Excerpt from improvised A/V performance; Milwaukee Art Museum; Milwaukee, WI; August 2005
InBetween States was an improvised soundtrack for video performed at the Institute of Visual Art (2003) and Milwaukee Art Museum (2005). A live electronic score was sculpted out of sound elements pulled from vinyl, CDs, and digital sequencers, providing a counterpoint to a projection of nine video vignettes. Each vignette was sampled from a different Hollywood film that uses cross-fade transitions, a well-worn narrative technique that advances a movie’s plot by jumping from one place or time to another by blending one shot into another shot. In order to maintain a rapid narrative flow, a cross-fade might move the story five minutes or five years into the future.
With InBetween States, I was interested in isolating this moment in order to amplify the conceptual potential of the transition, the rift in time and space, the movement between worlds – public and private, interior and exterior, control and chaos. By looping the transitional moment – moving forward and backward over the cross-fade at an increasing rate – the original linear narrative is eliminated, replaced by a thematic resolution based on repetition. With each iteration, the space within the filmic construct becomes more familiar and yet more unreal. The loop-based structure of both the video and improvised soundtrack creates a meditative space that transforms the intent of the source material into a composite of patterns revealed.
