On Terra Firma: Space, Place and the Moving Image, examines the moving image as a medium that both depicts space and place and positions the spectator towards varying levels ofspace and place. My thesis is driven by the status of place in relation to space and my own work reflects this. Accompanying and building upon my largely gallery based practice, my thesis is premised upon the idea that the spatiality ofthe moving image can be characterised as thin space. This concept is developed in contrast with the idea thick space. The latter is concerned with space as experienced, the former with regard to the moving image’s ability to sustain a feeling ofspace. My argument references the work offdm theory from the phenomenological and realist schools of thought, for example Jean Bazin, and from film theory that inclines towards film as an apparatus and language, for example Christian Metz. Thin space also reflects my concerns with the ‘imageness’ ofthe moving image, and its phenomenological status. Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, provides the basis for my analysis of thick space, and the work ofBernard Stiegler is central to my concept of thin space. Stiegler argues for the central importance oftechne, or technics, whereby the inorganic cannot be conceived outside ofthe organic, and vice-versa. Thus, ideas of the moving image as a machine for mimetic reproduction informs my examination ofthe spatiality of film, and early French film theory and the concept ofthe photogenic is central to this. The discussion also focuses on the work of a broad range of film-makers and video artists from experimental to narrative film-making. This crucially includes exploring the issues surrounding video work in the gallery, looking at how space and place are inflected in gallery based video art. Close analysis of work by artist film-makers such as Peter Gidal and Hollis Frampton serves to draw out issues around how the moving image is a mimetic medium that conveys space and organises space, and how, for example, the frame contributes to the spatial organisation of the image. With reference to Hitchcock and Ozu, I also use narrative cinema to investigate how spatiality in film can imbue a play between depth and surface, realism and artifice. Looking at the work ofPatrick Keiller, Graham Ellard and Simon Johnstone and Jane and Louise Wilson, I set out to challenge the vogue for immersion and the ‘cinematic model’. I argue that the centrality ofrhythm in single and multi-screen video is important in drawing attention to the relation between the organic and the inorganic and in overcoming the tendency towards spectacle and the immersive in gallery-based work. That, moving image work in the gallery, in order to engage with the architecture of its surrounding, requires an understanding of how it both absents and presences the spaces that it depicts.

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