| My father used to play Keystone Cop
super-8 films backward on family movie night. When I went to art school, I convinced him
to loan me his early-model Bell & Howell camera. I got really into the mechanics of
filmmaking and was instantly consumed with the production of my own hand-drawn, collogued,
and special effectized, stop-action animated shorts - kitchen table dioramas that took up
to 17-hours to shoot. Monty
Python’s Flying Circus animations by Terry Gilliam and film animations like A
Trip to the Moon / Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902) by George Melies blew my mind. I
marveled over the simplicity and magic of light blinking on a screen, perhaps best
represented in movies like Wargames(1983). I was similarly attracted to
structuralist films and interactive computer animation.
The hopes and fears of the future of a
nation were being provoked by a symphony of blinking and strobing lights and frame rates.
A tawdry effect that dazzles and invokes fear among the masses.
I made Info-receptor at a time when aspects
of my life began to shift from analog to digital. There was a lot of hype around metaphors
like ‘information superhighway’ - which most of us still had yet to experience
in 1994, including myself. The term ‘digital revolution’ had not been coined
although there were a lot of concerns around notion of authorship and loss of identity
beginning to surface.
Info-receptor is a flashy, low-budget,
dim-witted, infomercial with a built-in sense of irony. I shot half on videotape and half
on film, animating not only the subject but also dramatizing the slogging shift from
analog to digital, sugar-coated with enthusiasm and ambivalence. |
