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"Imagery never exists as such. It's determined by what people are told the image is going to be . . . The fact is the fovea cuts out most of what we see and the brain constructs an image out of almost nothing. . ."
-Harry Everett Smith in 1977 interview with P. Adams Sitney.
Think of the Self Speaking: Harry Smith, Selected Interviews, 1998.


My video work is informed by a few simple contemporary "facts": vision is an (innacurate) interpretive process (quite susceptible to pre-supposition and suggestion), (furthermore) reality itself is a semi-consensual construct, and all matter and energy are (most likely!) nothing more than vibrations. In light of these enormities, I am unconcerned with distinctions between film, video and 'digital film' beyond a personal preference for the realtime feedback that electronic cinema can provide. To me, whether captured on film or video or data stream, it's all audiovisuals, cinema, moving pictures, or just plain movies.

My formal models for making movies are drawn liberally from pre-cinema, visual arts, performing arts, music and significantly the New American Cinema and Expanded Cinema traditions (in opposition yet also indebted to Eisensteinian/Hollywood cinema.) My earliest inspirations were the analog computer animations of Children's Television Workshop, science fiction and the Space Program(s). I am driven to make video to help hasten the arrival of a long anticipated future in which a total plasticity of sight and sound* enables cinema to flow like conversation in a universal language that transcends cultural boundaries.

Our most significant universal language remains mathematics, and in my video work you can hear me speaking it with all the fluency of a dilettante. I am fascinated by the ways in which electronic cinema can be shaped with mathematics, thus tapping into the very life-processes that math abstracts.

Because I was raised with computers (my father is a retired computer and electronics engineer who specialized in 'systems design'), I find the significance of the 'digital' impact on our culture overrated and misunderstood- Nam June Paik and Marshall McLuhan laid it all out for us around the time I was born, and with a better sense of humor than today's sociocultural critics.

I enjoy digital technology for its economy of scale and for the access and control it offers- when it's working right. I favor analog computers (in the form of a/v synthesizers) because they have finer resolution and a quirky responsiveness that digital quantization limits. My creative process often begins by designing a visual 'system' or process that incorporates optical, analog and digital technologies so that the strengths and idiosyncracies of each combine to yield strange artistic possibilities and limitations. I typically may be found using a hodgepodge of custom software (which I may instigate but others usually code), quirkily functioning consumer tech, elegantly built old-school synthesizers, strange old broadcast TV studio gear rescued from eBay and a handful of lenses and objects. This 'mad scientist' approach is not unique but I pursue it more relentlessly than most, giving my work a wide range of palette and visual 'timbre' as compared to many video artists. By borrowing and expanding upon tools and techniques from the span of cinema's history I hope to simultaneously pay homage to a rich visual legacy and push further into the unseen in the process.

While my work is not always generated or composed in a realtime process, I am best known for my live cinema work. Even when I follow the production process I was taught in film school, from preproduction through shooting "out of sequence" to post-production, I am still concerned with retaining an openess I learned from "Personal Cinema" and the unfixable essence of music. More often I can be found in my mad scientist's lab patching a system together to see what comes out. I have a library of thousands of hours of photography from my travels, by image processing these shots I can make visual puzzles which exercise our perceptual systems' ability to "construct an image out of almost nothing". This abstracting process usually begins in-camera with my idiosyncratic photography which has sometimes been described as "home movies".

This formal approach may result in more than just self-indulgent knob twiddling, because (with time and study) a "visual music" may emerge, and, like music, these abstractions may capture something of what it means to be human. A knowledge of art history may enrich the experience for certain viewers, but hopefully the impact is felt in the more primitive parts of our nervous system.

~benton-c, the bronx, summer 2006


*thanks, Bill Etra




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