Benjamin Lord
Most of the material in Remote Sensing–Silent Disc is from someone else's abandoned project, a series of still exposures of a beach scene made on 35mm motion picture film. I found the film purely by chance, scratched and discolored, in the bottom of a cardboard box at the dump. I don't know where it was photographed, who made it, or why it was thrown out. At the time, I filed the film away for curiosity's sake but basically forgot about it. Years later, I reapproached it, partly as an act of preservation.
The shore is a zone of arrival and departure, of evolution, and of burial. The sequence of the shoreline images describes several natural cycles at once: the passage of a day, the lunar tides, and the annual seasons. Yet the jerking, glitchy rhythms of the stills, like those of an old TV weather-map, suggest a compromised transmission signal. Interposed between each sequence are photographs of a luminous blue glass disc, suggesting both a summation and a disturbance of these cycles.
Originally completed in 2002 for CD-ROM playback on a computer monitor, Remote Sensing–Silent Disc was remastered as a high definition video in 2008.
8 minutes. Edition of ten Blu-ray copies. $100 plus shipping. Email for availability.
(Note: the video is black for the first several seconds.)