Shadows Ghosts, Drifting in Cochin

Shot in Cochin in 2015 on the ferry going to the Cochin Biennale. The heat of the city made a for a tense atmosphere hinting at volotiliy hidden just bellow the surface of sweating skin. Something was not quite right within. Shadows and ghosts, drifting in the stream, a waterway to the art town beyond, 8 degrees from the horizon.

Lockdown Cities

Video made with wzrd.ai Song composed by Susie Green with elements made by Margaret Schedel, Sophia Sun, Ria Rajan and Sofy Yuditskaya. This is a city that doesn’t exist, a dream of stock images fed to a neural network, hidden away inside our apartments, we likewise lived in a city of the mind during the Lockdown of 2020.

Brooklyn Utopias

…Spring to Crystalline Life Along the Gowanus Canal.

A future-past scrapbook style move of Imagined Utopias created by editing found footage, and using Disco Diffusion, Antaphasia, and TextToImage AIs. A form of promptism playing with conceptual notions of the non-place that is Gowanus, and New York in general, a city constantly shifting, a city held only in our dreams and our collective memory on the great media archive that is the internet, soon to be left by for only the bots to see and the electric winds to digest.
The soundtrack, a recording of a jam session variously manipulated in software from Drummer's Grove speaks to another Brooklyn Utopia, one of time and shared rhythm, created by a Caribbean diaspora and all travelers crossing the earth through time and space to that stopping point. The only language needed to enter the circle being a sense of the beat. One of the last drummers groves in NY City, made official by the parks department, impervious to the noise complaints that drive the others out.
But we have already long held noise to simply be that which we cannot understand, like the researchers trying to map the universe, who successively stripped noise from their signal, only to realize the noise was dancing for them the very map they were looking for, it is the cosmic radiation left behind by the big bang.
That noise is present also in the texture from which the AIs guided by humans build their dream, slowly applying visual bandpass filters to clusters of pixels that we interpret as a vision of utopic Gowanus, such as it is, was, will be, and never will be. The programming of their logic created by humanities dream to optimize even sometimes at the cost of ourselves.

Bangalore is a Promised Heaven

Made at Walkin Studios in Bangalore in Jan 2020. Part of this series of videos concerning cities. They are aleatoric, magical, dreams of the cities they are shot in, some ending in a phrase that exemplifies the cities the videos are about chanted by people that live in them. The audio is field recording shot in Bangalore, a tech city shot thru analog techniques, zooming around town.

New York City is a Demon God

A beautiful video I made long ago with original sound recorded around NYC, which is, a Demon God.

Trip to the Holocenter

My morning commute from May 25 2016-Aug 1 2016 during my residency at Holocenter NYC that summer. Transition from urban to nature, from digital to analog. This video is filmed through a variety of prisms, crystal lenses, and diffraction gratings allowing the light to become holographic before it hits the 2 dimensional surface of my camera’s CCD. The video is edited with multiple and simultaneous perspectives in mind creating a holographic vignette of the commute experience.

Bombay Beach Dream

Rolling around Bombay Beach, recording the sounds and images I have found there.
This was my lockdown of 2020.

Spectacle

The video from my show at Spectacle Theater, with a little bit of the original white twinklies thrown in. Enjoy! Assembled from VJ footage since the inception of my collection, an audio recording made in Brighton Beach Brooklyn in 2007 as well as some music from Pan Sonic's Ma, this is an ode to New York, the end of things, and the human condition.
The sounds from Brighton Beach are so close to my childhood, the comfort of being surrounded by my people, immigrants from the Soviet diaspora talking on their phones, calling out to their children, as I transition to living more and more integrated with Americans that perfect moment was lost to the flow of time, but captured here briefly, saturated with nostalgia.