FAMILY PLOT // dual screen video, 7 automated music boxes, electronics, voice-over (2013, 25 minutes)
TRAILER, 2' (for a full registration, see below)
Family Plot is a 25-minute work for dual screen video, automated music boxes, voice-over and electronics. The piece builds a narrative out of the process of trying to remember something – an old home movie – and blends documentary material of a personal nature with elements of fiction and abstraction. It takes a look at our efforts to control the technologies we've come to rely on to preserve our memories for us.
The video material in this piece consists of 8mm footage of my mother from the 1960s, and a low quality digital recording of two men (one being my father and the other a former boyfriend of my mother’s) attempting to play that same 8mm movie, after my mother's death, on a projector that refuses to function properly. These two videos are shown simultaneously on two screens, creating a sort of mise en abyme effect, with one image repeated inside the other.
The original 8mm footage is broken down and completely reconstructed, extending it to about 25 minutes. This process is guided by a voice-over of the two men trying to remember and describe the movie from memory, slowly progressing through it, continuously omitting things, making mistakes, retracing their steps, correcting and rephrasing themselves. On the second screen we watch the men’s growing frustration as they struggle to get the projector to work and unlock the film from its ‘technological cage’. There are moments when they seem to get a grip on the movie, and the 8mm footage on the first screen is suddenly reduced to an object, both screens showing the same material as it is being handled by their hands. As the piece progresses and we see more and more of the original 8mm film, slowly the thinnest contours emerge of a story that seems to vaguely refer to the men themselves and their relationship to the woman in the picture.
AUTOMATED MUSIC BOXES, 0'44'' clip
During a live performance of the piece, there is also a small installation of seven automated music boxes on stage. These mechanical instruments are driven by little LEGO motors, controlled by a computer running Max/MSP, and synchronized to the videos via MIDI. Each music box is looping a single note, producing a fast tremolo, and all of them work together as a kind of organ to make chords. The looping strips of paper utilized by the music boxes also function as a visual metaphor of what’s happening on screen. The sounds of the music boxes are amplified with pick-ups and mixed in with an electronic soundtrack coming from speakers.
FULL REGISTRATION, 25'