Dashcam Paintings (2024–)
Ongoing. harm.work: Dashcam Paintings (entry dated 27 March 2024). Research channel: Dashcam Paintings on are.na, 24 image blocks, 29 December 2023 to 19 April 2025.
Dashcam Paintings is a collection of stills taken from dashcam videos of car crashes, each saved at the instant of the collision. harm.work lists it among the works, ongoing, with no medium or size, and shows six stills. The text beside them is his:
In the past months, I've been binge watching hours of dashcam recordings online of car crashes, and been saving video stills right at the moment of impact – a decisive moment.
This had a therapeutic dimensions as I was in bed recovering from a traffic accident myself; to admit my own fragility, and face the resulting depression (I'm fully recovered now).
I guess this is a form of photography and these are not paintings.
(Ongoing)
The words "decisive moment" link, on harm.work, to a PDF of Henri Cartier-Bresson's essay on the photograph made at the one instant when the event and its form come together. A dashcam has no photographer to choose that instant. It records continuously and keeps everything. The choice is made afterwards, by someone watching, who stops the video at the frame of impact. Here the person choosing was himself recovering from a crash.
The stills
The six stills on harm.work are wide frames from cameras mounted inside cars, most of them at night. In one the camera looks across the dark cabin at the steering wheel and a glowing blue display, while points of red and yellow-green light on the windscreen are drawn out into long star-shaped streaks. In another the frame is filled by a dazzling white light through the windscreen, its rays smeared outward as if by a zoom, with the roof lining above. A third shows a snow-covered verge with laden fir trees in violet night light, the car apparently leaving the road. In two the impact has thrown the camera: one is a smear of zigzag light trails over a bright headlamp, the other a blur of blue cabin light around a figure. The last is the most legible: a red drinks can flies across the beige front seats while debris sprays against the windscreen.
None of the stills shows a crash from outside. Each is what a camera inside a car recorded at the moment of the crash: light breaking up, objects in the air, the view knocked sideways. The painterly look the title points to comes from the camera's limits at that moment: motion blur, lens flare, a small sensor at night.
The are.na channel
The collecting is recorded in the are.na channel Dashcam Paintings, opened on 1 January 2024. Its 24 blocks are screenshots without comment, with one exception. The earliest, saved on 29 December 2023, carries the note: "This is a video still of a car crash that is about to happen. I really like the colour scheme." (block). The frame is a snowy motorway through a wet windscreen, near-black cars ahead, a band of brick-red slush and two orange brake lights. Colour reads the note as his habit of reading found images for their colour chord.
The screenshots show where the footage came from. Several are phone captures of short videos from accounts that collect crash clips, with the platform's interface still around the frame. Others are frames from desktop players, with the cameras' own overlays burned in: date, time, GPS coordinates and speed ("01/15/2023 05:24:21 PM N 41.58107 W 87.46135 17 Mph", block), a camera model and firmware version ("Thinkware X700 v1.02.03", block), and in the last block, added in April 2025, the title of a compilation, "MOST BRUTAL CAR CRASHES OF THE YEAR" (block). Most blocks are from January and February 2024. The stills on harm.work are cleaner crops from the same kind of footage.
Beside Swallow, Only Shallow
The work was made in the same weeks as Swallow, Only Shallow, which also starts from video stills captured off a screen. On 17 December 2023 he took screenshots and screen recordings of early-1990s concert films and music videos playing on YouTube; the final files of that series date from February 2024 (Swallow, Only Shallow: process). There the found frame is the raw material for an algorithm that averages and bands it. In Dashcam Paintings the frame is kept as found, and the only operation is the moment of stopping.
Both start from other people's recordings, stopped at a single frame. The dashcam stills are left as they are, and the artist calls them photography.
See also
- Colour — the first still, saved for its colour scheme
- Swallow, Only Shallow: process — video stills captured off a screen, December 2023
- are.na channels — the index of his research channels, with Dashcam Paintings