VIDEODUMP

Hey friends! It's taken me some time to digest the experience of my first solo show, my first installation piece and my first finished video. As hoped, though, it's helped me home in on a locus that unites several other projects I used to consider unrelated.

Above is the video element from Finder Keeper. Ledah helped me with a lot of these shots, either filming or pouring water from just outside the frame, and Elizabeth helped me with the initial experiments. It's pretty long, but a different thing is happening in the last three minutes, worth skipping to if you don't want to watch all 16 minutes. Among other things, I wanted each shot to be a complete narrative arc: water enters the frame and we follow the roving tip until the lowest available point is found. For the sake of keeping on track and getting to new ground, I'll say only a few things about the water bags hanging in the space: Their main function was initially as visual and physical baffles, forcing viewers to navigate around them and warping/fragmenting the view of the TV from the entrance. The idea came from the fly-repelling water bags seen in coffeeshop doorways, which pick up surrounding visual motion and appear dangerously active to flies. Insect perception and navigation led me to the ants which, like water, achieve goals with only the tiniest sense of context. An ant may stumble onto a windfall and update his scent-trail with "follow-me" smells, but the initial find is pure luck. The only information they can get from the world beyond a millimeter radius is vibration.

The above video is from the initial stages of the ant piece, and I was very pleased with the visual rhyme it makes with the water. There were other things happening, but this navigation without context thing is starting to look like the nugget of my interest right now, especially in light of slightly older work. This summer, Cara-Claire-Travis-and-Liz saw me working on an animation that kind of got away from me. First I thought it was about the coolness to be found in local alleys, then I thought it was about fantasy colliding with day-to-day life, and then I thought it was about hours and hours of drawing on drugs with Claire. Nope! Check it:

There's a lot in there, but what now jumps out at me is the way of seeing. Top down, centered on a moving point, and cutting out lots of context, just like the water video. Respect to anyone who recognizes the music. Next old project:

This is Land Here, from our July group show. It's a landing strip in a vacant lot. Around this time I was very interested in beacons, things that advertise themselves or something else over great distances. They are necessary for things with limited ways of perceiving their context, like airplanes at night. I was also playing with large balloons during this time, and while plotting the alley route that turned into the Spiral City animation, I occasionally lofted tinsel-draped balloon beacons from the top of my house to get a different sense of how far I'd travelled (absolute as opposed to subjective).

So the conceptual mini-cosmology I'm building has three elements: world, travelers, and beacons. World is like a warehouse filled to the ceiling with cotton candy. There are objectives and other travelers burrowing through it, and sometimes your tunnel intersects with one of them, and some travelers or objectives are equipped with beacons which produce a high-pitched beep that you can locate and follow. Mainly, though, travelers behave like water or like ants, acting according to hyperlocal cues like it is easier to burrow downward or I seem to have burrowed into a cave full of bears. This is a multidimensional worldview, in that it applies to the seeking of goals through spacetime and causality rather than any mere space. Although if you know of a warehouse filled to the ceiling with cotton candy, please tell me about it.