Robert Arnold

Rotunda

Designed by Thomas Jefferson to represent the “authority of nature and the power of reason,” the Rotunda is the physical and symbolic center of the University of Virginia, founded by Jefferson in 1824 as the first secular Liberal Arts university in America. Composer Judith Shatin and filmmaker Robert Arnold have created a portrait of the Rotunda that combines its timeless majesty with the ever-changing hum of daily life. Sounds and images recorded over the course of an entire year from season to season, are presented as a single day, from dawn to sunset.

Echolalia

Echolalia is the meaningless repetition of words or phrases associated with forms of dementia and aphasia. In the build-up to the war in Iraq certain phrases were endlessly repeated to the point where these empty rhetorical phrases were confused with concrete facts. I tried to record as many instances of people repeating the phrase “weapons of mass destruction” as I could stand and represent these statements in a way that draws attention to the deadening effect of their repetition, however emphatically they are expressed.

Zeno's Paradox

An experimental digital video exploring the illusions of cinematic movement and depth as corollaries of Zeno's paradox: There is no motion because that which is moved must arrive at the middle of its course before it arrives at the end.

The Morphology of Desire

In The Morphology of Desire, Robert Arnold digitally morphs romance novel illustrations into one another to create the illusion of cinematic motion. Using covers from 1960s and 1970s romance novels he has collected, Arnold constructs a lascivious vignette that explores how gender and desire are portrayed in popular culture. According to Arnold, the narrative is “about a couple representing a popular culture romantic ideal, caught at an ambiguous point of either turning to face their desire or turning away from it, never able to fully escape from it or fully realize it.”

Triptych

A view from a window overlooking Plac Wielkapolski, in Poznan, Poland. The space, divided into thirds by two trees, remains fixed. Time does not.