The Sound Of A Finished Kiss

One day, I bought a small lot of old Super 8 home movies for 15 bucks off eBay. Projected on my wall, I was struck by how many of the reels consisted of a random family's summer vacation footage. It felt slightly perverse to bear witness to the depth of a stranger's memories, and as I began wondering why they ended up for sale online, I felt a creeping obligation to destroy these images. Drown is what resulted from that endeavor.

Footage amassed from a randomly chosen assortment of Chinese movie DVDs sold at a curbside stand on Grand Street near my old apartment was used to construct a three part reflection on the stages leading up to, and immediately following the end of, a romantic relationship: longing, loss, and acceptance respectively.

Edited entirely using on-board VCR controls (fast-forward, rewind, pause, play), this video uses material culled from a trance music video and a car factory documentary, set to a remix of a remix of Toto's Africa. The cyclical, inhuman machinery of a factory, repetitive and heavily structured commercialized music, and the cyclical degradation and inevitable destruction of image and meaning under capitalism. An experiment in low quality.

Drunkenly running an old skateboarding VHS tape through my video synth, violently messing around with the FM radio dial. Without a tripod, the camera drifts around aimlessly, like me after a couple rounds.

Super 8mm portrait of the Flaybrick Hill Cemetery in Birkenhead, England, where some of my ancestors were buried. Part tribute to those I could never know and part intimate survey of the grounds in which they rest.