A meditation on grief and spectacle, mourning and media; what it takes to be lifted up and the decisions that bring us down.
This Particular Material came from obsessive searches online, in the library and on YouTube for videos from the Challenger and Columbia disasters. What I found in both cases was a massive failure of communication and leadership. The disasters lead to Presidential commissions through which the truth was uncovered at the 11th hour, against the odds of institutional obstruction. I sampled and looped a moment of peaceful anxiety from the song "Pax: Communion" from Leonard Bernstein's Mass (1971). The phrase is a repetitious flute—tenuous, frail, but determined—followed by unresolved arpeggios, begging a question.
The found video is sourced from public media archives. This meditation allowed me to practice counterpoint in video: using darkness to punctuate moving image and silence to indicate tone. The poem I have constructed is distilled through hours of processing and observing public media.
This Particular Material
2014
Found video, "Pax: Communion" by Leonard Bersntein
Variable, 1920 x 1080 px