An ecstatic chant to the rising of the sun. Sound and image are juxtaposed and find moments of synchronicity, while remaining parallel and separate. Time rushes forward slowly. Narrative is all and nothing. Left over material from "Blooms" was adjusted to accompany Chris Bailey’s music.
Compilation of various short treatments of material featuring dancers and set to music. Primarily choreography by Brooke Kidd, Washington DC, Yee Jen Bao, Norman, OK and Judith Mikita, Cincinnati OH, all processed at the Experimental Television Center.
A meditation on pollution. Based on treatments of footage I produced and shot for the Los Alamos National Labs on the subject of Radioactive Waste Water Treatment.
Performance by Carl Stewart. Carl wears a suit made of Camel packs, all of which he smoked. Filmed in the garden at his house in Rye, NY, wearing a pumpkin head which he grew. Inspired by Marlon Brando’s portrayal of the death of Vito Corleone. Dearly loved by me, this video exists somewhere outside of my other artworks and was never publicly exhibited.
I was commissioned by Andy Marko of Semantics Gallery in Cincinnati to create a live show as the concluding event for his annual Autumedia Festival. The space at Semantics was filled with other work in the show, so he approached Third Party, another artist run space down the street, to host the performance. I sent a general call out to friends at CCM looking for improvising musicians with the idea of forming a fairly large ensemble. I had a a number of responses and the musical group was ultimately made up of Regan Brown (Bass Clarinet), Dave McDonnell (Sax and Electronics), Carrie Magin (Percussion), Steve Weimer (Keyboard), and Zach Larabee (Drums). I also invited Loraine Wible, former student and previous collaborator, with Discerning Crane, to contribute a second stream of images. When we got to the space I decided to throw Loraine's images obliquely across the long wall with mine in the center.
The original material for this video was produced during a residency at Signal Culture in 2014 using three oscillators. The output of the first two was mixed by keying those images into portions of the output of a third. Subsequently, that footage was slowed down to about 10% of the original speed. During my stay at the Headlands Center for the Arts in 2015, I was struck by similarities between this material and the sound work of Brian Chase, another Artist in Residence there. This video is the result of an experiment in juxtaposing my video with Chase's sound work.
Short loop produced at a Signal Culture artists residency in 2014. Made using the newly built, Nam Jun Paik designed, Wobulator. Produced by sending the output of the oscillator to the Paik Abe Wobulator, with the raster on that device collapsed. This image was then filmed off the screen. "Wiggle" was created in response to an invitation to show a short silent work at Peephole Cinema in San Francisco. In the end, they Peephole Cinema elected to show an excerpt from "Roman Spa."
One of many attempts on my part to capture the magic motion of Aspen leaves, a fascination deeply embedded in memories of my childhood in Colorado. This footage was shot near Caribou, Colorado. The tape includes three different “episodes” which use a series image treatments and tricks, which further complicate the already complex motion of the leaves. The slow rate of change is such that no causal viewer will ever grasp the true dimensions of the work, beyond the surface image. This is a video which truly needs to contemplated as if it were a painting, installed in a space where it can be subjected to repeated viewing over a long period of time.
A meditation on the pleasures of observation. Image music and text weave in a multi-layer dance. Images built around a pre-recorded soundtrack.
Text: Jack Kerouac
Music: Michael Fiday
Image: Charles Woodman
Performers: Carla Kihlsteadt, Graeme Jennings (violins)
Narration: Matthias Bassi
Performance organized in conjunction with Passages, my one-person show at the Weston Art Gallery in Cincinnati.
Suzanna Barnes (violin)
Regan Brown (winds & autoharp)
Zach Larabee (percussion)
David McDonnell (electronics & horns)
Loraine Wible (images)
Charles Woodman (images)
A precursor to "Megurs Ehd Ffleweh Bq Nsolst." Shot in the backyard of my house on Riddle Rd in Cincinnati, and upstairs in my studio. The hibiscus flowers take about an hour to open starting just at daylight. The flowers were filmed in realtime and subsequently sped up.
