Altamont Pass

in collaboration with Glenn Spearman

Glenn and I made several trips to the windmills at Altamont Pass. Glenn walked around the windmills improvising on his saxophone with the windmill sounds while I recorded him and the landscape on video. In the installation/performance, Glenn performs to and with the video recordings, and I edit the video materials live so we are both performing with one another live in the performance space. This was also performed at a sound festival.

1994

saxophone, monitors, speakers, video switchers

CC Beam Goes for a Walk

in collaboration with Don Lloyd

About a cat going out for a walk on a leash. This modern metaphor is derived from the juxtaposition of dialectical recidivism and the vindication of self. Sexual and economic repression provide a background for the never-ending struggle of time against the arrival of the household robot, as humankind continues to claw at its environment.

1978

16mm film

Covering Yoko

in collaboration with Lisa Robertson

A curator asked me to put work in a show and I asked her if instead I could listen in her home. And make something from the experience. I asked the poet Lisa Robertson to come and listen with me. We spent eight hours listening in the curator’s apartment. I have had this whole thing about labor and the eight-hour work day, so I decided it should be a day like a conventional work day, but spent listening.

(I was concurrently working on a series of détournement in the landscape on the 24th Street Listening Project. I would listen at a site and then embed back into the site language I had heard, mostly gorilla fashion.)

We decided to structure our sound notes into the forms of poems in Yoko Ono’s book Grapefruit, which we found on the curator’s coffee table. I had read the book and been inspired by the book as a teenager.

We found save the date magnets on the refrigerator and were inspired to make our own magnet for the opening/ reading based on the cover of Grapefruit.

We asked an ASL interpreter to sign after we read each poem, to create another space for listening and attention.

2009

reading, refrigerator magnet

Cyclorama

An ode to the history of cinema and Atlanta; the pre-cinematic form of the cyclorama, the photochemical and the pixel, the analogue and the digital. 

Atlanta has one of the few remaining cycloramas in the world. Completed in 1921, the Grant Park Cyclorama is a bridge to our pre-cinematic past. The cyclorama was the precursor to the movies. It is also a link to Atlanta’s past, as it depicts the Battle of Atlanta during the Civil War. Referring to the pre-cinematic form of the cyclorama, the photochemical and the pixel, the analogue and the digital, Cyclorama speaks to both a technological and emotional past and present. 

Sound recording of arrival on Flight from SFO to ATL, shown as tape.

2007

16mm film loop projected, digital transfer of film, ¼ sound tape, cyclorama material

Framing Sound

Empty steel frames with titles at the bottom of the frame, such as Angel Island: sounds of ships passing, INS granite wall: echoes of many languages, are placed at seven sites around the city of San Francisco, each site having a relation to Bay Area histories of immigration or colonization.

1994

steel frames, ambient sound

How green IS my valley

in collaboration with Þorfinnur Guðnason 

I was invited to Iceland by my former student Þorfinnur who had curated a retrospective of my work. I arrived just after the volcanic eruption of Grímsvötn.

Before the exhibition we spent ten days together traveling around Iceland, meeting his friends and family, and reuniting with other former students. We collaborated on a video for the evening’s screening, an improvisation inspired by reunion, conversation, a love of the moving image, and our adventures together in Iceland.

We were thinking about place and our shared interest in film history, we détourned slightly the John Ford film of the same title, making a pun on IS for Iceland instead of the “was” in Ford’s title. In Ford’s film the valley is covered in coal dust from the mines, there was much dust in our travels from the recent volcanic eruption.

There are special spots here where the All-thought is manifest in the elements themselves… places where fire has become earth, earth become water, water become air, and air become spirit… the facts are all fled from you before you start the story.    ~ Halldór Laxness

2011

digital video

In a Disturbed Landscape

Made during a residency at Djerassi. 

An intervention into the landscape of Djerassi that would gradually disappear. 

I wanted to mark a moment in time and history that would fade like the flowers and the grass. Not a piss for territory scar in the landscape that is often called sculpture.

The Ohlone used to live in the landscape when it was redwood forest. Then the European settlers arrived and brought bull thistle with them, it grows best in what was called a disturbed landscape.

I was haunted by the landscape since the moment I arrived. The place exists because of the suicide of the founder’s daughter Pamela Djerassi. It reminded me of going into the Milagros chapel at San Juan Capistrano. I fled immediately, I could barely breath, the room was so filled with pain and longing.

On daily walks I began to wonder what the landscape might have looked like three thousand years ago, three hundred, even thirty years ago when Pamela Djerassi committed suicide. There were remnants of logging trails and old mills and some redwoods still near the stream. I began to notice more and more fields of bull thistle. Dark brown, dry thick stalks four to seven feet tall, with white tops. The tops, like small heads, poked up out of the fields of golden grass.

I decided I would spray paint the bull thistle orange to note its displacement. I went into a field with clippers to cut down everything but the stalks of bull thistle. I also left the golden California grass.

Eventually I shot film and video, and photographed the field with my scanner.

2007

field, bull thistle, non-toxic spray paint, video, scans

John's Ashes

Projected on the back of a wall is a tourist slide, a still frame from Hitchcock’s film, Vertigo, of the scene where Madeleine throws herself in the water near the Golden Gate Bridge. Parked in front of the slide is a bicycle with a monitor, playing on the monitor is a trip to the Golden Gate Bridge that John Topping and I took to throw his lover John’s ashes off the bridge. His lover had recently died of AIDS. On the way to the bridge, John talks to us about his lover.

