MattFlix presents Xylo~phone (2022) by Lucy Gunning.

This is convergence between a table and a camera. A phone camera and a table I have known all my life. I gave myself this task to see if I could make a film – to think about what this object is/has been. It was important that the top was shot in one take. The nature and length of it is a slow watch, reminiscent of a pre-digital time and yet made on and for a device where it’s possible to intervene, scroll back and forth. Making work for an online platform means you relinquish control of how a video is seen but placing the phone or device on a surface is a suggested way to view it. 

The title is oblique: Xylo meaning wood in Greek, and phone meaning sound / voice, the tilde ~ symbol in between means approximation.  It’s literal and nonsense, in a way that makes sense to me. Similarly, rather than a table this is a fulcrum of wood marks time stains light varnish screws glue gaps space. Rendered to pixels and digital noise. This particular table was probably made in the 1950’s - you couldn’t film a table with a phone then. The sound is incidental, ambient, reflecting presence behind the camera.

- LG, November 2022.