experimental A/V projects

PLAY AS TIME GOES BY • 2010

3 min 7 seconds : audio

A long day at the beach with a close friend, my father telling me a story, the crows of Northern Indiana, Ingrid Bergman, Allen Ginsberg, and the instrument of my fifth grade halcyon days, the Spanish recorder, all helped me tell this excruciatingly candid audio self-portrait I made when I was an undergraduate student.

We are in a classroom of 20 first-graders. A grown man stands at the front explaining to the anxious children that he is going to pass around what he is holding in his hands. He tells them to be careful, but that it is not dangerous. He tells them they may hold it in their hands, or of course, if they wish, they can have it around their necks.

You are at a birthday party. It’s January in Australia, and you’re sitting on your front porch. Thirteen of your best friends surround your parents who bring out a birthday cake and place it in front of you. There are seven candles and a summer sunset beyond. It’s your birthday party. They celebrate you, “hip, hip, hooray!”

You are in a bedroom. You are in front of a computer. You are at the point of tears. “Lights out in ten minutes—“ A door slams.

Through the sea of nervous laughter you find a child in a plaid dress and double French braids wide-eyed and shy, unsure of herself as the man approaches her corner sanctuary. He holds out what is in his hands, and she holds out hers to receive. It is a black snake and as it extends its body, it brushes against her cheek and smells her neck with his tongue.

It is a sensation received with half-repressed giggling and a broad smile.

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Last month I visited the Prado Museum in Madrid. Within the incredible collection of western art, one work caught the soul in my eye: Titian’s “Adam and Eve.” On the bench in front of the painting I sat down petrified, contemplating the gentleness in expressions, the innocence of Adam’s imperative gesture and the naivety of Eve’s intrigued reach—or perhaps, the naivety of Adam’s imperative gesture and the innocence of Eve’s intrigued reach. It profoundly occurred to me that there is a truth captured in this work that reflects a part of the human spirit to which we can all relate.

Growing up in the Christian west, we absorb a spirituality that begins with an explication of “original sin,” a concept that has always left me itchy and irresolute. As this project developed, it became for me a powerful meditation on moral self-awareness, culpability, and suffering. The sampled sounds on this audio collage come from three primary video sources, all from Youtube: 1) a video of children in a classroom handling a snake; 2) seventh birthday parties from around the world; and 3) this.

As one small jigsaw within a long puzzling history stretching back to Titian and long, long beyond, this project is my attempt to probe the possibility of “original whatever” that might be buried within the catacombs of our emotional pathologies, and to unearth it through the things that grow above the graves of my own deeper scars. It reaches for the unconscious ambience, the static noise in those lost parts of our mind, so far away that even the voices of those closest to us are barely a milky echo. This is the sound children make, as one by one they leave their lonely planets to follow the inevitable journey of all people east of Eden.