Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts

Mistaken Landscapes


















Mistaken Landscapes, 2024
Magazine, 8.5×11 in, 200 pages

The images comprising Mistaken Landscapes were made with an iPhone while traveling on Shinkansen bullet trains in Japan between 2014 and 2023.

High Dynamic Range, or HDR, has been an iPhone option since the Model 4 came out in 2010. When HDR is enabled, the camera quickly takes three images each time you press the shutter button—one underexposed, one at the correct exposure, and one overexposed. The three exposures are combined, yielding a single image with an increased dynamic range of color and contrast.

Although the three HDR exposures are made almost instantaneously, the Shinkansen travels up to 300 km/h (186 mph); consequently, the view out the window shifts during the image-making process. Although brief, the lag time between the first and last exposure causes inaccurate imagery alignment, with areas of misregistration appearing as a featureless, flat, gray tonality.

As viewed from a speeding Shinkansen, the landscape streaking by already seems unreal; however, the slippage generated by the HDR shifting pushes the images into territory bordering on abstract and hallucinatory. This selection, pulled from 11,417 images, manifests a range of scenes from urban to rural and a spectrum of misregistration from subtle to severe.

Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock vs. Brad Pitt at Sunset


 



 

 

 

 

 

Tonight 8/5/2022: Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock vs. Brad Pitt at sunset (approximately 8:36 PM) at All Star Fine and Recorded Arts: 3022 E 35th St, Minneapolis, MN 55406 Instagram. Listen to the audio hereLive Zoom link click here Meeting ID: 867 4296 5027. View a book version of the film here.

All Star Fine and Recorded Arts is not scared to go up against the big guns. So, we are proud to announce that Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock’s film, Mistaken Landscapes, shot from Shinkansen Bullet trains in Japan over six years, will drop on August 5th, the same release date as Bullet Train, a new action comedy starring Brad Pitt.

Based on the 2010 Japanese novel Maria Beetle by Kotaro Isaka, Bullet Train (filmic value yet unknown) is not to be confused with the extraordinary 1975 thriller, The Bullet Train, starring the legendary Ken Takakura and Sonny Chiba. Regardless—Takakura, Chiba, Pitt—we stand our ground.

Like the big motion picture companies, we, too, will bring a sampling of Japanese landscape into American theaters; however, our version emerges from the heartland minus the comedy, less predictably and more abstractly. Mistaken Landscapes will be projected onto the gallery window from inside All Star Fine and Recorded Arts, inverting space and turning the interior of this Minneapolis gallery into a view of the passing Japanese terrain. The corner location and visibility from pedestrians and drivers ideally places All Star Fine and Recorded Arts as the conduit between travelers on different continents.

About the film: the images comprising Mistaken Landscapes were made with an iPhone while traveling on Shinkansen bullet trains in Japan between 2014 and 2020 and exploit the iPhone’s High Dynamic Range capabilities.

High Dynamic Range, or HDR, has been an iPhone option since model four came out in 2010. When HDR is enabled, the camera quickly takes three images each time you press the shutter button—one underexposed, one at the correct exposure, and one overexposed. The three different exposures are combined, yielding a single image with an increased dynamic range of color and contrast.

Even though the three HDR exposures are made almost instantaneously, the Shinkansen travels at speeds up to 300 km/h (186 mph); consequently, the view out the window shifts during the image-making process. The brief lag between exposures causes inaccurate imagery alignment, with misregistration areas appearing featureless, and gray.

As viewed from a speeding Shinkansen, the world streaking by already appears unreal; however, the slippage generated by the HDR shift pushes the images into territory bordering on hallucinatory. This selection, pulled from 11,417 images, manifests a range of scenes from urban to rural and a spectrum of misregistration from subtle to severe.

Forming a counterpoint to the rhythmic shifting of the distorted visuals, the audio of this film is constructed from recordings made while sitting still on the balcony of a Tokyo apartment. As with the HDR images that don’t precisely combine, the addition of sounds—a child’s tantrum in the courtyard, a neighbor’s koto lesson, rice cooking, and an answering machine message from FedEx—enhances the surreal qualities of the film and foregrounds the contrast between movement and stasis, outside and inside, travel and home.

The star actor in this film is the visual/aural landscape itself.

Case Study Tokyo 2020



Case Study Tokyo 2020
7×7 in, 18×18 cm
438 Pages
Publish Date May 01, 2020
Preview the entirety of the book here.

