!AlertTrail, in collaboration with Eliza Fitzhugh,is a self-guided, multi-channel tour of petty crime in the City of Providence. Guided by a smartphone application, you are brought to over 20 specific points throughout Downtown and College Hill where a crime had taken place in the past year. Content for the tour include video reenactments, interviews, statistics and crime descriptions of the incident provided by RISD Public Safety, Brown University and SpotCrime. Each location is identified by a physical placard that both triggers the app and offers a secondary demarcation for pedestrian awareness and remembrance. 

!AlertTrail builds upon the convention of guided audiotours used in museums and tourist attractions. Additional media educates the viewer to a deeper understanding of context surrounding each point-of-interest. Typically, the rich narratives of historical events and people are celebrated and are built into a city’s identity. War monuments dot the city. Door placards mark historical homes of significant citizens. Cornerstones are etched with dates of establishment. These callouts acknowledge significance and value to the timeline of a city. They remind us to never forget and to never ignore. 

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s work with visual and aural narrative in specific location is a touchstone for !AlertTrail. Video augments reality with fabricated narratives as the viewer walks through an empty hall or ordinary path with headset on and camcorder in hand. The world is an empty frame, a stage for their performance to take place. 

AlertTrail uncovers the suppressed narratives of an ordinary street corner. It attempts to memorialize the ephemeral incidents of crime with iconic markers traditionally set aside for significant events. You are intentionally guided to the location and immersed in a physical experience, vulnerable to the story being told at the scene of the crime through an intimate memorial of sound and visual artifact. In essence, !AlertTrail is a tour that no one would want to take. It is in this irony that the narrative of crime and blights on a city’s reputation emerges. How long is long enough for a place to feel safe again? What degree of violence and suffering warrants a marble statue? How many stories have been erased and what qualifies those that are remembered? 

Show Reel, 2011

Ninth Hour is a video / audio montage experience, visualizing the death of Jesus Christ, commissioned by Highrock Church in Arlington, MA for their Good Friday service. The piece opens in darkness. Audio from ambient sound begins in an escalated rhythm of breathing. Music, played in reverse, underscores a montage of scenes of time-lapse views of cities and landscape. The video shifts into a contrasting visual language of black ink on white forming the final words of Jesus’ abandonment in his death. Stop-motion animates the violent events and dialogue in the final scene.

The death of Jesus has been told in innumerous ways in countless forms. Jesus films, paintings, storybooks, stained glass, and cartoons have all attempted to reenact the final scenes of Jesus’ death. Rather than illustrate the literal events, I abstracted the violence and emotional agony of the scene and translated them into soundscapes and metaphorical visuals. The intention of Ninth Hour is to give the congregation an immersive and evocative experience of isolation and fear, even within a room full of people.

The natural movement of ink and water draws upon similar visuals as Sehsucht’s Symphony in Red for the Konzerthaus Dortmund-Philharmonie in 2007 and Tröllback + Co.’s opening sequence for Pop Tech 2008. The audio work of Ann Hamilton’s Tower becomes a space for performance and physical immersion in reverberating sound.  

Ninth Hour uses multiple techniques to achieve the evocation of sight and sound of Jesus’ final moments. The historical images of blood and body, saints and sinners is reinterpreted into the present. Sounds and images of the contemporary city and abstract visuals of motion graphics invite you to consider the relevance of the crucifixion in contemporary society. 

A Brief History of Title Design, The Art of the Title. This one’s for you D-train.

Love is Gone, 2010

Love is Gone is a split-screen video montage of synchronized iconic romance movie clips, organized by one-line breakup stories collected from my peers. David Guetta’s hit single, Love is Gone, is the the underlying soundtrack and theme to the story in the video. The video runs at 2:50 minutes and is organized by a 3x3 grid of video and text. Video clips from classic romance movies include Casablanca (1942), Gone With the Wind (1949), Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Cleopatra (1963) , From Here to Eternity (1953), The Misfits (1961), It Happened One Night (1934), Shampoo (1975) and The Way We Were (1973).

The multiplicity of similar movement within each video clip emphasize the recursive tropes used in cinema’s romantic drama genre. From the introduction of the male and female leads to the first kiss and the breakdown of relationship, these patterns are made visible through my selective editing and simultaneous representation on screen. I also collected short, one-line breakup stories from my peers which later became the connective narrative thread throughout this video. 

