La Conchita mon amour
Christina McPhee 2005
Dvd / 49‘ 36“ in continous single
channel, or three channel simultaneous
loop
La Conchita is a community
in north Ventura County, California, whose inhabitants have been subject to
massive debris flow mudslides in 1995 and 2005, and persist under the threat
of continuing and inevitable recurrence. The most recent event on January
10, 2005 caused the loss of ten lives and the destruction of a central part
of the village. Chain
link fences surround a huge debris mound where the rubble of roofs and play
yards, swing sets and crushed cars mingle with improvised memorial gardens
made of banana plants, whirligigs, and photographs of the lost. Nonetheless
ritual and site study alike are undertaken beneath agnostic winter skies whose
storms trigger dissolution of the rincons.
Triangulating between
study of the limited range of scientific forecast or remedy, and documentation
of the continued local intensity with which the site inspires vernacular sacred
gestures, across digital edit and that of the analog sequencer, performing
video‘s leaps and elisions between observed ‘fact’ and subjective response.
As if as the sense of place collapses the distance between subjective/machinic
layers of information and a geologic time-scape marked by complex periodicities
and chaotic precision.
La Conchita mon
amour is created for three channel video installation in continuous
loop with localized parabolic speakers; or in theatrical screening with a
choice of one to three parts.
Rapid oscillation of
frames was achieved by streaming videographic and photographic content via
mini tape and computer interfaces into the Jones Sequencer, during a residency
the Experimental Television Center in upstate New York in November 2005. Output
was to minitape and then computer files, then returned to the digital editing
environment at my home studio in California. The ambient sound design is created
from documentary capture via camcorder and mic, as well as from internet video
clips posted online by a USGS witness to the catastrophic debris flow. Music
in (part 2) are selections from the composition TAO, composed by Kyong Mee Choi for piano, voice and electronics. Texts are culled
from initial United States Geological Survey reports on the landslide at La
Conchita. Primary documentary sequences were shot by Terry Hargrave. Special
thanks to Hank Rudolph and Sherry Miller Hocking of the Experimental Television
Center, New York; and to architecture students at California Polytechnic State
University, San Luis Obispo, for their active engagement in the site research
surrounding this project.
-cm
Christina McPhee’s transmedia works explore landscape and
memory at the borders of cinema and scientific visualization. Kyong Mee Choi, composes works
for chamber, electro-acoustic, interactive, and multi-media music.
©Christina
McPhee 2005 naxsmash group productions / all rights reserved