april 13, 2006 - 10:31 p.m.

some thoughts i have about the videos i make

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they are paintings that move, when it comes right down to it I can't call them anything else. though they have existed for people as backdrops for performances, they belong in a gallery, projected on walls.

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i believe the human soul needs beauty to survive. i make things i find beautiful, loaded with their own private meanings, their own alchemies. i love having my own secrets with the work that nobody else knows.

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some people need meaning more than others - some audience members need meaning so much they will 'create' or 'discover' it, and tell me stories of what they've found in the work. of course that exists! they invented it!

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the human senses, they are co-creating our experiences all the time. all i do is give the audiencs some evidence with which to create their own story, their own illusion...something like how we live our own lives, i suppose.

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i believe we can answer the biggest questions -- it just takes a different kind of thinking than ordinary thought. the answers come from a kind of engaged waiting. i think we have to honor ourselves by asking the biggest questions we can of life, and finding answers that make sense to ourselves.

my process of making art is "engaged waiting".

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video as visual memory played back for the audience. video as inner experience projected outwards. video produced small (inside my computer) projected large (micro/macro). video as a series of paintings. video hipnotic as life.

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soundtracks? -- i was a prodigy violinist, training in a conservatory when fate intervened and halted my performance career. i played very little for the ensuing 15 years. the instrument returns to accompany the visual material here and there, as do found & arranged sound that is either a self-contained, highly composed sound piece, or set up to unfold according to a system of rules created for that specific video piece.

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backing videos -- elements of the whole. the audience member is having this experience, and the video is just one aspect of that experience. i like to set up situations where the video and the performance are unfolding in their own way, with each audience member making their own connections between the videos and the performances. When i'm performing, i usually can't see the film, and people come up to me afterwards and let me know what connections they got from watching the work happen like that.

its like cooking, throw these ingredients/symbols together and put them in front of an audience and see what happens. people like to be overwhelmed with too much information, its great when they trust me to give them too much.