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.

Orphan

Orphan, 2001, total running time 44 minutes and 17 seconds

Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless. – Thomas Edison

Orphan is a 44 minute, 17 second sound piece that took one year to create. For the first six months of the project, every week samples were randomly extracted from the New York region airwaves. The material gathered, which ran the gamut from rash cream commercials to "blazin’ hip hop," was the raw material upon which a series of experiments were to be conducted. The intention of the research was to ascertain if the authoritative language and tone of voice utilized on commercial radio could be broken down and distilled into an essence. Once the soon to be obsolete products were edited out and the remaining absences filled, it only remained to organize the residue into a presentable form.

Could the new hybrid function in an assertive manner like the parental source promotions, however with the end goal of selling absolutely nothing? The answer we have found, after much trial and error, is a swaggering and secure yes – the poised language of marketing can be mined and forced to function on new terms, yet with a certain number new and unpleasant side effects coming to the forefront.

Genetic tampering, even with seemingly simple Am/Fm radio source material, is messy business with unpredictable results. Your engineered product may look fine now, only to dissolve before your eyes moments later. Instability becomes the norm and that’s the risk of advancing evolution. It might seem difficult at first listening to our alpha voice die – it’s always hard to loose a leader – however, there are few pleasures greater for a victim of commercial over–saturation than witnessing power itself stuttering and spurting, untethered by sales objectives, eventually degenerating into nonsensical tongues. Think of Orphan as something reclaiming territory by generating a waste of time. This project is a collaboration with Tom Kehn.

The Swimmer

The Swimmer, 2001, c-print mounted to Sintra and Plexiglas, h 48.403” x w 36.4” (bottom image: film still of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz from Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now)