Higashi-Nippori

Higashi-Nippori, 2023
RGB filtered B & W Super-8 film, color, sound, total running time 5 minutes
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Higashi Nippori investigates the difficulties of making something straightforward. Three black and white Super-8 film cartridges were shot in single takes from a fixed position in an apartment in Tokyo, Japan, for each of the film's three sections.

Each cartridge was filtered for one of the three additive primary colors: red, green, and blue. Superimposed atop one another and colorized accordingly, the three elements should combine to create a single color take; nonetheless, deviations between the three pieces of footage caused improper registration and undulating color shifts.

The film's first section was shot at high speed, showing clothes drying in the wind on a laundry balcony. The second section is a time-lapse of three consecutive days of the sun rising behind the living room's sliding paper screen. The third section is a view from the apartment's balcony, looking down at treetops moving in the wind.

Although clothes drying, the sun rising, and the wind blowing a treetop seem like uncomplicated topics for a film, numerous factors problematized the objective of creating one color take, from the camera and tripod vibrating,  gradually shifting its position on the floor to the elements in front of the camera moving.

The soundtrack is the narrative backbone of the work and forms a domestic counterpoint to the shifting of distorted visuals, even though the audio is highly fragmented and is constructed from recordings made at different times while sitting still on the apartment's living room floor or standing on the laundry balcony. As with the images that don't precisely combine, the addition of disparate sounds—rice cooking, a heavy metal band in a nearby park, a passing recycling truck, a child’s tantrum, cicadas, crows, and an answering machine message from FedEx—enhances the surreal qualities of the film and foregrounds the contrast between inside and outside, private and public.

The three pieces of film footage periodically come together in proper registration and create a singular image, along with a plausible audio accompaniment; however, most of the time, the elements that comprise this film are in various disjunctive states and call attention to the film's assembled nature.

In the Street

A copy of Helen Levitt, Janice Loeb, and James Agee's 1948 film In the Street was brought from New York City, bootlegged in Beijing, then left on a blanket of a man selling copied Louis Vuitton bags on the sidewalk just outside the ancient markets of the Roman Forum. An Italian psychic transmitted this information to everyone participating in a large, open-call exhibition at Shoshanna Wayne Gallery in Santa Monica, CA.

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.

Landscape Film (Tottori, Japan)

Landscape Film (Tottori, Japan), 2009, video, color, sound, total running time 1 minute and 52 seconds.

Landscape Film is partially constructed from material extracted from Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1964 film Woman in the Dunes. The scenes utilized from Teshigahara’s film have been sequenced so that they show the protagonist walking through an empty landscape, then suddenly, without reason, breaking into a sprint and running out of the film. The screen in Landscape Film is divided between Teshigahara’s B&W footage and color footage shot in April 2009 in Tottori, Japan where Teshigahara made his film 45 years earlier.

I walked and filmed 199 steps in the Tottori sand dunes corresponding to each of the main character’s paces from the film. Once brought together side by side with Teshigahara’s footage, each of my steps was meticulously slowed down, or sped up to match the shifting gait of the central character.

The soundtrack is comprised of live sounds recorded during my walk and portions of the film’s ominous score. The synchronized footsteps on sand and powerful wind overloading the microphone function as additional sound effects duplicating the protagonist’s movements and environment.

The left channel's figure moving on screen serves as a document of a dubbing process, a point of view shot from Teshigahara’s actor, or potentially even someone pursuing the main character. Beyond the precise matching of the footsteps, the relationship between the footage, like the principal's behavior, is left ambiguous.

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.

Landscape Film (Shatana, Jordan)

Landscape Film (Shatana, Jordan), 2008, video, color, silent, total running time 1 minute and 14 seconds

Landscape Film is comprised of numerous short films made with a digital point and shoot camera as it is repeatedly thrown into the air and caught by the artist. The terrain of Shatana, Jordan is transformed from a static state through a series of pans and frenetic dives.

