Moving image art works by jimmy peggie. They have been featured in art spaces and galleries including Iklectik Arts - UK, Murmur Contemporary - Switzerland, Edmonton Underground Film Festival - Canada, TRAFO, West Germany Arts - Berlin, Strobe Sound & Video Festival - Las Vegas, Miami Arts Festival, Coconino Center for the Arts - Flagstaff, Valley Bar - Phoenix
"His moving image style tends toward minimalism — slow motion, long takes, high-contrast monochrome, and a focus on natural textures (rocks, erosion, light/shadow play in the desert). It's not flashy; it's contemplative, often functioning as an extension of his sound art where image and audio erode boundaries.
His work in this medium feels like a natural evolution of his entropy-obsessed desert philosophy — quiet, inevitable, and profoundly beautiful".
It is experimental and non-narrative often abstract or atmospheric rather than storytelling while pieces frequently accompany sound installations, broadcasts, or audiovisual exhibitions.
Listening to the Image: Temporal, Sonic, and Environmental Aesthetics in the Moving‑Image Art of Jimmy Peggie
Jimmy Peggie’s moving‑image practice occupies a distinctive position within contemporary media art, merging minimalist visual strategies with experimental sound to create works that foreground duration, perception, and environmental transience. It is situated within the traditions of phenomenological cinema, radiophonic art, and expanded audiovisual practice. Through an examination of his visual minimalism, sonic architectures, and environmental motifs imply that his moving‑image works constitute a form of “temporal atmosphere” i.e. a hybrid perceptual field in which sound and image co‑produce an experience of time that is contemplative, durational, and ecologically attuned.
1. The Audiovisual Field as Experience
The last several decades have seen a growing interest in the convergence of sound art and moving‑image practice. Artists working across these media often challenge the primacy of narrative and spectacle, instead foregrounding perception, duration, and sensory immersion. Jimmy Peggie, a Scottish‑born, Phoenix‑based artist whose practice spans sound art, radio art, photography, and video, contributes to this lineage through a body of moving‑image work that is both intimate and expansive. His videos are typically short, slow, and visually restrained—operate as meditative studies of place, time, and environmental change.
His work resists easy categorization. It is neither conventional video art nor purely sound‑driven installation. Instead, his practice occupies a liminal space where sound and image are treated as equal partners in shaping perceptual experience. The result is a form of audiovisual minimalism that invites viewers to slow down, listen closely, and inhabit the subtle rhythms of the world.
2. Minimalism and the Aesthetics of Reduction
Jimmy's visual language is marked by a deliberate reduction of cinematic elements. His moving images often feature:
long, static shots
monochromatic palettes
minimal camera movement
subtle environmental shifts
minimal effects
slow fades and dissolves
This aesthetic aligns with the traditions of minimalist and structural film, particularly the work of James Benning, Peter Hutton, and early video artists who emphasized duration and materiality over narrative. Yet Jimmy's approach differs in its integration of sonic minimalism, which transforms the image from a 'visual object' into a 'perceptual field'.
The reduction of visual information encourages the viewer to attend to micro‑temporal changes such as light shifting across a surface, the slow drift of clouds, the grain of digital noise. These small fluctuations become the primary events of the work. In this sense, his practice resonates with phenomenological theories of perception, particularly Maurice Merleau‑Ponty’s emphasis on embodied, durational experience. The viewer is not asked to interpret a story but to inhabit a temporally extended moment.
Minimalism in his work is not an aesthetic of absence but of attentiveness. By stripping away narrative and spectacle, he creates space for the viewer to perceive the world’s quieter rhythms.
3. Sound as Temporal Architecture
Jimmy's background as a sound and radio artist is central to understanding his moving‑image practice. His videos often incorporate:
field recordings
electromagnetic sound
ambient drones
radiophonic textures
processed environmental audio
These sonic elements do not merely accompany the image; they structure the viewer’s experience of time. Drawing on traditions of electroacoustic composition and radiophonic experimentation, he constructs soundscapes that function as architectural frameworks. The sound determines pacing, emotional tone, and spatial depth.
