While in the Gallatin M.A. program I created this video-performance piece entitled 8:32. In this video piece, which could be classified as a “self-portrait”. I was a painter, painting my body with black and red paint. Videotaping this, I painted my upper body, starting with a single brush stroke, and until it was mostly covered. I edited this footage to a pre-prepared score. This score was an ambient sound “collage,” consisting of me speaking the same thirty-two words, tuned down at half speed, and looped over and over for eight and a half minutes. I then digitally “time stretched” the phrase – changed its length and pitch— to several different degrees and gradually layered these different variations of this on top of each other, adding complexity and tension as the piece progressed. Higher pitched and faster versions of the vocal phrase were laid on top of the original slow, low pitched version, and even lower versions were added, creating a rumbling sound underneath. The effect was that the words blended together to become noise, tones and “atmosphere” rather than words. The words, solitary and stark at the beginning of the piece, became a tangle of overwhelming noise, building to a crescendo at the end.

In 8:32, I used repeating words as a metaphor for events and how, in our experience, they unfold, via television, news, Email, telephone calls, and other forms of communication. This information—as it is often experienced—is a series of ideas that begins simply and becomes a deluge from so many sources, with so many different versions that it blurs together and becomes meaningless, except for a sense of anxiety. There is simply too much information available for a person to process and then derive meaning. The piece also suggests—via the metaphor of paint covering a body, not a traditional canvas—that information or “facts” (as “news”) are given, via the media, in such a way as to annihilate meaning and individual opinions– especially during events where there is the potential for (or reality of) actual annihilation. It also suggests, conversely, that art is a living thing.

Posted on YouTube last week.