Phantom Loops
In collaboration with Amber Vistein
While knitting the VHS piece I allow myself to get bogged down by the medium’s history. It’s not something to be considered neutral, like steel or brick or yarn--it’s my own memories. I let myself get overtaken by it. The piece is a physical manifestation of crippling nostalgia. It’s this burden; I had been thinking of Piranesi’s prisons and their winding, inescapable staircases with false starts and paths leading to nowhere. I take on the tape, and time itself winds through my fingers. I’ve committed to this piece, to this repetitive sculpture. -AJ
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Memory and fiction inhabit us. They inhabit our perception, seep into our surroundings, and infiltrate everyday objects. They live out endless permutations as phantoms; animating and interrupting both the static density of matter and the unidirectional axis of time.
The sound in this piece was modeled after Diana Deutsch’s research on phantom words. A short sample of text is played against itself and slowly moves ever more out of sync. As the words pull away from each other, the mind scrambles to fill the gap. Phantom words, words which are not actually present in the recording, emerge through this hyper-associative activity. -AV