Take one part working methodology from the influential 1972 book, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, combine with the megacity of Tokyo, add Fordham University Gabelli students, stir for ten days in Japan and what do you get? You get direct acquisition of knowledge through experience with a small team, realized in a hardback research volume focusing on branding, sensory marketing, architecture, design, photography, and urban planning.

There is a fiendish pleasure in meeting your students at Tokyo's Narita airport after they have endured a fourteen-hour flight and crossed the International Date Line. Their disorientation is palpable—from bloodshot eyes to messy hair (which actually fits in quite nicely with the local, youthful styles) and from the need for sudden naps and its alternate in the form of sleep-deprived rambling. It is the equivalent of barging into someone's room at 3:00 a.m. and saying, "Wake up, the class has started!"

Nonetheless, over ten days, endless miles of walking unfamiliar terrain, including innumerable fresh sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and experiences, a transformation occurs. The initial shock and strangeness of being in a new country yields to impressions that are increasingly nuanced and personal. Here follows a description of the primary objectives and methodologies employed in this class, which will contextualize the storm of thousands of images that is to come on the following pages.

Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour is a landmark study that looked at a city in terms of architecture, density, lighting, signage, sound, and numerous additional prisms. It is an eclectic research tome whose structure served as the skeleton for our case study of Tokyo. While we are not architects, nor did we travel to Las Vegas, we were interested in the idea of looking at a city from multiple vantage points, both literal and conceptual. The eclecticism of our approach has led us to unforeseen revelations and to find engaging connections across different aspects of our topic city, Tokyo.

The megacity of Tokyo (population over 13.9 million) served as the base for our investigations, with research itineraries that brought us from the cosmopolitan ward of Shinjuku to the center of youth culture in Shibuya, from the cutting edge fashion districts of Harajuku to the traditional temples and shrines of Asakusa. Each day brought new and different locations where we quantified aspects of the city for our study. Our team conducted primary visual research via smartphones with an emphasis placed on generating straightforward images that were decidedly not photographic works of art. These images were subsequently categorized into our working data set and eventually output to this book.

For the ten days that comprised our study, each of the students in our team produced five images per day in each of the following categories: sign, object, area, color, and architecture. Images were organized by date, as well as assigned one of the five keywords. In assigning only single, descriptive keywords to each image, several intriguing dilemmas arose almost immediately. How does one appropriately label, for instance, an image of a crumpled, colorful gum wrapper covered with graphics and brand logos, or architect Tadao Ando and fashion designer Issey Miyake's 21_21 Design Site in the Roppongi district? With the former, the wrapper could easily fit into the category for either object, color, or sign. With the latter example, the roof of Ando's building, based on Miyake's clothing concept, "A Piece of Cloth," is folded from one sheet of steel and functions as both an enormous sign and advertisement for Miyake's concepts. Beyond the branding of Issey Miyake, the building's single sheet of folded steel potentially references the sheet of folded paper used in origami, the Japanese art of paper folding. It thus functions as an advertisement for a traditional aspect of Japanese culture. The complexities of categorization are numerous.

During generating thousands of images and assigning keywords, class members began to ask questions. Need signage be large, or be linguistically based? Might a building's silhouette serve as signage? At what point does an object's scale shift into being an architectural structure, or diffuse sufficiently and transform into an area? Is there a color palette specific to Tokyo and fundamentally different from elsewhere? How do companies negotiate co-branded endeavors in regards to color, object relationship, and shelf placement hierarchy? Even with their inherent absurdities, the five basic categories we employed provided a method by which to consider Tokyo, prioritize the defining characteristics of the images produced, and organize our research.

At the very beginning of this course, the class viewed French filmmaker Chris Marker's 1983 essay film on travel and Japan, Sans Soleil. Oddly, here at the end of our process, a quote from the film's narrator resonates strongly and states our Case Study Tokyo's objectives perfectly. She says, "I've been around the world several times, and now only banality still interests me. On this trip, I've tracked it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter." Along with architect Tadao Ando's description of 21_21 Design Site as a "venue to redirect our eyes to everyday things and events," we can see how this study is a collection of small, but precise examinations by a group "relentlessly" traversing Tokyo. The primary goal was simply to see.

What one makes of their observations, detects in the trends within the book, or how one might utilize this data in the future is yet one more very interesting and wonderfully complicated discussion.

Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock, 2020

彦島 Hikoshima



















 


彦島 Hikoshima
Size 5×8 in, 13×20 cm
88 Pages
ISBN: softcover: 9780368099113
Publish Date Jan 04, 2019
Preview the entirety of the book here.

