Artistic Research
Week 2023

I’ve never considered myself a particularly spiritual person. I was raised Catholic, but it served more to instill a misplaced sense of having always done something wrong. The closest I’ve come to actually feeling any profound mystical presence was borne not out of religious practice, but through media. The most transformative early memories were of film, TV, radio – sounds and images unfolding in time. Before I even had developed a sense of self, I was a clumsy body running my fingers over the static glass of the television set. It fed the house with daytime talk shows, blockbuster reruns and used car commercials. I soon started to imitate the voices and gestures playing out in front of me. Not long after that, I was recording that mimicry with my dad’s VHS camera and playing it back onto the same screen. It was a portal, one of many to appear. And as they grew, I grew with them – eventually coming back to moving images in adulthood as a profession and practice.

While I’ve long lost faith in a Catholic’s vision of the afterlife, I’ve lately been reflecting on two realms: that of the physical world which we all inhabit, and that of the media world. The latter is intangible, yet it coexists with ours in both time and space. The media world is a two-way mirror: we see ourselves reflected in it, while it can see itself reflected in us. And much like the microplastics absorbed within our bodies, it is internalized. Our present landscapes experience such a free-flowing torrent of mass media that our very psyches are seemingly fused with the sounds and images we consume. In this psychological headlock, they have the power to “manufacture” our collective and individual longings, anxieties and desires. What, then, are we feeding into this world, and what are we getting back as a result? The reason I pose these questions are twofold: I, like anybody with a screen, am exposed to these media landscapes. Secondly, I have earned my living by editing and producing them. 

It’s from this position that I was compelled to look back at how mass-media has both affected and reflected us, while exploring the construction of our “media spirit world”. Only over the course of the past two years could I begin teasing out new approaches for filmmaking through this frame, developing tools to properly address the sounds and images that face us. 

The InterContinental Hotel chain was founded right after the Second World War, at a point when there was great financial interest for US corporations to expand across the world. By the 1960s, it had exploded in popularity, becoming one of the first global luxury hotel chains. An interior designer named Neal Prince was brought in to develop the look of each hotel, making every corner of their ostentatious establishments as seductive as possible. For the Tahara’a Hotel in Tahiti, meticulously staged tableaus were photographed in order to promote a way of living. There, fantastical visions of western leisure grafted themselves onto the South Pacific.

The Cliff is a short film which began taking shape while researching advertisements for The InterContinental, a US resort chain that globally expanded in the 1960s.

A conjuring of distorted sensorial memories, The Cliff brings you into view of a lost hotel whose siren song rings out in the darkness. Through the roving eye of the lens, promotional images of a tropical island resort become an otherworldly medium, resurrecting a space of commercial luxury and western fantasies through the media that helped to sell it.

During the 1980s, watch advertisements regularly featured airplanes as a symbol of speed, precision, and adventure. These advertisements often portrayed pilots and other aviation professionals wearing sleek, sophisticated watches while at the controls of their aircraft. The goal was to create a sense of excitement and glamor around the product, suggesting that wearing the right watch could make the wearer feel like a daring adventurer – or a skilled pilot. This was particularly true for luxury brands, which often used airplanes as a way to position their watches as symbols of status and success. Ultimately, the use of airplanes in watch advertisements was a reflection of the era's fascination with technology, speed, and progress. 

Stress Eating Time developed during research into airplane-related cinema of the 1980s, and drawing a connection to that period’s neoliberal notions of technology, time and productivity. Through the archival media, I began to see the airplane as a tragic figure longing for escape, and something in which we can actually see ourselves reflected. Through this, a narrative emerged.

Crushed under the unbearable weight of time, an airplane has an existential crisis and hijacks itself. A recycling of cinema and advertising, Stress Eating Time explores the suspended space in the air as a zone between life and death, anxiety and calm, technology and spirituality.

After two years of research, I found myself reflecting on the life cycle of cinema, of all media we’re exposed to. What happens to the sounds and images we produce if we allow them to live eternally? In our age, popular media and digital ephemera can’t simply go to the grave like mortals of the physical world. Instead, they float in the ether before being copied, transferred, reused, re-contextualized and reincarnated as something new. I have tapped into a vast reservoir of existing footage and archival media – channeling the past from the present moment and linking disconnected sound and image.

As I worked with this mediumistic film practice, it occurred to me that all of my materials had been mediated by something other than myself. It's a tangible space, and a container in its own right. A real bridge between the physical and media world.

Corridor Blues, the third and final film (in development) of the series, examines the contemporary data center. These vast physical containers of the internet reveal a space of seemingly spiritual properties – one that forms a bridge between worlds. A greater reflection of our growing digital archive, the work explores media’s perpetual cycle of death and rebirth. It also begs the question:

Would a dying data center hallucinate the internet before passing on? Through a patchwork of 16mm, digital video and contemporary archival footage, Corridor Blues explores the lifecycle of popular media and the digital landscapes that facilitate it.