de Ruijter looked for images on Google Earth taken by aerial cameras. Each selected image is one of the countless fields in the southwest of the United States which are sprayed by means of centre pivot irrigation.
De Ruijter cropped the photographs in such a way that the fixed pattern of a circle in a square remained in all of the images. He then placed them in a four-minute-long animation. The colours change with the season and the cultivated crops while the irrigation machine divides the plots into different strips like the hand of a clock. The mesmeric haze of the work, compiled from over a thousand images, is emphasised by the lingering, stuttering electronic music of Michel Banabila.
