Among Collater.al’s projects is a series entitled Ballet Mécanique, which consists of a collection of videos with the aim of highlighting the synchrony of everyday movements, which, combined with processing noises, create a kind of calming choreography. The loop is a mechanism that hypnotises and reacquaints the human senses. It happens when there are videos with optical effects of geometric shapes, but also in everyday life we can witness coordinated movements from which we cannot take our attention away.
In his videos, motion artist Joe Pease seeks out precisely these situations and these repeated movements, or rather he recreates them in post production, gluing them together like a collage and constructing surreal scenes.
Pease’s videos are constructed mainly from outdoor scenes, because people are more dynamic, interacting with space, running and moving according to the times imposed by traffic, hurry and other people. The work the artist does is to synchronise all these times and moments, with the presence of man making everything more fascinating and in some cases dangerous.
What is also mesmerising about Joe Pease’s works are the details in the group scenes, there is always one or more characters that break the pattern of apparent tranquillity, performing strange and unpredictable actions. It will be surreal, then, to see a man in a shirt digging a hole between passers-by at a metropolitan crossroads, or again at a similar crossroads wondering what an office desk and a printer are doing spitting out sheets of paper over and over again.
Joe Pease’s work is appreciated and has brought him a fair amount of success in NFT’s circle of collectors, a world that has valued the artist’s work and Motion Art, a current that is less valued by the traditional art market.
In an interview with Undrgrnd, the artist explained that “I was very lucky to have a group of great artists and collectors who supported my work and helped me to push it through their channels. For years my work was just for myself living exclusively on my Instagram. When NFT came along, I felt so grateful to have a permanent space to live my pieces. I think motion art is definitely an art form, people can now look at motion art through a different lens with the help of blockchain. Blockchain and NFT have changed my vision of how people can interact with my work.”