The images in this book are selected from a body of work made in the south of Japan over the past ten years. I first started photographing on the small island of Hikoshima in the city of Shimonoseki during visits to see my wife’s family. I wanted to walk where she had walked, gradually discovering a sense of place through observation. After my son was born I continued my walks; however, with him strapped to my chest, my camera in one hand, and a baby bottle in the other. My son and I now walk the island together and he often points out things to me that he thinks would make interesting images, in addition to making his own images with a point-and-shoot camera. It is enormous fun, as well as a means for him to connect to the place in which he was born.

Vanishing Lands





















Vanishing Lands
Curators: Doron Polak & Esti Drori
Exhibition dates: May 10, 2017

Artura/The International Artists’ Museum
Design Hotel Ca' Pisani
Venice, Italy

#122: Kitakyushu, Japan 
The complexities of how to cultivate attachment are divulged, yet the language is either scrambled, or in a dialect that I can't understand.

The 2017 Whitney Biennial: Debtfair















The 2017 Whitney Biennial: Debtfair
Curators: Occupy Museums (Arthur Polendo, Imani Jacqueline Brown, Kenneth Pietrobono, Noah Fischer, and Tal Beery)
Exhibition dates: March 17–June 11, 2017

The Whitney Museum of American Art
99 Gansevoort Street
New York, NY 10014
whitney.org

"Formed during the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, Occupy Museums connects the struggle for economic and social equity to art institutions, highlighting instances when they propagate and normalize injustice. In 2012, the collective launched Debtfair, an exhibition platform that categorizes artists according to their debts and other financial realities. The system reveals the relationships binding individuals to the banks holding their loans—a hidden but highly consequential factor underlying American art."


Fundació Joan Miró: Autogestó






















Autogestó

Curator: Antonio Ortega, Adam Nankervis
Exhibition Dates: Februaury 16, 2017—May 21, 2017

Fundació Joan Miró
Parc de Montjuïc
08038 Barcelona
website

Autogestó includes work from Adam Nankervis' another vacant space project, of which I am a long time fan and contributor. Antonio Ortega writes, "Self-organization provides a genealogy of artists from the 1960s on who have been developing strategies to recover the authorship of their own narrative. The exhibition is also an attempt to understand recent art and confirm the current validity of these dynamics." Desire Line, 2005, is the piece selected by Adam Nankervis for Antonio Ortega's exhibition.


Desire Line, 2005, C-print mounted to Sintra and Plexiglas, h 70.5” x w 3” (right image: detailed enlargement)

Desire Line presents the entire cast and crew of a single movie on one vertical support the precise height of the artist. As with the companion video Desire Lines, the title of this piece refers to the landscape architecture term of the same name where the placement of concrete sidewalks is established by the organic paths worn into the landscape by foot traffic.


Faculty Spotlight 2015















Faculty Spotlight 2015

The Ildiko Butler Gallery
Fordham University at Lincoln Center MAP
113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue
New York, NY 10023
ildikobutlergallery.com

Featuring works by:
Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock
Richard Kalina
Anibal Pella-Woo

The current display of works in Fordham University's Ildiko Butler Gallery is the 2015 installment of the annual Faculty Spotlight Exhibition. Each year in the fall three members from the Department of Theater and Visual Art are asked to share a sampling of their production with the Fordham community. Richard Kalina represents painting this year and photography is represented by both Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock and Anibal Pella-Woo. Despite the differences in their mediums and approaches, their works generate a lively dialogue regarding content and representational methods.

Dates: February 3, 2015 – March 10, 2015
Reception: Tuesday, February 3, 2015, 6 – 8 p.m.
WEB:

For more information please contact: apicellahit@fordham.edu

Postcard project for Cabinet Magazine


















My son with his great-grandfather, 3/13/2011, 2:52 PM Japan Standard Time, postcard project for Cabinet Magazine, issue number 4, Spring 2013

Dah Di-dah-dah Dah-dah-dah, Di-dah-di-dit Dah-dah-dah Di-di-di-dah Dit Di-dah-dit Di-di-dit


Dah Di-dah-dah Dah-dah-dah, Di-dah-di-dit Dah-dah-dah Di-di-di-dah Dit Di-dah-dit Di-di-dit, 1985 (approx.) – 2011, h 20 cm x w 13 cm (h 8” x w 5”), 82 page pocket book, black and white text pages printed on 60-pound (90g/m2) cream-colored paper, 4-color front and back cover. Project for Markers 8, International Artists’ Museum Artura/Projective, ArtLife for the World Contemporary Art Space, Venice, Italy.

