This first 16mm film made after graduate school, and also my last. Coyote Tracks culminates my interest in Semiotics and the exploration of cinema as a linguistic system. Each shot represents a single “pictograph” in a sentence describing a narrative journey. Shot in New Mexico and featuring a cast of old friends.
Companion/sequal to "Lota’ Burger" produced a few days later, and under the same circumstances. This tape uses a similar methodology, this time with a moving camera, shot from a car, and a more complex series of overlapping wipes. Produced at Eve Muir Studios.
An early experiment with time based correction and the ability to mix two tapes together, as well as one of the few projects in which I worked with an online editor who operated the controls at my direction. This tape features two versions of the same image (shot in Santa Fe) slightly staggered in time and then wiped over each other. Edited at Eve Muir studio by Trevor Long. I was paying for the studio time to edit a project for LANL and was able to squeeze extra time in to edit two videos, this one and San Mateo Drive.
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. Subsequently, each of the 2x2 grids of images composing the two sides (L&V) was transferred to a single tape. These are represented here as LX4 and Vx4.
Produced almost entirely at Experimental Television Center (ETC), the video uses a simple animation of a rotating rectangle (produced in Deluxe Paint on the Amiga Computer) as a stencil into which are keyed various versions of a processed live image of the river outside the window at ETC. This was my second attempt at a multi channel piece. The four programs have been shown in grid’s of twelve and sixteen monitors. While relatively simple in structure and shown only three times, this remains a personal favorite.
My reaction to the Gulf War and the continuing transformation of war coverage into media spectacle. Edited at PPG and an early exploration of the Ampex ADO-1000 Digital Video Effects unit.
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, and developed over the course of two visits to Experimental Television Center. Final editing at PPG onto 1” open reel tape.
