video art :: returning home 2025
videos from start of medical leave / return home
Both of these videos are products of the start of my, I guess, recovery process of trying to become a person again after coming back from grad school. Precisely, it is that I had to come back early due to the way that burnout and school stuff was negatively effecting my health. Specifically, these videos emerged from when I was going on daily walks around some of the neighborhoods near my parent's house. I tried exploring different areas every day because I only knew like the same four or five roads I used to get places. I found comfort in trying to look at places that both I hadn't seen and which I felt other people weren't looking at either. This is why I am often looking at the sky or up at the trees overhead when I am walking around outside. I think nature (or what you would call it) is so enrapturing -- the vitality that churns and churns, passing from one body to another in an endless continuum.
I think "perambulating, looking up to something" is also somewhat informed by that Patricia Taxxon had semi-recently put out her accompanying "Ten Skies" album to the film of the same name. I haven't listened to the album or seen the film, but I have a sense enough as to what these are about. I'm still not in a place, unfortunately, where I am able to volitionally watch movies is part of that reason. During the three days I was making this video I wrote in my notes that I felt like I was kind of an inverse Patricia Taxxon -- making images of the sky (and trees) for to accompany an album; unlike Taxxon, though, I considered myself a coward for not committing to visualize the full album. I'm chill with where I am now, though. There are a couple of things I would change probably, but overall I think it turned out well. The title wasn't planned initially but I think it's fitting.
The look of "perambulating, looking up to something" was informed by that I finally started wearing sunglasses in my day-to-day life to somewhat remedy the extreme visual strain I've lived with all my life. The glasses I was wearing at this time had a reddish/orange/brown tint to them. I shot some of the scenes by holding my glasses in front of my camera lens, while others I tried to match the effect in post (mainly for footage shot before I realized I could "bake in" a solution). That being said, the holding my glasses in front of the camera lens was not a perfect solution, as it meant I was once again not able to see the world outside very well (having to squint and distort my fact into a garrish yawn to make things out). This was also before I figured out how to play music in my headphones concurrent to recording things, so the filming is a bit more fast paced than it maybe would have otherwise been and doesn't always sync up perfectly to the lyrics (I did my best by having my version of the songs playing in my head while I was filming, but I didn't always remember each song fully and I would also often loop or repeat sections). I knew where I wanted to start, and as the project went on, I had more and more ideas about how I could continue, so finding a place to stop that would maintain the concision and still make sense was a bit tricky. I think I found somewhat of a compromise in the end. I was still in my "I need to make use of as much of the footage I filmed as possible" mindset, so some of the shots end up being somewhat forced, and I don't know that the ending is tied up as neatly as it could be.
As for "decapitation. (I Found Out There's a Park With a Swing Set Within Walking Distance of Where I Live!)", this video emerged from a couple of places. As I said in the first paragraph, I was on a mission to explore as much of the unseen areas of the surrounding areas as possible. The first motivating force behind this video is that this mission yielded a genuine breakthrough (what the parenthetical title explicates). I have always loved swinging, but I had never (thought I) lived within walking distance to a swing set, such to justify going there often. I always would use the swing when I went to a park that had one (when I was younger and now too), but the parks I was nearest didn't always have swings -- or so I thought! As I was going down a dead end, I uncovered that, lo and behold, through the woods and across a little crick, here was a swing set within walking distance of my parent's house this whole time! Yea! I was so excited by the discovery and I had already been looking for another subject to make into a video (after recording trees and stuff for "perambulating, looking up to something"), so I became deadset on somehow making a video out of this newfound treasure. Despite my excitement, I couldn't figure out a good inroad to approaching the subject for a while. I was too in my head about how excited I was that it was a swing that I could swing on that I had trouble stepping back and coming up with other, novel ways to visualize it. I'm not in love with what I ended up on here, but it let me advance some other ideas I had been percolating, so, eh, I guess it's good enough. (I would continue to go to this park every day for the next several months; in that time, I found other things to film that left me with greater satisfaction -- these scenes have populated most of my videos since).
The second influencing force was that I had been thinking a lot about analog horror at this time and was trying to crystallize my thoughts into writing and other art forms. I won't regrugitate that journey here, as you can find it illustrated in enough detail in my essay on the topic ("post #17: The decapitated head of analog horror"), but the long and the short of it is that this is where the formal style comes from and where the non-parenthetical title comes from ("decapitation." -- this is, in my opinion, one of the core things analog horror is about).
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