Untitled (with Kite)

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

After two weeks of unsuccessful attempts to fly home built kites made from garbage bags and sticks, we finally gave up and purchased an imported Chinese kite from a nearby store in Irbid, Jordan. The first flight was a tremendous success; however, the small video camera attached to the kite was mistakenly turned off just at launch and turned back on upon landing. There after followed four kites, all of which would fall apart in a relatively short span of time. This process of continued foundering was interspersed with days marked by a total absence of wind, which is highly unusual for the town of Shatana in the North of Jordan. The second successful flight was to be the last, as the kite string broke and the kite flew off on its own according to the wind. The video camera recorded the snapping of the kite string, the collaborators in pursuit of the renegade kite, and the kites’ journey across the landscape to its final resting spot. This project is a collaboration with Ben Washington.

Looking Southwest towards Midal al-Ataba from the Northeast corner of Shari Khulud and Shari al-Azhar...

Looking Southwest towards Midal al-Ataba from the Northeast corner of Shari Khulud and Shari al-Azhar, Seventy consecutive 30-second takes with a Cannon S70 point and shoot camera, 2007, video, color, sound, total running time 34 minutes and 55 seconds

Part performance, part traditional street photography, and part objective surveillance film – a domestic point and shoot digital camera was utilized to shoot seventy consecutive short films from a stationary position on a Cairo street corner. The camera was held at chest level pointed in the same southwest direction for each of the 70 takes with no regard to compositional framing, or subject. The camera focus and exposure were set before each take according to the distance and light on the artist’s feet. The camera’s maximum shooting time of 30 seconds and the size of the memory card dictated the length of individual takes, as well as the length of the film.

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.

Rough Sketch

Rough Sketch, proposal

Two identical helicopters facing each other rise straight up until they reach sufficient altitude that nothing is visible out their front windows aside from the other helicopter and empty sky. They then begin to slowly rotate in opposite directions facing each other periodically. The footage is shot from a fixed position inside each helicopter pointing directly out the front window parallel with the axis of the helicopter. The two films are projected side by side on a suitably large wall.

Potential points of interest:

1. The Eames description: “Starting at a picnic, the camera zooms to the edge of the universe; then the journey is reversed, ultimately reaching the nucleus of an atom. Literally a sketch and essentially black-and-white, this is the first version of Powers of Ten.”

2. The music composer for the Eames’ film is Elmer Bernstein. The music composer for Antonioni’s Blowup is Herbie Hancock.

3. Consider the piece in relation to Steve Reich’s use of looping. Cycles of sound are obvious; nevertheless, the beginning and ending points of the loop are difficult to ascertain. In regards to Blowup, something divorced from its context, or fixed point of reference, has no meaning. The “something” has no meaning or value – “a great Kantian definition of art.” The quote source is unknown.

4. The site for the Eames’ film is of significance, or not. The Eames’ site (Soldier Field in Chicago) is dubious, as indicated by the postcard. Utilize the slippage of truth as criteria for site choice. Above what?

5. It is a loop, yet it is a real-time loop. The moments of re-cranking and loading may feature as an element.

Image: Charles and Ray Eames filming Rough Sketch of a Proposed Film Dealing with the Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of Things in the Universe

A Drawn-out Conflict

A Drawn-out Conflict, 2005, video, color, sound, total running time 86 minutes

A Drawn-out Conflict merges the movies Wild Style and Fast Times at Ridgemont High to create a feature-length amalgam of two distinct forms of youth culture from 1982. The films were selected for their oppositional nature and averaged together to a median length and equal opacity. Audio tracks for each film were isolated and panned hard right and hard left, respectively.

“The viewer of A Drawn-out Conflict is confronted with a visual and auditory battle of East Coast Wild Style versus West Coast Fast Times, the South Bronx versus the Valley. Locations, budgets, filmmaking style, stereotypes, and racial composition of the cast could not be more divergent; nevertheless, from love scenes to credits, the plots of the two films overlap at major benchmarks, revealing a surprising formulaic style embedded in each movie.” – L.L. Pendersen

Phantom/Fountain

Phantom/Fountain, 2004, video, black and white, sound, total running time 1 minute and 49 seconds, Sculpture Center basement hallway, LIC, NY (four video stills)

Phantom/Fountain is a 1 minute 49 second film of mouthfuls of water being repeatedly spat at a video camera held at arm’s length in a morgue. Although the video is noticeably dark and empty, the space was active during the day. The video was made during the time in-between numerous autopsies. Phantom/Fountain records the raw sound of the incessant discharge; furthermore, it is a record of the gradual breakdown of the video camera itself, first with the failure of the microphone, then the auto-focus, and eventually the entire camera.

