Sunday Morning (Lucid Somatomancy)

What do memories look like? How does the visual technology that we are accustomed to effect the way our memories are recalled? Can the true feeling of a moment be captured, preserved in exactitude, or transmitted through common contemporary methods of visual representation?

Technologies may become outmoded, but hardly ever obsolete; much like neural pathways, which can cross, misfire, and degrade, but remain intact almost indefinitely. Reaching back and forward in time, I am using outdated visual technology to create a metaphor for how my memories might be recalled many years from now. Being a child of the 90s, I am most likely part of the last generation that remembers a world that had not yet been inundated by high-quality, non-stop, digital imagery. By transferring a very personal moment to VHS, I use the aesthetic of the past to age and degrade the memories I am making today. The obfuscation of the image on the VHS tape is interpreting an intimate moment the way it is captured in my mind's eye and slowly lost and distorted over time. The contradiction of the simultaneous frailty and vividness of memory, and the way it transforms moments into personal histories, is explored through the combination of a medium and moment that both have an especially endearing quality. This series is also an ode to Brian Eno’s ‘Thursday Morning’ video portraits. Recalling and inverting his process of recording portraits on analog film then editing them with digital technology, I am exploring my inspirations through my ability to recreate and re-interpret using a similar combination of technologies. The audio and video are slowed to the point of abstraction to invoke the feeling of reliving a moment.

For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.
-Brian Eno

Sunday Morning (Lucent Somatomancy) from C. Alex Clark on Vimeo.

VHS Video, Tube Televisions, VCRs
Audio: 'Sunday Morning' by Nico, slowed x10

Made with the gracious help of Nouel Riel; soul, body, and mind.

C Alex Clark © 2014

C ALEX CLARK