1992

video, bicycle, slide

Latent Light Excavations

The Latent Light Excavation Series is a continuation of my engagement with American history and its residue in the landscape. I am interested in how sites carry traces of their history, but also act as reservoirs of memory, as virtual sites. Each final projection in the series is a document of the landscape itself, a slice through time to what lies below the visible, an archive and critique of what it means to be an American. 

For this series, I use a hybrid process, employing both 16mm film and digitization systems to excavate the invisible history of American landscapes and to reconsider and make visible media technology within the transfer process of film to digital.  Again I exposed 16mm raw film stock without a camera. As in the Translation Series, this exposure encodes on the film both the light of the site and the performance of a gesture. Next, the developed film is used as source material for an improvisation on a film to digital transfer/encoding deck, using the film material like a chart or thematic framework on which to improvise. 

The material aspects of the film source medium are revealed through usually hidden, unintended and unwanted artifacts: dust, scratches, hole punches, head and tail leader information. Uniquely and typically unwanted digital artifacts are introduced to the transfer process. 

These American sites are chosen for their complex histories. The works function at times as memorial gestures or homages and at times as celebrations or critiques. 

This series eventually expanded to include exposures at international sites, including Lebanon, Rwanda and the Jordan staircase in St. Petersburg, among others.

From the series:

Side by Side (2005)

Golden Gate Bridge Exposure: Poised for Parabolas (2004)

Latent Light Excavations: Reno (2004)

Pyramid Lake Paiute Reservation Exposure: As Long as the Rivers Flow (2004)

Intersection (2003)

St. Ignatius Church Exposure: Lenten Light Conversions (2003)

2003-2007

16mm to digital video

Memory Holes

in collaboration with Merve Caskurlu

Interventions around the Istanbul Biennial:

Binbirdirek Divan Yolu Caddesi No:15 Çemberlitaş, Fatih; Mısır Bazaar, Yeni Cami Gate, Eminönü; Galata Köprüsü Galata Bridge; Hacı Küçük Sk 16, Fatih; Apartman hayatı, Kamacı Ustası Sk 3, Beyoğlu; Salı Pazarı Ykş, Beyoğlu, Küçükçiftlik Park Entrance

Merve and I collaborated to produce this walk around central Istanbul with seven stopping points. Istanbul is a city linked by water, patterns, cats, birds, and, as with all cities, the presence of death.

I took Hi-8 footage from a trip to Istanbul from 1992, and then Merve and I developed a downloadable VR Mobile App so that the old video footage could be projected now as digital footage in our cell phones, into the same location many years later—a meeting, across time, of two technologies.

2019

Mobile app

Refracted Case Histories

in collaboration with John O’Brien

Jacaranda Tree, Chalon Road Exposure: Brazilian Transplant, Huntington Gardens, Giant Cactus Exposure: California Native, and St. Mary’s Chapel Exposure: Galician Import, explore my on-going interest in native and non-native landscapes, taxonomic lineages, and the migration of plants and systems from one historical and physical location to another.

Installed inside St. Mary’s College Gallery, John and I projected the three film to digital exposures (see Latent Light Excavations) through a display case from the Huntington Gardens, turning the gallery space into a refracting light chamber.

2004

digital projections, glass and wooden display case, deconstructed gallery materials

The Residue of Life Series

I have continued to scan objects from daily life. This suite was made while living in Paris.

1997-2000

scan prints

Three Domestic Interiors

The film portrays three people through their living room environments. These portraits push domestic order to the edge of collapse and loneliness. Only the telephone remains as a common link to the outside world, as the home becomes both sanctuary and prison. Using the wide angle properties of film and the close-up properties of video, the film explores the temporal and spatial relationship between the mediums of film and video. A film about loss.

1992

16mm film

Three Voices

Part of a series of films shot from my apartment windows. The character narrates possible scenarios of neighbors' lives, talks about the mid-Atlantic accent, and the threat of war as the windows are washed and people move in and out of their apartments.

1984

16mm film

Translation Series

The Translation Series focuses on the temporal isomorphism and indexical relation between recording and reproduction. Film is used strictly as a light recording medium. I exposed 16mm raw film stock without a camera, by opening a film can and holding the film to the light of a site. This exposure encodes on the film both the light of the site and the performance of a gesture. 

These films are the result of a series of small “acts” that when projected function as documentations/translations of movement from space to time, meters to feet, photons to grain. While living in Paris, I mapped the contours of my apartment exposing film to the light of different rooms.

Salon: 61 rue de Maubeuge, Inspired by the complicated parquet pattern in the living room, I devised a system of measuring using lengths of film to record space, light, and movement in the room.

Couloir, I walked down the hallway capturing the light and space, exposing film as I moved.  The same exposure is printed with different lights at the lab, bringing out the layered space of the film emulsion.

L’ Entrée, I exposed film in the entrance foyer. In transferring the film to digital video, I discovered the possibilities of working with the transfer process as another recording tool, which led to the Latent Light Excavation Series. 

1997-2000

16mm film

View Across 6th Street

Live video is projected from an SRO room upstairs to the gallery space below. The room was open to residents or anyone in the neighborhood at set times to come and speak to the camera. Participants’ thoughts and images were streamed live to the gallery below during the duration of the exhibition, when no one was speaking, the camera was turned to the street, and activity on the street came inside the gallery space. Participants were not recorded. Sound played from small, suspended speakers.

1990

live camera, live and recorded sound, window frame