Stepping on the Light

Stepping on the Light is part of a series of works exploring the creative potentials of extremely portable digital devices. This work was shot with the camcorder feature of a credit-card sized digital camera, and explores two extremes of video display scales, that of pocket video and large scale projection. The protagonist of this video is modeled on the notion of an avatar in a virtual space, only this avatar is wandering real space (downtown Chicago) in a semi-virtual environment (video footage). The duality of the layered image aims to illustrate this split-subjectivity of real and represented walker/avatar navigating in a not-quite-aimless fashion through the Cartesian grids of the urban matrix, a grid-space also redolent of game environments. Traditionally, Cartesian coordinates have aimed at Control, Predictability, and Accuracy in the modeling and manipulation of space. The approach of the protagonist in Stepping on the Light is to highlight the embodied and pleasurable aspects of navigation. The noise in the imagery, an effect of the technology of portable image capture, is reproduced in the soundtrack, which marries noise and video game soundscapes.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• experimental video
• Cartesian space