|
 |
| LA CONCHITA
N=AMOUR [single channel] |
2005-08 |
|
|
La Conchita N=amour reflects on the debris
site as a place of N. The place of N is the place of love. N
is a placeholder. The video image implies a space below or outside
the image. The video is a metonym for presence below the level of
the mudslide. The video and microsound montage 'breathe' in repeating
cycles, that slowly persevere. The sound montage is aphasic. For
this HD version, I used the animation footage that I had created
at Experimental Television Center in late 2005. The Jones Sequencer,
a linear destructive editing tool from the late seventies, gave its
own semi-random sequencing to 10 hours of tape, from which I selected
one and a half hours of video footage in which the machine-montage
had an especially psychotic tinge. The strangeness of this tape was
that it had an airless quality, a claustrophobia. I felt it could
be a metaphor for the relentlessness of the debris flow threat at
La Conchita: you can’t get away from it, and it will come again.
So the animation/composition challenge was to edit the ‘airless’ psycho
footage so that it would both carry the sense of recurrence, nightmare
visitation, and airlessness; but also that I as the human editor
could cut into this footage and make a kind of air or breathing space.
So I designed a grid of the psycho animation footage, to map a topography
of the N-place (nowhere). Over this I layered paint-like transparent
masks that derive from the ETC footage. As a structural strategy,
the grid refers to the cyclical coordinates of the site (inevitable
return of the debris flow). The masks import amnesia into the montage,
as partial erasures. The gaps between these elements are the breath-spaces
or volumes of aphasic, perseverant ‘speech’. Or almost-speech,
breathing on the outside of the space of N.
 |
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
Single
channel HD version
HD video 1920 x 1080 pixels. Audio 48 khz
34 minute loop |
|
|
|
