Film as archive; from still to moving
Making videos is new to me. It is a way to bring together music and image, a form of curation using fragments I, or others, have captured on my phone or computer and that I later rediscover. The process is like making a collage from my personal archive, digging up material that I hadn't found any reason to expose in the past, but that I also haven't decided to erase. I think it exposes the emergence of new relationships made from connecting the past to the present.
The music comes from a store of home recordings and phone recordings that I have accumulated over time. I select pieces because they match the duration, tone, or rhythm of a video, and the pairing mutually enhances their value. Like remembering the feeling you had when you took the video, usually some combination of intrigue and joy, and trying to find the precise nuance of that feeling in sound.
The photos and videos I take are captured spontaneously. Sometimes I film videos that are already playing on another screen or my computer, recording an image a second time. The resulting document is not coming from a primary source but from a reference, a situation of watching. This becomes a way of documenting the experience of seeing something again: something I may have forgotten, now encountered differently.
I am drawn to unstable framings, images that drift or tilt. They suggest a kind of urgency, a form of attention tied to the body of the person filming which is outside the frame, inattentive to the camera. This method also reveals the material conditions of viewing: reflections, glitches, flashes of light, dust, and traces of touch on the screen.
This feels honest to me. It is what an archive is like, handled and imperfect, though chosen, partially obscured, sometimes degraded, yet still cared for and enduring.