Benton-C: Pale Blue Dot

Pale Blue Dot
incorporating:
Powers of 10 Remix, Ecstatic Velocity, Raster Dance 101, The Holocene (part 1), Squat Down on East 5th Street, It's Nearly Space..., Touched by Another Day's Sun, The Holocene (part 2)
1 hour, Stereo, NTSC Color, 2002

"Our planet is a lonely spark in the great enveloping cosmic dark. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. . .in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves . . . preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

-Carl Sagan, "Pale Blue Dot", 1994, responding to Voyager 1's last photograph of home transmitted from the edge of our Solar System.

Carl Sagan's text "Pale Blue Dot" was an appeal to fellow humans not to wipe each other off the face of our tiny planet. My live movie "Pale Blue Dot" is far more modest; a celebration of our insignificant moment ". . . on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam" (ibid), particularly the little things that make post-2001 life in the capital of the American Empire a very privileged position in the spacetime continuum. Attacked by passenger planes, dot.conned and En-wronged, watching our dollars diminish while our civil liberties are terrorized by Cheney, Bush & Co., I no longer take the good life for granted. Still, I wouldn't trade living in the future of my childhood dreams for a caveman's life- in prehistory's shelter, today's war room or tomorrow's housing project, up in the asteroid belt.

~Benton-C, NYC, 2002

I premiered this episodic suite at Roulette just before I moved out of New York City in an aborted attempt at ex-patriotism in Berlin.

Mostly Pale Blue Dot uses diaristic footage to try to make some sense of the post 9-1-1 era. I didn't become an internet millionaire in the late '90s, but living in a storefront on East 5th Street from 1996-2002 gave me a front row seat to the radical transformation that wealth wrought on the East Village.

"Squat Down on East 5th Street" is a document of a pivotal chapter in that gentrification story. When a squat across the street from me caught fire, Giuliani defied the court and used this as an excuse to tear down 2 buildings and seize 3 lots. Living with the 24-hour demolition and police occupation of my block was my first direct experience of the extremism that characterized Rudy's mayorship; a disturbing change from the freedom I had enjoyed living in NYC in the Eighties. All the footage was shot from inside my studio, including the illegal arrest of a protester that recurs throughout "E. 5th St." (I simply threw open my storefront doors to catch that shot.) The audio-to-video synthesis was driven by music I made at Experimental Television Center during my January 2002 residency.

At this same residency, Hank Rudolph taught me ETC's latest acquisition, a Dan Sandin Image Processor built by Dick Sippel. I found the Sandin/Sippel IP confusing to use but I loved the unnerving energy it brought out of my shots from "The Holocene." "The Holocene" Part 1 is captured from the live performance ot Roulette where Ilayered additional digital delayed feedback with a TiVo. Part 2 is seen straight from the recording at the Center.

~Benton-C, The Bronx, 2007

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