quiet american

30fpd: a day, a week, a year
On January 8, 2003, I began making a movie of my life, one second at a time. I carry a small digital camera with me everywhere I go. I document everything I encounter: the banal, the sublime, the beautiful, the stultifying, the grotesque, the titilating, the tedious, the familiar. Every day — so far without fail — I take at least thirty digital pictures. From each day's pictures, I select thirty which in consecutive order well-document the day; these become exactly one second of film at 30fps. For each year, the movie grows by six minutes; in ten years, I will have almost exactly an hour to show for my life. WIth as much honesty, attention, and disclipline as I have I am trying to document what is visible in my life. The public debut of this project was in installation form in February 2005 at New York's Synchronicity Space in T-minus 2005, a show of media work exploring the passage of time through time-lapse and related processes. It's also been shown as a video with other experimental films.		marincello unsoundwalk rodeo soundial handpans and the hang as paredes têm ouvidos flostam resonance #1 a day, a week, a year field effects concert series annapurna: memories in sound quiet, please serendipity machines kolam urban cycles other recordings
February 9, 2003, two days after I was doored and broke my collarbone. My hospital ID bracelet was still on when I woke up past noon.
The film — currently about forty-five minutes long — has some of the properties I hoped it might. At 30fps, images flash by so quickly that there is no hope of seeing them all. It is impossible to interpret them or construct a coherent narrative, though patterns present themslves: my compositional ticks are maddeningly apparent, for example. Yet individual images continually emerge clearly: a face, a word, a place, a landscape... but even as each of these is identified and named, another and then another again is supplanting it, relentlessly. This is a film with many subjects, all filtered through my own habits and sensibility. One of them is process: the process of its making, of course; but also the processes of perception and cognition; the process of memory. One is my wife, whose beauty and many moods it captures, after all these years, only in part. And now brightest of all shines my daughter Ember, who was born one month (thirty-odd seconds) beyond the exact midpoint of the movie. Long ago I considered naming the resultant movie Mnemosyne, after the spring of memory: as it will be a media object not unlike that river, full and fast moving and perilous. (It is quicksilver, and will never give up more than a fraction of itself.) Nowadays, I'm not so sure. At present I am averaging around 125 images a day. Those I shoot beyond the necessary thirty are archived; I hope that all may find other uses. Perhaps the sum of them will be compiled into a second film containing every single image I shoot. It may come as a surprise that I have not yet settled on a soundtrack. But I'm getting closer. To support this and my other projects, I am selling the days of my life. A 'day' is a set of digital 5x7 prints: each of the thirty images that document my life on a given day, from waking to sleep. Images are printed on high-quality paper, protected in glicene sleeves, and gathered in a protective cedar box and signed. Only one copy of each day is available. If you're interested in purchasing a day, write me to inquire about availability of specific dates and for current pricing. Note that some days document events not suitable for all viewers.