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Transistor Yantras is a transformation of the initially perceived randomness and noise from television static by mirroring and repetition. Much like traditional yantras —mystical diagrams similar to mandalas— the geometric repetition of these images act as electronically generated ritual charms. The strobing of the images inherent to the flickering television screen is slowed to produce a constant frequency near 10 pulses per second, turning the screen into a hypnagogic device —based on Brion Gysin's Dreamachine. The patterning and flickering of the screen provides a site for trance induced meditation with the eyes open, and hallucinatory activation with the eyes closed.




The video was installed on a classic 1970's tube television as part of a Meow Wolf Collective group show in 2016, Santa Fe NM.


C Alex Clark © 2016

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 Reaching back and forward in time, I am using outdated visual technology to create a metaphor for how my memories might be recalled many years from now.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

Phantom Somatomancy


Small pieces slowly come into focus, tacitly converging into a unified whole, but remaining individual in their manifestation. Invisible creases discovered by a glance, denoting both past and future. A moment clinging to infinite recollection, intimate and scrupulous.

Recreating the compilation of memories that we gather of people we have fondness for, through recording the tenuous moments that collect in our minds, we make portraits of their configurations in meager proportions. Contemplating the minuscule lines of the corpus, their origin and their destiny, traps them in an unrelenting loop on the membranes of perception.




What an insubstantial sliver of mitigated head space we spare for each lover, friend, or foe.

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

C Alex Clark © 2013
Running on Cargo