Tempest 81

Original film shot October 2013. I'm going to let it speak for itself.

Here is a film that my partner and I made for our first studio project of the year.

The site is the old Erie Canal trail park.


Shot and edited September 2013.

(I'm secretly proud because it's my first time using film as a medium)

Play the Blood, Sea the Music

You glance down at your journal. Something seems to be sliding across the page, slimy and dirty and depositing its blackness across the aged yellow finish of the surface. The page undulates with each release of ink from the metal nib on what used to be organic matter, and at times the liquid glistens as it catches the light of the afternoon sun, pretending to be something that lives and breathes as you do. The light reflecting off the page is an annoying cloudy glare, so much that you narrow your eyes like an angry cat. As your eyes slowly adjust, your mind becomes clearer and more active. Thoughts jump around and you relentlessly pursue them with your hand, a setup for invariable failure. And it's frustrating that the itching feeling inside of your lung cavity is like bubbling hot steam, so volatile that it cannot exist in its true form outside the container of your body. The original message is filtered through the brain, the only existing connection with which you navigate the external world. Even then, the brain is filtered by the hand, which cannot even act at half the speed that the brain operates with. Up, down, loop, scribble, dot, lift, press, release. It can do these simple modular motions in complex ways, but these modular motions cannot themselves evolve in complexity. Since the first day you learned to recite the alphabet, a baseline has been etched into the way you think, and the way you subsequently live according to your thoughts.

Filters on filters on filters.

Language has become so simplified and reductive that you cannot convey anything that is outside of the normal realm of expression. What is “politically correct” speech? If you choose to speak in only generalities, omitting 90% of the English language tinted with history that invariably offends someone, what message are you actually delivering? The act of giving a speech does not entail the deliverance of the message. After you apply copious amounts of self-editing, the original expressions that have rung clear in your mind is spewed out as an inglorious vomit of clichés. Because everything has a precedent, it is difficult for those less-disciplined to refrain from plagiarism, because you have no faith in your originality. You will always be a watered down version of that which has existed prior.

With each stroke of the pen, you lift and pause, creating a junction that has to be abridged. Like an animation, you make up for the lack of coherence between each still frame by manipulating speed--by seeing dots appear before you so quickly they become a line--by understanding words faster and faster until they become sentences and paragraphs and essays. Deep down inside, you know that the human system of comprehension will always be flawed. Normally you skip over the holes in logic in order to stay at peace with those around you, but at times the fragility of the constructed system nags at your instincts, raising emotions that are neither explained nor forgiving. The lack of control you have over yourself makes you realize that maybe others are treading in the same watery grave as you, that uniformity creates only falsehoods. You don't even know what you don't even know and you look to new media as the beacon of hope in guiding original experience, except you often forget that the people creating these media, are, like you, swimming in a closed universe. They have been swimming all their lives and cannot be expected to know what is outside of the system because they are trapped within. What then, of your fervor? Will it, someday or somehow, take you somewhere better than the dreary wet concrete you planted yourself on today? Will it fly the text off the page and imprint it in a way that has never been done before?

Pause. Think. Speak. Silence.