Projecting the Sky So It can See Itself

Digital video projection treated and manipulated in realtime during course of event.

For the final night of my residency at McColl Center for Visual Art I temporarily transformed the exterior of the building to reflect my experience on the interior.  The videos are collections of imagery of clouds viewed through the window of my studio at the McColl center. During the course of my 3 month residency, several times a week at 3pm I would place my camera on a tripod and point it out the window and let it record until the memory was full. The resulting videos were then sped up 1000-2000 times and mixed together in a live video projection on the arts center for the closing night of the residency.  Initially I was just seduced by the view  of the sky from my studio, since this is the first time I have had a workspace with windows, and found myself gazing with wonder at the horizon beyond. I particularly loved how at moments I could see cars rushing by at 70 miles an hour while clouds drifted slowly above.  I also thought it would be nice, in a poetic sense, to let the sky gaze upon itself since I so often gazed at it. A final thought about my hopes for this piece is that I just wanted to share with an audience the sheer joy to be found in letting the mind wander and watch a cloud just pass out of view.  As a special thank you to those in attendance video of the audience arriving through out the night was later mixed in with the cloud projections for audience members to see themselves become a part of this piece.

Video

This work could not have been fully realized without the support of the McColl Center for Visual art and it’s volunteers and especially not without the generous support of projectionist Alex Rosen, whose equipment and technical know-how facilitated the realization of this work.