memories that never formed

Photography is often made as an example of memory: all those
experiences of life, tucked away in the archive of mind. My motion
media installation 17523 Pictures contradicts that perspective.
It may be seen at Tower Fine Arts Gallery, 180 Holley Street,
Brockport NY, September 2 - October 7, 2008.

Here's the statement:

We privilege the visual sense, yet only those things most
important to us make the hop from short-lived, sensory
memory to permanent, long term memory. The vast
majority of our visual perceptions are never retained.
Among these experiences are the uncountable nameless
faces we've passed but will never remember. Less than
lost memories, they are memories that never formed.

Life is comprised of individuals. There have been so many
of us, so many lives, yet we scarcely notice this in our daily
routine. With this piece, my wish is to draw attention to how

selective our memories are and to suggest the enormous

scope and complexity of humanity.

the active recipient

One could perform an experiment of lifting favorite text from the
grid, copying it out onto an old sketch pad. A technique used in
'specters' might be employed, anticipating an image that's similar
to 'specters' , but different. Instead, unexpected secondary
features will be observed, a consequence of image processing
that provides ideal seeing. On this modern variant of palimpsest,
patterning as though from writings on a sheet above, now long
gone, is the prize received.

omne ignotum pro magnifico

how to make a lead book, a short film of mine, will be screened at The Little Theatre, 240 East Avenue, Rochester NY, on Monday July 28 at 9:15 pm.

from the antipodes

The previous entry offers a page of text as imaginary landscape. What might be on the verso of such a page?

and in utter savagery, mysterious life

We draw closer to the sources and inspirations of our affections.

Thus, marrying interests in landscape and literature could

reasonably lead to imaging words as though they are terrains.

'features of a tract' pulls text from grid-like storage, placing it

into a form that draws attention to a change. In the above

example, the grid is retained, but made into row after row of

valleys. Words sinking into a plain.

complexities

My short film, Tea, will screened at The Little Theatre, 240 East Avenue Rochester, NY on Monday June 30, 2008 at 9:15pm. This project demonstrates that a routine act, like making tea, can be an opportunity to consider that all of life is composed of unseen features and hidden complexities.

features of a tract

The current problem considers the matter of text and image; in this case, topographies made of text. Here, text has been removed from the rectilinear grid, placed into a geometry that's familiar but not the norm. The words are from Fast One by Paul Cain.

specters

During an email conversation with Chris Burnett, I observed that texts often had a spectral quality about them. This exploration is one of my efforts intended for the Image Process Literature project. Here is Joseph Conrad's first page of Heart of Darkness, presented as a ghost. The crop is his first paragraph, one of the loveliest I've ever encountered.

the first dent

After the first dent, the car you drive becomes yours. Similar with the first entry in one's blog.