Phantom Ride

Australia, 2016

Ian Potter Moving Image Commission, ACMI Collection

Daniel Crooks is represented by Anna Schwartz Gallery, Australia and Future Perfect, Singapore

Artwork ACMI commissions Objects and artworks On display

Daniel Crooks’ Phantom Ride alludes to cinema history to create a seamless journey through a composite reality. By manipulating digital footage as though it were a physical material, Crooks has constructed a collaged landscape, taking us through multiple worlds and shifting our perception of space and time.

“Phantom Ride comes out of my long-held fascination with the convergence of trains, the birth of cinema and modern ideas and representations of time.

I’ve presented it as a two-sided video; the forward-facing journey on one side and the rear looking journey on the reverse. The screen becomes a meniscus of the present, separating the past and the future.

– Daniel Crooks

Curator Notes

Taking as a starting point films such as the Lumiere brother’s Leaving Jerusalem by Railway (1896), regarded today as the first ever tracking shot, Daniel Crooks’ Phantom Ride is a continuous journey through the natural and constructed landscapes of our contemporary environment.

The work references the phantom rides of early cinema, a genre of film popular in Britain and the United States in the early 1900s. Pre-dating narrative features, these short films showed the progress of a vehicle, usually a train, moving forward by mounting a camera on its front.

By seamlessly stitching together a series of tracks found in urban and country environments (including tram tracks, tram repair depots, and bridges and tunnels along disused country railways), Crooks’ Phantom Ride creates the illusion of a single journey through diverse worlds. Traveling simultaneously forwards and backwards, the work challenges the singular perspective of linear time to suggest a world in which multiple presents could be possible.

– Curator Emma McCrae

Daniel Crooks biography

Daniel Crooks works predominantly in video, photography and sculpture. He is best known for his digital video and photographic works that capture and alter time and motion. Crooks manipulates digital imagery and footage as though it were a physical material. He breaks time down, frame-by-frame. The resulting works expand our sense of temporality by manipulating digital ‘time slices’ that are normally imperceptible to the human eye.

Crooks’ works are in notable public collections, including, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; M+ / Museum of Visual Culture, Hong Kong; Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne; Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; and the Chartwell Collection, Auckland.

An interview with Daniel Crooks

How are these works connected?

Explore this constellation

Related articles

Related works

Content notification

Our collection comprises over 40,000 moving image works, acquired and catalogued between the 1940s and early 2000s. As a result, some items may reflect outdated, offensive and possibly harmful views and opinions. ACMI is working to identify and redress such usages.

Learn more about our collection and our collection policy here. If you come across harmful content on our website that you would like to report, let us know.

How to watch

This work is not a single channel linear video and thus cannot be effectively shown online.

Learn more about accessing our collection

Collection

In ACMI's collection

On display until

16 February 2031

ACMI: Gallery 1

Credits

creator

Daniel Crooks

Production places
Australia
Production dates
2016

Collection metadata

ACMI Identifier

Z000118

Curatorial section

The Story of the Moving Image → Moving Pictures → MI-03. Time and Movement → MI-03-AV02

Object Types

Installation

Materials

Multi-channel installation, video, colour and audio

Collected

181865 times

Please note: this archive is an ongoing body of work. Sometimes the credit information (director, year etc) isn’t available so these fields may be left blank; we are progressively filling these in with further research.

Cite this work on Wikipedia

If you would like to cite this item, please use the following template: {{cite web |url=https://acmi.net.au/works/119--phantom-ride/ |title=Phantom Ride |author=Australian Centre for the Moving Image |access-date=11 November 2024 |publisher=Australian Centre for the Moving Image}}