Atmospheres & Accidental Ghosts is an episodic, multi-channel video and sound installation, which randomly reconfigures and activates a perpetually shifting selection of media drawn from the artists’ work and obsessions. Relying on chance and coincidence, this at times unruly and unpredictable piece generates elliptical narratives and enigmatic visual juxtapositions, as the computer continually scans for something elusive, scrambling restlessly through data in an attempt to search for patterns or meaning. Upturned sinking ships, flashes of color and light, shuffling playing cards, a dancer’s looming face, fragments of text, and spectral mirages meld, collide, and shimmer, in a ghostly aura of moving image montage.
Atmospheres & Accidental Ghosts is an open-ended, self-generating work, which is controlled through an interactive, programming software called Isadora. In this piece, the software is programmed to randomly create sequences of moving images by shuffling through an assortment of our past and current projects. At arbitrary intervals, this shuffling lands on a pair of images, which the software recognizes as a match. As soon as these connected images play out, the computer once again cascades back into a restless shuffle, moving and morphing from one incarnation to the next, from moments of peaceful serenity to raucous energy. In this twin pairing of images, there is a flowing forward and backward at the same time with no clear beginning or end. Images repeat, synchronize and then just as easily fall apart and disperse, striking a balance between separation and convergence, simplicity and complexity.
Each iteration of Atmospheres & Accidental Ghosts is entirely unique and mutable.
This work sample contains documentation of the work as installed at the New York Electronic Arts Festival on Governor’s Island (2015) and the Brooklyn Public Library as part of the BEAT Festival in 2012. It also inclues a short, two-channel mock-up of the work itself.
Atmospheres & Accidental Ghosts is made possible in part by the Media Arts Assistance Fund facilitated by Wave Farm through a Regrant Partnership with NYSCA Electronic Media/Film.