Translate the long and short signals of Morse code contained in this pocket book into English and you will have detailed walking directions generated by Google Maps from the Venice, Italy gallery in which you are standing to a specific location.

The Google Maps algorithm will bring you on some rather mysterious and seemingly pointless detours along the way, including two segments of the journey by ship; nevertheless, the instructions will eventually get you from point A to point B. Follow this walking route for approximately three days and eleven hours – 2,180 km – and you will arrive at a corner where two lovers used to meet in a black and white film from 1962.

On top of a pedestrian handrail at the intersection you will find a yellow key for a small locker in the Ueno train station in Tokyo, Japan. When you try to use this key to open locker number 6107 it will no longer work because by now the three hundred Yen locker fee has long since ran out, the contents have been taken to the lost and found, and the lock has been changed. So, present the key to the station’s lost and found department and they will hand you a Maxell UR 90 Tinted Oval Window Cassette Shell / POSITION•NORMAL / JAPAN•JAPON cassette.

There are no labels or distinguishing features on the cassette itself. Nor is there any label, or information on the cassette case, save for the fact that the cassette case spine is completely blacked out with marker pen. This is your prize. It is the most valuable thing that I can give to you. You hold my future in your hands.

This cassette tape was fabricated in Japan sometime during the mid-80s, exported to the United States, and purchased in the New York region. The tape was subsequently used to record a conversation between a family member and a psychic. It was, amongst other things, about the possible directions that my life would take. However, after the family member’s death in 2005, and prior to having the opportunity to listen to the tape, the cassette was erased.

In 2009 the erased cassette was brought back to Japan from the United States and presented to a diminutive Japanese psychic who can consistently be found at the corner of Kuyakusho Dōri and Yasukuni Dōri in Shinjuku, Tokyo. After a careful investigation of the tape, the Japanese psychic stated that since the erased recording was originally in English, a language that she didn’t understand, she was not able to decipher it, whereas had the erased recording been in Japanese she would have been able to.

After an improvised ceremony, I quietly placed the cassette in locker 6107, locked it, and walked away with the locker's yellow key. The Maxell UR 90 Tinted Oval Window Cassette Shell / POSITION•NORMAL / JAPAN•JAPON cassette sat in the darkness of the locker until my three hundred Yen ran out and a station attendant took the locker’s solitary object to the lost and found. It now waits for you there, our futures interlocked as the erased tape predicted.

Black & White Video


Black and White Video, 2009, found balloon, three cubic yard dumpster, video, black and white, sound, total running time 1 minute and thirty seconds (balloon missing/destroyed). Project for Last Day of Magic, International Artists’ Museum Artura/Projective for Détournement, 2009 Venise, a collateral event of the 53rd Venice Biennale presented at ScalaMata Exhibition Space, Venice, Italy.

In the fall of 2008, a black balloon blew down Kent Street in Brooklyn, New York, and into my leg. I picked it up, took it to my studio, and bounced it between the studio wall and the front of a video camera. The balloon appears as a black shape on a white field, alternately decreasing in size, or occupying a progressively larger portion of the video camera frame, eventually hitting the front of the lens and blocking all light.

After I filmed the balloon, it sat on a shelf in my studio for five months, gradually shrinking, until I discarded it into the three cubic yard dumpster outside my door. Almost immediately after disposing of the deflated balloon, a friend asked if they could have it, so I climbed into the dumpster and with the assistance of a different friend I methodically emptied its contents into a number of large garbage bags.

Although we sifted through the refuse like meticulous archaeologists, we failed to locate the missing balloon. I checked each piece of trash as I returned it back into the dumpster; nevertheless, the absent balloon did not materialize. The black balloon drifted up to me, stayed for some months, and then vanished. Black & White Video and several images are all the remaining proof of the balloon.

12.9 miles, 24 minutes; 25.2 miles, 42 minutes; 18.8 miles, 54 minutes; 11.4 miles, 40 minutes


12.9 miles, 24 minutes; 25.2 miles, 42 minutes; 18.8 miles, 54 minutes; 11.4 miles, 40 minutes, 2009, video, color, silent, total running time 3 minutes and 5 seconds. Book: 2009, bound 162 page hardcover book, h 8" x w 10"

12.9 miles, 24 minutes; 25.2 miles, 42 minutes; 18.8 miles, 54 minutes; 11.4 miles, 40 minutes is a 3 minute and 5 second video comprised of one hundred sixty photographs taken consecutively on Friday, February 20, 2009. The images were shot from a fixed position in the back of a car with a digital camera on full automatic mode. All images were made at one-second intervals by means of a timer and the images are displayed in the order in which they were shot with no editing, or retouching. The information at the beginning of the video denotes the distances and times between three different IKEA locations and the information at the conclusion of the video refers to the exact times at which the three IKEA images were made. The book version of this project was conceptualized, executed, and bound within the same day. This project is a collaboration with Anibal J. Pella-Woo.

