Wisconsin Air (2005)
by Dan Senn
Introduction
This piece, like so
many video works of mine, resulted from an unplanned moment. I
was on a lecture-performance tour in the midwest and had a few
days to visit my childhood home, in Watertown, Wisconsin, where
both my parents were still living. And as explained in the spoken narrative for this piece, while having
a breakfast in the kitchen of this old, tumbling down house, I
noticed two objects lying in the back yard which, because of the
context, I did not at first recognize. After going out and inspecting
them, and finding them unusually beautiful in the autumn light
and leaves, I decided to do a close up mapping of their textures
and colors on video. Exactly how I would use the footage, I was
not even sure. This quick decision was not without some hesitation
as the backyards here are open and without fences, in this small
conservative German immigrant community, and my parents would
probably hear about it later on. Time, however, had jaded my sensitivity
and so I spent several hours circling an old bathtub and sink
with my camcorder in hand mostly oblivious to the social spectacle
I was making of myself.
Mapping structures on
video, like buildings, cars, kids, crops, forests, and bathroom
articles, is something I started in 1992 when I bought a HI-8
camera to document my sound sculpture work. This camera, however,
also allowed me to manually start and stop videotaping with such
speed that I could capture as little as 3 frames at a time on
the fly. Realizing this, and without giving it much thought, I
started to map objects using a rhythmic "still moving"
technique which was directly informed by my music improvisation
and still photography experience and then integrating this with
my installation work. At the time, I had no editing equipment,
could only edit in-camera and so there was a powerful real-time
performance pressure added to capturing an object on video. Everything
counted. It was also hopeless to use a tripod, because it restricted
movement, but so long as the object remained still, I learned
that my eye would tolerate an unsteady camera. For about 5 years
I shot film this way.
"Wisconsin Air"
was captured using a Sony VX1000 and edited using Final Cut, and
while the lickity-split
characteristics of my in-camera HI8 pieces are not present,
the piece was shot without a tripod with the rhythm, speed and
direction of the piece reprocessed in the editing phase. Videotaped
in 1998, with the experience well-recorded in my journal at the
time, I put the piece together in the summer of 2005.
TOC | Narrative | Director Statement | Clip | Dan Senn