In the Air Tonight

A text, some images, and an unstable arrangement of durations to which one can devote a fluctuating form of attention.

Silvesterchlausen is a mysterious tradition that takes place every New Year’s Eve in Switzerland’s Appenzell, the most conservative part of the country. Groups of six men dress in ornate costumes and engage in wordless, polyphonic yodeling and rhythmic bell clanging. The ritual has been performed for at least 500 years, but nobody knows how or why it began.

A semi-biographical fiction inspired by his father’s work at one of Kodak’s first processing labs, Wilson’s speculative gloss on the evolution of photochemical science entwines multiple perspectives and personas. Co-written by James N. Kienitz Wilkins, Kodak imagines a dialogue between a blind, mentally unstable former film technician and George Eastman himself, recordings of whom play out over a procession of photographs, home video footage, vintage Kodak ads, and animations.

The Uncertainty Seminars abstract corporate aesthetics across several sections, conflating modes of address from avant-garde cinema and video art with contemporary therapeutic and motivational techniques. The techniques involved address forms of uncertainty in personal, professional, and civil life.

An unhoused character impersonator on Los Angeles’ Hollywood Boulevard seeks connection to the world through radical, Hollywood-oriented conspiracy theories that they consume by way of a Bluetooth headset soldered into the helmet of their storm-trooper-like costume.

In 2010 the physicist Aaron O’Connell and his colleagues proved that a strip of metal, visible to the naked human eye, can both oscillate and not oscillate at the same time. Essentially this means that objects, whatever their size, can be in two places at once. From here it starts to seem like existing means being inconsistent, while dying means becoming consistent.

What happens inside a Poké Ball with space and time? This is one of several questions we face in a tale told in amphetamine-fuelled voice-over. The repeated act of zooming into a multi-purpose residential skyscraper breaks open modern family domestics to reveal increasingly bizarre tableaux. A papier-mâché Pikachu stares ahead, knowing all the answers.

The first section employs a 75mm to 1500mm Canon telephoto lens developed for wildlife cinematography. This uncannily prolonged zoom moves from a cityscape view to details on a single balcony of Chicago's Marina City. The second section employs 8K photorealistic computer generated materials commonly used in architectural renders, video games, and the motion picture industry. The third section was procedurally generated using fractal software developed by the computer engineer Code Parade. Wilson worked with Code Parade to customize his programme towards heightened cinematic realism and render what look like infinite synthetic 3D landscapes constructed for something other than the human body.

Andrew Norman Wilson announces the streaming deal that he signed with Metrograph at home.

Animated loop by Andrew Norman Wilson.

Ode to Seekers 2012 is an infinite loop that celebrates the existence of mosquitoes, syringes and oil derricks via a translation of the formal techniques of John Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn from printed text to video.