The term "palimpsest" refers to a text which has been written upon two or three times, but whose lines have been imperfectly erased, so that different layers of all the texts are visible and mix together.
Collaboration with Poet/Performer Enrique Aviles. This video has its origins as a part of the “video set” for a performance by Aviles, directed by Davis Chung. In the theatrical piece Aviles played the roles of two immigrants to the US (one Mexican and one Korean) who live on opposite sides of a rooming house in the Adams Morgan neighborhood in DC. Subsequently, Aviles and I decided to create a stand alone video using one of his poems. The original footage of the neighborhood was supplemented with images of graffiti he produced and a shot of him reciting the poem in the backyard of his house in Arlington, VA.
I was fascinated by the photos on gravestones in the Cemetery at San Minato in Florence, Italy. I began to think about the way in which a single image came to represent the entire lived experience of the person. Cinema as a whole also seems to be about representations of actions. I wondered about trying to film an experience directly lived as opposed to being represented. "I Morti" presents four streams of diary footage, images of daily life and travel. Collected over a 4 or 5 year period, these function as a counterpoint to the images of the dead on the fifth screen.
Produced while I was living in Washington DC. This is a meditation on highway architecture and the view from moving cars, subjects that have long been dear to me. Shot on Hi8 with footage processed at ETC and in my studio using the Amiga computer.
My first multi channel works for synchronized video streams. The piece starts in Cape Cod and moves gradually across the North American continent, ending at the Pacific Ocean. There is no attempt to cover all this of ground in any compete way - the work is an assembly of the places I traveled to and landscapes I admired during the four-year period in which I collected the material. All the scenes were shot with a single camera, then staggered in editing to create the appearance of a continuous shot. During filming I would pan, pause, and then move again, resulting in a series of staggered movements in which the different screens appear to drift in and out of synchronization.
My first multi channel work for synchronized video streams. The piece starts in Cape Cod and moves gradually across the North American continent, ending at the Pacific Ocean. There is no attempt to cover all this of ground in any compete way - the work is an assembly of the places I traveled to and landscapes I admired during the four-year period in which I collected the material. All the scenes were shot with a single camera, then staggered in editing to create the appearance of a continuous shot. During filming I would pan, pause, and then move again, resulting in a series of staggered movements in which the different screens appear to drift in and out of synchronization. Installed at El Camino Medical Center in Mountain View, California.
I was fascinated by the photos on gravestones in the Cemetery at San Minato in Florence, Italy. I began to think about the way in which a single image came to represent the entire lived experience of the person. Cinema as a whole also seems to be about representations of actions. I wondered about trying to film an experience directly lived as opposed to being represented. "I Morti" presents four streams of diary footage, images of daily life and travel. Collected over a 4 or 5 year period, these function as a counterpoint to the images of the dead on the fifth screen.
Produced while I was living in Washington DC. This is a meditation on highway architecture and the view from moving cars, subjects that have long been dear to me. Shot on Hi8 with footage processed at ETC and in my studio using the Amiga computer.
A mostly formal exercise in composition and image processing, using footage of water. Probably the first in a ongoing series of works dealing with landscape, investigating the idea of video as a contemplative viewing experience akin to painting. Filmed in California and Mexico, Developed over the course of two visits to ETC, Final editing at PPG onto 1” open reel tape.
Demo version of my first attempt at a multi-channel video installation. The work was highly influenced by Nam June Paik’s retrospective at the Whitney and by Steina Vasulka’s “The West”. This piece was produced while I was living and working at the Vasulka’s House/Studio in Santa Fe. I had persuaded them to let me house sit while they spent six months in Japan. Access to their equipment, particularly to 4 adjacent monitors and four ¾” video decks, was what made it possible to compose a multi image work. “Virtual Space” was originally an eight channel work, mounted as two 2X2 stacks of monitors facing each other across a narrow space. Standing in the middle, the viewer had to look back and forth between the two sides. One side (L) is an assembly of footage gathered at the Lightning Field (a land art project in southern New Mexico by artist Walter Di Maria.) The other side (V) features four views of the interior of the Vasulka’s live/work interior as a handheld camera slowly and continuously pans across interior surfaces in the space.