“Picking up where Bruce Nauman’s Self Portrait as a Fountain (1966) left off and following its art historical concerns and references, Apicella-Hitchcock creates a formal abstraction of shape, trajectory, and framing that also accentuates a psychological discomfort with a physical proximity to death.” – Anthony Huberman, Sculpture Center

Desire Lines

Desire Lines, 2005, video, sound, total running time 6 minutes and 17 seconds, (image: installation for Palimpsests at Gigantic ArtSpace, New York, NY), special thanks to Tom Kehn

Desire Lines is comprised of the scrolling end credits from films in the artist’s collection. The footage is sped up tremendously, diminishing legibility and highlighting the fact that despite the various movie genres, the films all adhere to a specific structural logic. The title of this piece refers to the landscape architecture term "desire lines" where the placement of concrete sidewalks is established by the organic paths worn into the landscape by foot traffic.

Ritorno a Lisca Bianca

Ritorno a Lisca Bianca, 2003–2005, video, black and white, sound, total running time 2 minutes and 30 seconds, looped

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 and swim ashore with a video camera in a plastic garbage bag, only to find nothing of interest except for red ants attacking black, shiny beetles. The film is comprised of five simultaneously running vignettes detailing the stages of the journey; however, synchronized audio is only available for each vignette for 30 seconds out of the film’s 2 minute and 30 second total. The film's audio shifts one vignette to the right every 30 seconds, traveling across the film and mirroring the journey itself. The soundtrack is in part constructed from video camera recordings while accidentally left on inside of the garbage bag.

Falling Between Positions

Falling Between Positions, 2002, stereoscopic 3-d video projection, color, silent, total running time 7 seconds, looped

In Falling Between Positions, the seemingly simple action of walking is broken down into a series of small, planned increments for examination. Three paces were executed over the period of one hour. Each pace was broken down into 25 stages of body movement, where each of the 25 phases making up a single pace had to be held for 60 seconds. In the final stereoscopic 3D projection, the three paces are sped up approximately 4000% so that they appear at normal speed. This project is a collaboration with Brian McClave.

Allez Cusine (Go Kitchen)

Allez Cusine (Go Kitchen), 2002, video, color, sound, total running time 2 minutes and 31 seconds, (image: 16 video stills)

Allez Cusine is a hallucinatory montage of fifty commercials in which artfully arranged portions of dog food are endlessly presented on spotless porcelain dishes and elegant crystal plates with decorative trim. For 2 minutes and 31 seconds various combinations of commercial strategies attempt to seduce the viewer with their pitch of visual plentitude.

Manicured hands courteously present and slide fine china across the screen, plates slowly revolve cutlets, silver forks rotate juicy morsels, wooden cooking utensils tumble nuggets and mix in slow motion, and spoons dance modest servings up towards your mouth. Gleaming knives abound – slow pans across luminous knives cutting and displaying, as if pâté, close-up shots of glowing chef’s knives precisely cutting, as if fine fillet mignon. Medallions are delicately divided, then glistening portions are gently slid apart to reveal their perfectly cooked and tender insides. The gliding camera dollies closer towards and across the immaculately plated food – harmonious in color scheme, formally arranged, and attractively garnished with hints of color. One dish is even served with a rice pilaf.

The emotionally soaring soundtrack for Allez Cusine is Fighting 17th, part of Hans Zimmer’s score for the 1991 Ron Howard film Backdraft, and later used as the introductory theme music for the Japanese television cooking show Iron Chef. The music, described as “driving,” “heroic,” “brassy,” and “triumphant,” serves as a proper counterpart to the visual imagery, both sophisticated and complimentary; yet always informed by the knowledge that the culinary delicacies presented are for the eventual consumption by animals, not humans. This project is a collaboration with Tom Kehn.