The Plot is Very Bare (Berlin)


The Plot is Very Bare (Berlin), 2005/2009, fifty LightJet prints mounted to Sintra and Plexiglas, h 12.3825 centimeters (4.875 inches) x w 16.51 centimeters (6.5 inches)

Bereznitsky Gallery

The Plot is Very Bare represents a walk across a baseball field to the bench in the dugout of the Encino Little League field in Encino, California in the United States. Each photograph is taken from a position one step closer than the previous and the photographs are installed exactly one pace apart from one another.

Visitors to the 2009 Berlin installation of The Plot is Very Bare at Bereznitsky Gallery are invited to pick one of the fifty images, remove it from the wall during the opening, and take it home at the end of the night. As the evening progresses, the work will transition from being cohesive, to fragmentary, to absent. The image you decide on is yours with no attached conditions whatsoever.

Your choice will join you to the individuals who claimed the images to the left and right of your selection. You will become a part of an invisible line of people that are connected despite geographic distance. Additionally, this dugout is where the character Stacy from the 1982 film Fast Times at Ridgemont High loses her virginity to Ron Johnson, the audio consultant from the mall.

Excursions


Excursions, 2008–2009, written text, image with caption, offset printed publication. Image caption: Outdoor movie theater across from Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman’s house on Via Vittorio Emanuele, Stromboli, 2006

Excursions
is a written text that attempts to understand a sudden reversal of my compass’ polarity while traveling in Japan in 2008. Although the piece almost arrives at a conclusion employing the filmic backdrops of Yasujiro’s Tokyo Story, Roberto Rossellinis’s Stromboli, and Henry Levin’s Journey to the Center of the Earth for support, the piece is ultimately unsuccessful in providing a satisfactory answer for the strange geomagnetic occurrence.

At last I saw the figure of Hans as if enveloped in the huge halo of burning blaze, and no other sense remained to me but that sinister dread which the condemned victim may be supposed to feel when led to the mouth of a cannon, at the supreme moment when the shot is fired and his limbs are dispersed into empty space.” 1

The following thoughts, like limbs dispersed into space then reassembled, form a loose body – rudimentary, transformed, and not entirely unified, but something with the promise of a body nevertheless.

On Thursday, March 13, 2008, I used my small pocket compass to orient my map and myself when I emerged from the Shinjuku rail station in Tokyo, Japan. There are hundreds of exits from Shinjuku station and one can easily wind up walking in the wrong direction, becoming increasingly lost and bewildered if they are not initially pointing the right way towards their destination. As in the past, my compass allowed me to fix my bearings and quickly set me on the correct course. Two days later, while traveling south from Tokyo, I stopped in the city of Osaka to see the grand sumo tournaments. Again, I utilized my compass to adjust the relationship between my map of Osaka and the city itself; however, despite the alignment of the compass rose on the map and the compass held in my palm, I was significantly off course and getting no closer to the Osaka Prefectural Gymnasium. Having become quite desperate after repeating the same, wrong route numerous times, I decided to walk in the opposite direction, concluding that my map of Osaka had somehow been printed in reverse. As I walked on this new course, the Osaka landmarks on the map quickly began to emerge in their appropriate places. I arrived at the Gymnasium and the entire matter disappeared from my thoughts as soon as the sumo bouts began.

Several days after my stay in Osaka, I arrived further south at my intended destination of Onomichi on the Inland Sea. Yet again, I encountered the problem of being significantly off course as in Osaka. I was investigating the city of Onomichi, looking for the different locations where the filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu shot portions of his 1953 film Tokyo Story and I repeatedly found myself getting terribly lost despite the use of my pocket compass. After retracing my steps back to the Onomichi rail station, I carefully compared my map with the station’s map. My map seemed to be exactly the same, so I aligned it properly according to the station map’s compass rose, and set out once again. Now, I navigated with ease to my desired sites and it gradually dawned on me that my maps had not been the source of the problem at all, but that there was something terribly wrong with my compass. Somehow, my compass had suddenly and enigmatically reversed its polarity during the previous days – north was precisely south, and south was precisely north. From my perspective, the world was now entirely upside down.

