This installation is an arrangement of 3 separate works that come together in an immersive environment. Rigorous material investigations and works for the screen are brought together with mechanical interventions that allow for a loss of control. The work is about what the viewer carries with them, and the affect of its retuning or detuning. The three pieces shift to avoid fixity, and represent the multiplicity of perspectives from which they can be viewed.

How does one collapse a moment? An Ideology?

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Opening Reception:
Thursday, May 10
6 – 10pm

1111 8th Street, San Francisco

Exhibition hours:
May 11 – 19
10 a.m. – 7:30 p.m., daily

Official Exhibition Website

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All of these pieces are not quite finalized yet, but this gives you an idea of what I am working on in addition to the brick wall project.

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This is a collaborative multimedia installation. As you enter the space, you are tracked and activate a sound collage. Your image is captured and projected into a portal above the doorway. The flickering light in the center is both enchanting and off-putting, and casts more than light over the forest mural mounted to the semi-circular wall. The electrical cord that attaches the work to the grid, is a repeated phrase. “Could I live in a space time structure corresponding to this reality?”

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Henry Witecki, 2011

9min38sec

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Proposal For Remote Indoor Greenhouse, 2011

An abandoned air hangar, in a barren location, it’s roof is removed and replaced with ETFE film. Inside, vertical hydroponic rotary gardens tower before you, shadowed from the sun by hanging trough planters cascading overhead. Ultimately, the cubic footage would be maximized with more towers, until the entire space is utilized, and teeming with foodstuffs.

This proposed project would be a system of vertical hydroponic gardens enclosed in an abandoned structure. The structure’s shell will be removed and replaced with ETFE film. The location of the abandoned structure is tantamount: Rather than in a densely populated area, where indoor farming is practical, this garden is to be relatively remote. The compact nature of the design is not for space efficiency, but explicitly for combating nature in the face of climate change. The facility will be on the electrical grid, but will be maintained by emergency gas backup generators in the event of grid failure. Once built, it will be the responsibility of the community at large to maintain the facility, reap, and distribute the produce.

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I have been frequently infatuated with Hollywood cinema, for as long as I can remember. My parents, the incredibly nurturing folks they were, sensed this passion, and sent me to the campus of Harvard when I was 12 years old. I was the youngest in a summer film program put on by the New York Film Academy. I was thrust into a six-week intensive course, and learned the ropes of filmmaking, as well as having exposure to dozens of new creators. It was then and there that I fell in love with the idea of becoming a filmmaker. In high school, I had the incredible opportunity to drop math and foreign language my junior year in order to focus on the Arts. Photography and Cinematography were my passions, but after taking an AP Advanced Studio Art course, I learned of a much different Art world. I learned of The San Francisco Art Institute, I applied and was accepted in 2004. It was there, while taking courses in the New Genres, Photography, and Film departments that I became interested in a much different capability of film/video, as Gunning would call it, the aesthetic of attraction.  Perhaps a major, and until reading Tom Gunning’s article an undetected shift in my art practice was toward the aesthetics of attraction. I transferred into Alfred University my junior year of undergraduate studies. As well as having neon facilities, this institution offered an opportunity to supplement my art studies with Philosophy. I took a class on Marxism and Modernity, it was there that my life changed. Understanding the material world as the precursor to ideas, understanding the core and the sphere of influence, and the echoes of Marx in modern philosophical theory and culture. I have since pursued a deep understanding of Marx conception of capitalism, and an understanding of the work of those influenced by his thinking, as his life’s work has come to deeply influence my own practice.

Reading Tom Gunning’s An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator was a truly revelatory experience for me. I came to realize my push through cinema into multimedia installation is my own investigation of the aesthetics of astonishment. From my attempts to illicit visceral response through flicker response, subsonic and supersonic sound, and various forms of 3D technologies, I have been attempting to re-create the Lumiere ‘s Arrival of a Train. Reifying that mind-blowing moment of shock and awe could sub-characterize my personal epoch. The nature of this intention elucidated on pp.128, “As Hansen has indicated, Benjamin’s analysis of shock has a fundamental ambivalence, molded certainly by the impoverishment of experience in modern life, but also capable of assuming, ‘a strategic significance as an artificial means of propelling the human body into moments of recognition.’” I cannot express how many times I have tried to compose this very sentence to varying degrees of success.  The potential for the recognition of something profound, something internal, about the external in the moment of unprecedented perceptual phenomenon is what excites me.

I feel that there is a potential in this moment of recognition to better understand the true nature of the human condition. Gunning quotes Walter Benjamin, Some Motifs in Baudelaire “There came a day when a new and urgent need for stimuli was met by the film. In a film, perception in the form of shocks was established as a formal principal.” I maintain that the world is again in an urgent need for stimuli tantamount to the projected motion picture.  Here a problem arises, and that is identifying where this need originates. Gunning writes on pp126, “…a spectator whose daily experience has lost the coherence and immediacy traditionally attributed to reality.” This reminds me of Georgio Agamben’s thoughts on “Naked Life”, which I see as echoing Marx. In short, the power given to the sovereign eliminated a naked form of life where life was at stake. I would argue that this is parallel to Marx wherein the loss of this immediate risk, compounded daily, is one of many components in our alienation from the true nature of the human condition.  Which raises the question, was this the nature of such an investigation on the part of the Lumiere brothers? If so, does its eventual capitulation into modern cinema suggest absolute failure? And if so, is my own pursuit of the next monumental shift in the aesthetic of astonishment futile? And, is that okay?

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This work is a result of my revelatory release from expository form. In allowing ideas to flow more freely, i have approached the materials of my past works with a more sensual hand. I could best relate the paradigm shift as transposing a research paper into a poem.

With this allowance, the piece is speaking to me in ways my other works have not. I have created an object referent of structure, infrastructure, construction, breath, decay, pollution, life, death. This unsorted read is a relief. Rather than stretching these materials, I am allowing them to speak for themselves. Steve Edwards taught me of glass that you mustn’t force the material into a form, but let the material lead the way, merely guiding the path it chooses. This symbiotic relationship with glass could be applied to all media; instead of attempting to force specific meaning through semiotics (a virtual impossibility), choose materials who’s relationship and potential is reciprocal with ones understood intentions, without making them explicit.

Afinial, 2011

12″x56″x14″

Plywood, Neon, Colored Vinyl, Stucco, Lath, PVC

Lost in these photographs is a small ammount of smoke that wafts inside the sculpture, dissipating before it reaches the top of the piece.

The images include a detail shot of the sculpture, as well as an earlier iteration of the project, with a bucket, and exposed wires.

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