Imprint and Playback: Performance and Artist Talk

Drawing on John Berger’s conception of home as an intersection of two kinds of time: one, made up of our horizontal movement upon the planet, and the other, our connection to the ancestral time of the graveyard—Vertical Time. Horizontal Traffic uses animation and performance to upend and transmit shifting perceptions of home through creating architectural relationships between memory, time, and the body.

Authored in the Max/MSP/Jitter programming language, the underlying code drives cuts, frame rates, textual inclusions, as well as pixel and sonic processing in real time. The result is a shifting composition of image and sound that operates along the full chain of A/V experience as it continually undermines its own coherence, refusing narrative certainty, visual fixity, or temporal closure. The discernible imagery from the reworked source material acknowledges manifestations of the prairie in American media as a site of colonial, nationalist, and capitalist reverie while simultaneously calling into question the mediation that substantiates these depictions. What emerges through sustained viewing is not a narrative but a condition, one in which contemporary media reveals itself as a live, volatile sensorial system whose meanings are always provisional, contingent, and materially produced.