Love is Gone builds upon other remix videos that appropriate content in order to emphasize a singular message. Christian Marclay’s Video Quartet choregraphs three videos featuring musical performances and instruments, creating his own score through the multi-screen viewing. Also, Roman Kroiter, Colin Low and Hugh O’Connor’s In The Labyrinth, for the Expo ‘67 Pavillion in Montreal features five split screens that combine into a singular mosaic. 

By disassociating the clips from their original context and aligning them within in the same picture plane, new relationships are formed from the juxtaposition of disparate pieces. This new narrative is reinforced by the typographic voice, a personal reminder of the reality behind these fictional films.  Love is Gone is a synthesis of music, language and moving images that captures a universal truth: Breaking up is hard to do. 

sleeping pattern, Uneventful Productions. Thanks Habibi!

Closed Captioning, Setting the Site

Closed Captioning is an installation of 3D typography in the environment, documented through video and edited to reveal a covert dialogue between administration, faculty and students at the Rhode Island School of Design. The captions were built out of foam core in a monospace typeface to mimic the form of television closed captioning and inserted into iconic spaces around RISD. Five captions were created and set in parentheses as inaudible noise in the scene: (President Talking), (Teachers Arguing), (Angry Shouting), (Students Whispering), (RISD Waiting). The final video is a back-and-forth conversation between the captions, edited in specific rhythm and volume to further enhance the escalating conflict of miscommunication on campus.

With the vote of no confidence by a majority of RISD faculty, the current administration, including the President and Provost, and the proposed strategic plan have been at a stand still. The distrust of change and breakdown in communication between both parties have created discord, trickling down to the students and percolating rumors and confusion based upon assumptions. At this current time, the strategic plan and more importantly, faculty-administration relationships are pending. Co-opting the visual language of video, the closed captions represent indiscernible audio that is seen but not heard in the ambient noise of the recorded environment. The pace of the dialogue escalates through the quick cuts between captions, concluding in the statement, (RISD Waiting).

The construction of this dialogue in physical space establishes a mise en scene as described by William Mitchell in Placing Words: “to arrange objects along a circulation route so that they appear in sequence like successive sentences in a narrative or scenes in a film. Here patterns of clustering and sequencing can become significant” (Mitchell, 6). Further, RISD itself becomes a distinct character in this dialogue, represented by the backdrop of campus scenes, or “public images,” as described by Kevin Lynch in The Image of the City. These common mental pictures shared amongst RISD students, teachers and administration are the common thread in the midst of disconnection and, consequently, the institution impacted the most through the ongoing conflict. 

This piece is not intended to offer solutions, but is merely a visual response to the current tension in the air. The work sets in motion a new way to document mixed messages in the interconnected web of RISD campus. 

Uneventful Productions is a video production company I created to document the ordinary stories of our day-to-day experiences.  It is a collection of videos, each at 1:30 minutes with footage from my peer’s routine event as well as voice-over narration from short interviews of each participant: 

On Permanent Loan /  Emily Sara Wilson
1,788 / Craig Wen
Swirl, Tap, Buff / I-Fang Cheng
The Human Experience / Jenny Wang
In Between Time / Marc Choi
Ordinary Beyond Ordinary / Sara Raffo
Side of a Waist / Jessica Greenfield
Sleeping Pattern / Salem Al-Qassimi

Traditionally, special event videographers are hired to capture significant events, with costly equipment and extensive post-production. By reversing expectations of this model, Uneventful Productions offers that same quality of documentation and post-production but to banal moments. Videotaping activities like vacuuming, riding an elevator, checking RSS feeds and napping allows the viewer privy to these intimate activities; to unearth meaning behind the mundane; to find permanence in impermenance. Personal narration offers further insight to each individual’s anectdotes and hidden quirks.

Uneventful Productions was inspired by other mediated platforms for exchanging personal stories. Storycorps by Local Projects created physical soundbooths for pairs of people to share and preserve their own stories in the Library of Congress. This American Life on Chicago Public Radio is a weekly public radio broadcast that interweaves true stories of everyday people based on a selected theme. Through the multiplicity of voices, a larger picture of the nation’s experience is revealed.

Each video is an extended snapshot of repetitive movements throughout a day. The elevator ride documented on Uneventful Productions is no different from the other hundred rides taken. However, by archiving this particular instance into video, they become iconic representations that memorialize an otherwise overlooked experience. These short documentaries are momentary instances but collectively weave into a rich narrative of the human experience — the everyday, uneventful stuff of life.