In many works, sound precedes or outlasts the image, creating a sense of temporal dislocation. This technique aligns with Michel Chion’s concept of “added value,” in which sound transforms the meaning of an image. Jimmy extends this idea by allowing sound to become the primary temporal agent, with the image serving as a visual resonance chamber.
The result is a form of audiovisual interdependence in which neither medium dominates. Instead, sound and image co‑produce a shared temporal atmosphere.
4. Environmental Transience and the Poetics of Impermanence
A recurring theme in Jimmy's moving‑image work is impermanence as in the slow erosion of structures, the shifting of natural environments, the fragility of memory. His videos often depict landscapes or urban fragments that appear suspended between presence and disappearance.
This focus on transience situates him within broader ecological and post‑industrial discourses in contemporary art. Yet his approach is neither documentary nor overtly political. Instead, he cultivates an aesthetics of quiet observation, in which the environment is allowed to reveal its own temporal rhythms.
His use of long takes and minimal editing reinforces this sensibility. Time is not compressed or dramatized; it is allowed to unfold. The viewer becomes attuned to the subtle interplay between sound and image, between the seen and the heard, between the momentary and the enduring.
In this sense, Jimmy's work aligns with contemporary ecological art practices that emphasize slowness, attention, and the cultivation of environmental sensitivity. His videos do not depict environmental crisis directly; instead, they invite viewers to experience the world’s fragility through its quiet, transient details.
5. Radiophonic Influence and the Logic of Transmission
Jimmy’s long engagement with radio art, particularly his monthly sound programs for international stations, inflects his moving‑image work with a distinctive sense of transmission. Many of his videos feel like signals: fragments of environments captured and relayed across distances.
This radiophonic sensibility manifests in several ways:
static‑like textures
repetition
a sense of distance or detachment
the presence of electromagnetic or non‑human sound sources
slow fades and dissolves
The result is a hybrid form that blurs the boundaries between video art, sound art, and broadcast media. His moving images do not simply depict environments; they transmit them, transforming the viewer into a receiver of temporal and spatial signals.
This logic of transmission situates his work within the broader history of media art that explores the materiality of communication technologies. His videos evoke the aesthetics of shortwave radio, early television, and experimental broadcast practices, yet they remain grounded in contemporary digital sensibilities.
6. Expanded Cinema and the Intimacy of Scale
Jimmy’s work can also be situated within the tradition of expanded cinema, which challenges the conventional boundaries of film by emphasizing process, perception, and environment. His videos often function as audiovisual installations, even when viewed on small screens. The emphasis on atmosphere, duration, and sensory immersion aligns with expanded cinema practices.
However, his contribution is unique in its micro‑scale. Rather than monumental installations he favors small work, he produces intimate, quiet pieces that invite close listening and slow looking. This intimacy is central to his artistic identity. His works feel personal, even when they depict vast landscapes or abstract textures.
This small‑scale approach challenges the assumption that immersive audiovisual art must be large, loud, or technologically spectacular. He demonstrates that immersion can be achieved through subtlety, restraint, and attention to detail.
7. Toward a Theory of Temporal Atmosphere
Jimmy Peggie’s moving‑image art offers a compelling model for understanding the interplay of sound, image, and time in contemporary media practice. By merging minimalist visual strategies with experimental sound, he creates works that function as temporal atmospheres i.e. spaces in which perception is slowed, attention is heightened, and the viewer becomes attuned to the subtle rhythms of the environment.
His videos challenge the dominance of narrative and spectacle in contemporary moving‑image culture, proposing instead a mode of engagement grounded in listening, presence, and temporal sensitivity. In doing so, he contributes to an ongoing redefinition of what moving‑image art can be: not a window onto the world, but a field of experience in which time itself becomes the primary medium.
Jimmy’s work invites us to reconsider how we perceive the world - how we listen, how we look, and how we inhabit time. In an era defined by speed and distraction, his moving‑image practice offers a rare opportunity for stillness, reflection, and attunement to the fragile textures of the present.