I sat for a long time in Onomichi at one of Ozu’s filming locations thinking about the implications of the world being unstable enough to abruptly invert. It was both odd, as well as comforting to be considering an enormous change such as a polarity reversal in Ozu’s own backyard, he being a filmmaker whose works are known for their fixed camera positions and methodical, steady nature. What event would be significant enough to cause a compass to rearrange its orientation? Would not such an event have enormous effects on transportation in the world and at the least merit a brief mention in the news? Additionally, what would the repercussions be for my personal life? While thinking loosely around these matters, I recollected that a compass reversing its polarity also featured in a book I had read a long time ago as a boy – towards the end of Jules Verne’s 1864 novel, Journey to the Center of the Earth.

The main characters from Jules Verne’s novel attempt to reach the planet’s core, entering the Earth via an opening in a volcano crater in Iceland. Then, at the end of the story after numerous adventures, they are ejected from the core on a wave of hot lava into a warm climate considerably different from Iceland. The chief protagonist puzzles over the changed environment and eventually concludes (after hearing Italian) that their previous proximity to the magnetized core of the planet affected the functionality of his compass, which had reversed, and that they were on the other side of the world. In fact, it turns out that that they had been expelled from the earth from a volcano on the Aeolian island of Stromboli, in the Tyrrhenian Sea north of Sicily, not back onto the volcano in Iceland. It was not precisely the other side of the world, but close enough in my book.

So far, I have not been to Iceland in my travels, or even remotely close to transiting through the inside of a volcano; however, I actually have spent time on the island of Stromboli where Roberto Rossellini made his film Stromboli in 1949. A few years earlier I stood on the island near the active volcano and considered the possibility of the explorers from the 1959 film version of Journey to the Center of the Earth – actors James Mason, Pat Boone, and Gertrude the Duck – being shot out from the volcano, out of their movie, and directly into Rossellini’s film alongside the heroine Ingrid Bergman. The science fiction of Journey to the Center of the Earth, in some ways a polar opposite of Rossellini’s hard edge realism, would form a bizarre amalgam; further, they even shared a legitimate geographic feature in the volcano. However, sitting in Onomichi, I could not piece together, cinematically at least, what the connections were to Japan and what this had to do with my compass shifting so radically.

Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story was made in 1953, Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli was made in 1949, and Henry Levin’s Journey to the Center of the Earth was made in 1959, so there was no commonality of production year to bring the works securely together, or even legitimately into the same mental conversation. Still, I thought, if only I could arrange for a screening of Tokyo Story at the library’s outdoor theater on Stromboli, at the base of the volcano and directly across the street from where Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman lived while filming, that would be a neat suturing and provide the third side of this filmic triangle.

Upon returning home to New York from Japan, I looked further into the mysteries of magnetism and was quite surprised with the answer from the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Geomagnetism Program when they posed the following question on their website, “Is it true that the magnetic field occasionally reverses polarity?” The website then went on to say with great enthusiasm, “Yes, incredible as it may seem, the magnetic field occasionally flips over! Occasionally, however, the secular variation becomes sufficiently large such that the magnetic poles end up being located rather distantly from the geographic poles; we say that the poles have undergone an ‘excursion’ from their preferred state. During a reversal, between polarities, the geometry of the magnetic field is much more complicated than it is now, and a compass could point in almost any direction depending on one’s location on the Earth.” 2

This new information made me consider my situation quite differently. Who knows what would have happened when my compass flipped over if I had been seeking out film locations for Ozu’s Late Spring, made in 1949, or for his 1959 film Good Morning. Perhaps I would have encountered less complications, smaller variations, and found significant connections with Stromboli, or with Journey to the Center of the Earth. Nevertheless, I had been in Onomichi, Tokyo Story was made in 1953, and consequently the reassembling of dispersed limbs is not as straight as it could be, or, more truthfully, is not at all. Two lines have been joined, with the promise of a potential triangle in a distant, missing leg.

After Verne’s character emerged from the volcano’s halo of burning blaze and spotted the guide, he likened his feelings to the sinister dread of a condemned man just before “his limbs are dispersed into empty space.” If this character were to collect their senses and overcome their anxieties of the unknown, then ask the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Geomagnetism Program “What causes the magnetic field to reverse polarity?” They would be confronted with the following answers:

First, “Nothing.”