The Swimmer

The Swimmer, 2001, video, color, sound, total running time 24 minutes and 37 seconds (three stills from film comprised of 401 images)

The Swimmer is a layering of inaccessible performance, automatically formatted video, and exceptionally thorough documentation. Ten Hours from now I will begin a seventy-five mile, three day, walking expedition from my apartment in Brooklyn to upstate New York to participate in an event called the Brewster Project. This will be my very own hallucinatory trip upriver into the heart of darkness, during which I will be continually broadcasting to the world – at maximum volume from speakers attached to my body – the entirety of Martin Sheen's hypnotic interior monologue extracted from Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now. Digital images will be produced systematically throughout the trip. Then, upon completion of the journey, these stills will be coupled with Sheen’s monologue to serve as a new and unexpected accompaniment for a well-worn audio track.

The piece is called The Swimmer, in honor of Burt Lancaster's itinerant character in the 1968 film of the same title. The Swimmer is one of the most effectively appalling of all quest films, perhaps even more so than Apocalypse Now, because its calamities are sited in an innocuous suburban landscape during the height of the Vietnam War.

Heroes

Heroes, 2001, video, color, sound, total running time 7 minutes and 11 seconds

In 1989 the film Mac and Me was released to absolutely no critical acclaim, without doubt because it is an exercise in patent fakery. Mac and Me is a scene-by-scene rip-off of Steven Spielberg’s film E.T. the Extraterrestrial. Mac and Me is not a very good film by any standard, which makes it a perfect candidate for filmic resuscitation and shock therapy. The goal: to exhaustively look through the film to find and subsequently celebrate one small kernel of possibility from within a seemingly endless progression of commonplace scenes.

Heroes extracts and contextually modifies a generic sequence in which FBI agents are engaged in a frenetic foot chase up to and through a mall. By slowing down the sequence to 12% of the original speed the awkward and exaggerated actions of these hack actors are transformed into motions ethereal and balletic. Aside from slowing the speed of the footage, a significant liberty has been taken with the original narrative flow of Mac and Me. The chase sequence has been re-cut so that what the FBI agents are pursuing is conspicuously absent. Viewed unaltered the plot is turgid and the action predictable, yet edited and slowed the significance of their quest becomes cryptic and their movements are marked by unusual delicacy and refinement. Furthermore, the audio component of Heroes assists in transmuting the original footage into something remarkable. The soundtrack, once slowed down to 12% of the original speed, has more in common with ambient experimental music than maudlin film scores. Time elongation converts the music from something stale to something unusually changing and airy.

Ultimately, a heroic action is something done in response to a desperate situation. The purpose of Heroes is to scrounge through another filmmaker’s cinematic detritus until something worth honoring is found. This project is a collaboration with Tom Kehn.

Training: the Basic Question

Training: the Basic Question, 2000, video, color, sound, total running time 1 minutes and 46 seconds

Training: the Basic Question is a distillation of an entire informational video series created by the McDonald's corporation to regiment proper workplace etiquette and maximize production. The series has been edited, compressed, and restructured so that the logical points and authority from the original message have been transformed into an incoherent, rambling series of half completed sentences and uncomfortable silences. The video, whose purpose was to describe efficient communication techniques, is now ultimately incapable of following through on its own suggestions. Directives have been meticulously excised from the video leaving behind a pervading sense of confusion, including a number of workers who seem to have developed an uneasy relationship with their primary product, meat. Numerous images of individuals obsessively attending to and handling meat in Training: the Basic Question generate a connection between employee and product that borders on fetishistic. This project is a collaboration with Tom Kehn.

Air Bud: Golden Receiver

Air Bud: Golden Receiver, 1999, video, color, sound, total running time 4 minutes and 43 seconds

Air Bud: Golden Receiver is a series of short, absurd video loops generated from footage mined from a Disney film about a golden retriever who can play football. After a shocking first viewing it seemed that the film was 100% generically commercial and devoid of any notable footage whatsoever; nevertheless, after numerous additional and more painstaking examinations a substantial number of salvageable 1–2 second fragments were located scattered throughout the 90 minute cliche. One would not imagine that a Disney project with a G rating would contain such disturbing and lewd imagery, yet exceptionally distressing scenes are all latent in the formulaic original if the film is carefully scrutinized. This project is a collaboration with Tom Kehn.