desert code

Desert Code

4-Channel Digital Video. 5:29 minutes. 4:3 (each channel). 2008

Desert Code was conceived and exhibited as a 4-channel video installation, with each of the four videos projected onto separate walls in a square room. Completely surrounding the viewer, the animation begins with silent footage of a desert landscape looking in all four directions, giving the viewer the impression of standing alone in a vast and silent landscape. Slowly, a tangled network of animated morphing shapes grows over the scene, eventually covering it up completely. Each shape contains video footage of medically related imagery gathered from dozens of television programs, films, Youtube videos and medical animations. As they cover over the screen a chorus of voices, sounds and background music raise to a fever pitch. After a dramatic pause, the whole process reverses itself until the four silent views return into view. Like a psychological shock wave, this work traces an emotional rise and fall from a state of calm and silence to extreme tension and anxiety and back again.