Followed by, “The fact that the magnetic field occasionally reverses is simply a property of the continuous, on-going behavior of the Earth's dynamo.”

Then, lastly and most lovely, “There is no ‘cause’ per se.”

Notes:
1 Verne, Jules. Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Trans. William Butcher. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
2 "National Geomagnetism Program Frequently Asked Questions." (April 16, 2007): U.S. Department of the Interior/U.S. Geological Survey. .

Untitled (with Kite)



Untitled (with Kite), 2008, video, color, sound, total running time 1 minute and 54 seconds

Collaboration is about having conversations and finding common interests. What better example than flying a kite with a friend and having a couple of beers on a sunny afternoon. However, the piece culminates with the kite’s camera filming a disaster. This project is a collaboration with Ben Washington.

Untitled-17: “Epson Perfection 2580 Photo” B by A, “Epson Perfection 2580 Photo” A by B, September 28, 2007, 3:48 PM


Untitled-17: “Epson Perfection 2580 Photo” B by A, “Epson Perfection 2580 Photo” A by B, September 28, 2007, 3:48 PM, 2007, C-print mounted to Plexiglas, h 11 1/2” x w 17”

Two “Epson Perfection 2580 Photo” flatbed scanners were placed with their glass scanning surfaces facing each other, oriented so that the recording mechanisms passed in opposite directions as they made their scans. The resultant left and right images that form this diptych are the raw scans generated according to the devices’ factory presets and are printed at one hundred percent original size with no retouching, adjustments of image density, color correction, or cropping. Although the settings were identical for both units and the scans initiated simultaneously, the two images have numerous distinct, if subtle, variations from one another.

A Triangulation (Japan)





A Triangulation (Japan), 2006, MDF, paint, c-print mounted to aluminum, video, written text, Queens Museum of Art, southeast ramp, Flushing, NY. Sculpture: h 91.5” x w 46.125” x d 46.125,” destroyed, image: h 6.57” x w 9.1,” video: color, sound, total running time 30 seconds, looped. Writing: tri-fold printed handout.

Special thanks to Eric Zeszotarski of Solid Studio.

(Foreword and first entry from ten field reports)

Subject: Foreword
Date: June 19, 2005 9:32:03 PM Japan Standard Time

I was initially pleased upon seeing Cinderella Castle in Tokyo Disneyland at the Tokyo Disney Resort in Japan. Its duplication of Cinderella Castle in The Magic Kingdom at the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida was precise to the smallest detail and seeing it was like reuniting with a long-standing friend. Still, in short order the comforting familiarity was replaced by mounting anxiety and a vague sense of dread. Yes, there was an abundance of grey stone, gold trim and royal blue in the rooftop shingles. Yes, the trickery of forced architecture operated in the same manner as its companion in the United States, yet something far more powerful and inexplicable was at work than simple perspective deception. Seeing this building replicated accurately in another country had the consequence of destabilizing my sense of orientation. Somehow this doppelgänger, because of its stubborn, insistent sameness, operated effectively in inverting everything that surrounded it. This baffles me.

I understand how Cinderella Castle’s combination of architectural styles taken from various castles and chateaus in Europe is not terribly odd in and of itself, since the Disney “Imagineers” wanted their castle to be as genuine as possible; all the same, seeing this building exported from France, to Florida, then on to Japan creates a double displacement of an uncanny nature and merits closer investigation. I intend on exploring this predicament of authenticity further during a fact-finding mission to Florida that will be unified with my explorations from Japan. Understanding how the Castle compromised my sense of grounding is of primary importance, particularly as I am a simultaneous critic and fan of “The Happiest Place on Earth.”

442 days later…

Subject: The Happiest Place on Earth 1
Date: September 4, 2006 11:30:21 AM Eastern Daylight Time

So, I am 100 feet inside the park sitting on the steps of City Hall looking around. The train at the Walt Disney World Railway just gave several quick toots and an "all aboard," another group is off on a circumnavigation of the park. The familiar smells of popcorn and vanilla float on the breeze and the Main Street Transportation Company just pulled up, its clip clopping barely audible above the sound of the band bouncing through a homecoming march; even so, I must say that I am a bit on edge because in addition to presenting my ticket at the gate only moments ago, I was also asked to present my index finger for a fingerprint scan. This is the beginning.

