Cleaving In Too

[film] featuring Deserts by Edgard Varèse

(two-channel video; run time 27:11)

I.

Cartoon panther wakes up, dawning awareness of the bright, friendly colors that surround them; the body is a color too. Something is not right. Half of them is gone, the half that animates, that makes everything—even the bad stuff—seem OK. And that part has been replaced, an innovation that becomes increasingly disturbing. Maybe if they start moving things will re-form, wake from the dream.

II.

Trees live here too. The palms lose specificity, becomes a theme, a constant presence, an icon. Two points of time are indicated by color (duration as a volumetric quantity between these points). Time is unstable, cycling from one side to the other following the percussive cue of the music. Color is the sky.

III.

Objects in the sky. Climax, then rupture—a new beginning. Put the music back in front. Duration of break is metered as color washes across text.

IV.

A circle of light sweeps across the frame. Light parallels sound as information emerges from darkness/silence. This light reveals proximity, texture, and always also the binding edge of the frame.

V.

Fire rages beside itself, separated by the ready identification of sources, both revealed by their respective brands (acronym and celebrity). A horizon between the images forms and then breaks. The cinematic image becomes a screen behind which a crowd completes a new horizon line. Flames fracture into a thousand hand-held screens.

VI.

The tape runs backwards. Waves tickle the edge of the screen, now single (double wide.) The imagined sound of the water merges with groaning technical distortion. The screen flickers, seam cracks then mends. The wave creeps up the frame, a horizontal break in a field of soft blue.

VII.

Back to the beginning; colors liberated from the rule of the beat, cutting a lackadaisical dissonance until image fades.