HOME > VIDEO INSTALLATIONS > LA CONCHITA N=AMOUR VIDEO INST. FROM LA CONCHITA MON AMOUR PROJECT LA CONCHITA N=AMOUR [single channel] 2005-08 << La Conchita N=Amour | Installation View 1/13 >> 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. Technical: Shot at La Conchita, California, October 2005 to August 2006. Animations created using 4 channels of video inside the Jones Sequencer (analog destructive editing tool) during a residency at the Experimental Television Center, New York, November-December 2005. HD montage in Final Cut Pro  Micro-soundscape from cyclical sounds at the site, include surfsounds, motorcycles, cars on Highway One, trains, conversations with residents). Additional sound from voices on footage shot during the mudslide on January 10, 2005 (web based found footage). Musical elements from TAO, by Kyong Mee Choi (2005). Additional videography by Lawrence Mahadoo and Terry Hargrave. Video and sound animation/composition by Christina McPhee. Artist interview:  "Bare Life and the Traumatic Landscape" documenta 12 magazine project for –empyre-, 2007; first published by Miguel Leal, editor, VIROSE, 2006.

Single channel HD version HD video 1920 x 1080 pixels. Audio 48 khz 34 minute loop