Seeking to understand the disorienting effect of the Cinderella Castle at the Tokyo Disney Resort in Japan, Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock subjects its image (and those of its twin at the Magic Kingdom in Orlando, FL) to some forms of displacement reciprocity. In a spare installation, a looping video captures the Tokyo Disney Castle on a cloudy day spinning around the edge of the screen. Near the video, a simplified silhouette of the castle, bisected by its copy, hangs upside down from the ceiling like a stalactite. A third element, a photograph from Orlando’s Disney Resort, further complicates the entertainment franchise’s aggressive innocence and its disorienting duplications. – Herb Tam, Associate Curator, Queens Museum of Art.

A Triangulation (Italy)/An Island


A Triangulation (Italy), 2003–2006, 45 rpm silver master plates, h 12 3/8" x w 22 3/4" (framed) An Island, 2006, C-print (from a Super-8 film frame) mounted to aluminum, h 6 1/2” x w 9” (image) h 9 1/16” x w 11 5/8” (framed)

Have you ever seen Buster Keaton going out a doorway? He turns right, then he suddenly turns left, then, spinning on his heels, he abruptly reverses direction and heads off to the right as he initially started. It is impressive to see his original intention, his deviation, his realization, and his modification occur in the space of a few short moments. As well as the physical agility demonstrated in this comedic instant, one also might detect a compressed set of emotions in the scene that range from desire, to failure, to subsequent redemption – the fundamentals of a classic narrative. In a sense, the improvisations that occur when actuality tempers our wishes are a skeletal array of touchstones for this project; nevertheless, they are points transposed from the period of a few moments in the space of a doorway and stretched out into several years on the Tyrrhenian Sea.

In 2003, I set off for the Aeolian Islands north of Sicily, the island of Lisca Bianca specifically, to find the character Anna who disappeared from Michelangelo Antonioni's 1960 film L'Avventura; however, I accidentally went to the wrong island. I returned a year later to the right island and swam ashore, but I found nothing. Sound recordings were made during both voyages of my boat’s small outboard engine as it labored in transit to the wrong and right islands and my grand journey eventually assumed the diminutive and archaic format of a 45 rpm record, Going Towards the Wrong Island and Going Towards the Right Island. The unique, silver master plates for the A and B sides of the record are presented in A Triangulation, their encoded sounds and story clearly visible, yet ultimately inaccessible, as the master plates cannot be played.

Working alongside the two reflective plates of A Triangulation is the third component of the project, An Island. A single reel of Super-8 film was shot in a continuous take during a 2006 return to the Aeolian Islands, yet the objective was not to travel once again to Lisca Bianca, but to navigate accurately to the wrong island. Although the film itself was never intended for presentation, the very last frame of the film, the end, was selected for enlargement. This singular frame is the trophy from a return trip to an island that formerly represented a colossal blunder on my part. As well, the last frame of the footage is a bookend, providing finality and closure.

The title, A Triangulation, refers to a navigation technique whereby the properties of triangles are used to precisely determine a location by means of compass bearings from two points a known distance apart. Within the context of this project, one might consider the technique of triangulation in relation to positions in time, as well as in regards to physical location; conversely, the numerous ambiguities, deviations, as well as the mysterious disappearance of Anna at the core of this series of expeditions, operate in stark contrast to the exactitude of the triangulating process. Along these lines, the vaguely titled, An Island, also plays with notions of accuracy by utilizing an indefinite article to describe the island that is neither clear, nor precisely defined. Although we know that An Island is not the right island of Lisca Bianca, it becomes questionable whether the original name wrong island is entirely useful, particularly given that the island was traveled to intentionally and successfully on the most recent trip. As with many different types of adventures, transformations have emerged en route: objectives have changed, techniques altered accordingly, and original presumptions questioned.

Record


Record, 2005, LightJet print mounted to Sintra and Plexiglas, h 36” x w 36” (top image: installation for Palimpsests at Gigantic ArtSpace, New York, NY; bottom image: Record and enlarged detail)

Record is the spine of my favorite record made in 1983. Although the record spine has been scanned and enlarged for closer inspection, it is so thoroughly worn down from use that little information can be deciphered. Record is a relic.

Going Towards the Wrong Island and Going Towards the Right Island


Going Towards the Wrong Island and Going Towards the Right Island, 2003–2005, LightJet print mounted to aluminum, h 4 3/4” x w 12 2/3” (image) h 7 3/16” x w 15 5/16” (framed)

Travel to the Aeolian Islands north of Sicily, the island of Lisca Bianca specifically, to find the character Anna who disappeared from Michelangelo Antonioni's film L'Avventura and accidentally go to the wrong island (Bottaro). Return a year later to the correct island.