Contribution to the "Exquisite Video Corpse" project. The first 8 seconds are the video I was given as a departure point, the remainder is my contribution to the chain. The final 10 seconds were given to the next contributor.
Music Luigi Nono ...sofferte onde serene... 1976, for piano and tape. Produced for Collide-o-Scope Music on the occasion of our performance at Atlas Performing Arts Center, Washington, DC in 2011.
Three part work created for my exhibition at Shirley Jones Gallery in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Features dance treatments from Experimental Television Center, as well as footage from my backyard on Riddle Rd in Cincinnati. The piece was projected onto the store front windows of the gallery.
The image was filmed off a decorative plate with a live camera which was being processed dimming, and then coming to brightness then back again. It looks like the hue was off too, giving Jesus a green tint. Produced during a residency at the Experimental TV Center.
Produced on ¾" tape at Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Fe; features music by the Memluks, a band from Norman, OK, and appearances by my friend Willy.
Filmed on VHS, mastered on Betacam SP at Public Production Group, Washington DC. Ceramic artist Betty Woodman demonstrates her technique of ceramic art, discusses her background and talks with critic, curator and painter John Perreault about her work.
Two channels or two versions of a video made with an early non-linear editing system "The Video Cube." Purchased by Matt Dibble, to which I made a contribution and got some time on the system. The tape attempts to form a series of wipes as if constantly changing channels. All footage is appropriated from cable tv.
Video by viDEO sAVant. Music by The Ubudis Quartet. The Ubudis Quartet combines Mexican guitarist Omar Tamez with Buffalo-based musicians Steve Baczkowski (saxophones, clarinets, and ethnic woodwinds), Jonathan Golove (electric cello), and John Bacon (percussion). Performed at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, this video presents a five minute edited sample of the Live Cinema performance.
Snow Mountain Ranch is a meditation on the elasticity of time and the veracity of representation. The focus is on careful observation and on a tension between the static and the dynamic. Shot from the patio of my hotel room at a YMCA Resort located just down the road from Camp Chief Ouray in Granby, Colorado, where I spent two summers a boy. The video begins as a single continuous take. We are witness to two unfolding narratives, happening at very different scales, the action of the weather and that of the cowboys. Both the movements of the sky and the action on the ground have been accelerated but not always to the same degree.
Edited excerpts of the performance documentation from 2/25/2012. Curator and long time viDEO sAVant supporter Steve Liggeitt, of Living Arts of Tulsa, paired the sAVant crew with a group of choreographer/dancers for this improvisational extravaganza.
Table of Elements was specifically conceived and designed for use in a health care environment. The ideal situation for this work is in a hospital waiting room, "Table of Elements" attempts to shift the viewer’s experience away from the typical mode of watching a moving image and towards a way of observation more akin to the way in which we view a painting. I’m interested in creating a tension between the static and the dynamic. Initially the work may at times appear unchanging, although never static, and the piece, which at first may seem like it can be absorbed in a single glance, gradually reveals new dimensions of itself over time, or through repeated encounters. The work is exhibited as a diptych, with two synchronized video loops displayed on two adjacent monitors.
Commissioned by the Concert Nova chamber music group in Cincinnati. I created this image to accompany a performance of "Fratres" by Arvo Part. The recording used on this version is by Kronos Quartet.
The images for "Heaven" were produced at the Experimental TV Center. Nicholas Economos and I shared part of the residency and he helped me develop this complex patch using both the Jones Frame Buffer and Jones Keyer with a slow oscillator varying the amount of “trails” we see at any one time.
