Artist's statement
In January 2022 I had the desire to make a site featuring a 24/7 livestream. It was intended to be a constant stream of all the videos I'd recorded up until the point of conception. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how a livestream would work, and figured I'd return to it later on. I later discovered Night Walk, and slow television in general. I went on to show Night Walk to an ex partner on our first date, along with one episode each of Home Movies and Dr. Katz. She was putting together a zine, and I suggested a secret QR code placed somewhere within it. The QR code would lead to a page with nothing on it but a 24/7 livestream of heavy but fast-moving traffic recorded on VHS-C with jazz music and ambient hospital sounds layered on top. We decided it didn't fit the aesthetic of the rest of the zine, and I set it aside. I've always had an obsession with camcorders and have loved documenting what I experience. I went through a cycle of expansion and contraction on April 10th 2022, around 6PM. Something clicked, and I snapped. The concept of One day we will go to a place where none of this ever happened came to me as an art show, and I explored that idea but decided again on a website. I was gong to do a livestream, but found that the only way I'd be able to do this with the resources I had at the time was with a plug-in that just directs to a YouTube livestream. I did not like this idea. I went back to the concept of the site and decided I wanted a new video to load every time the site was accessed, taking inspiration from the game 2:22 AM with randomization. Usually whenever I start a project I write simple jot notes, but with everything related to this I forced myself to fully flesh out every single idea which came to me. The bulk of the high-level concept came in the first day, then the next few were spent focusing on the concrete. With my love for old technology, I have a deep fascination with Windows 95/98 and decided to model the site with it. I didn't get to ride the high of the excitement from my ex and friends who cared about the project due to the fact that I was experiencing a mixed episode and was somewhat removed from reality at the time. I had the desire to try out more experimental videos and found myself uncomfortable when I put them on One day we will go to a place where none of this ever happened. I decided I'd create another site, and with this, realized I want a hub for all future sites. A network, with each site on this network, a channel. I'd create my own network. Broadcasts from no place in particular became the channel for experimental videos, and Network of Decay became the container for both of these. The network is now my life project. I will create and abandon channels as I grow--sharing more and more as I experience this life. The Network of Decay will continue to grow until I die.
One Day We Will Go To A Place Where None Of This Ever Happened is the birth of my artistic identity. It was my first time sharing what I constantly ruminate about in a way I saw fit. The videos were of intimacy with a layer
of separation from the viewer and the voyeuristic peaks into another’s mundanity created by a lack of sound. By denying the viewer one of the key senses needed to truly experience and replacing it with ambient music, the
viewer is to feel a sense of displacement from one’s own surroundings. The original manifesto is as follows:
The pieces are a meditation on both the vibrance and dullness of life. It does not focus on the contrast between the two, but rather, is an examination of the entity which emerges when both are considered equally. It is
the understanding that one day, as the name suggests, we will go to a place where none of this ever happened.
It is the rumination on the reality of the impermanence of life, the certainty of death, the desire to make the most out of the love + life we experience, and how these thoughts lurk in the mind at all times.
It is an exposé on what this experience looks like through our eyes, as I try to model the perfect example of what we'll miss, what we've experienced--everything, before we die our respective deaths.
It
is an experimental project, existing as an attempt to reach deep into the crevices of the mind responsible for longing for a reality in which time can last forever, but is also an effort to remind the consumer of their
very impermanence on this plane, and the unknowingness of what happens to all that happened to us after we pass away. It is composed of mundane clips of daily life/social interaction, shot on an array of different handycams.
The website plays a new video randomized on refresh. The page can be directly refreshed by pressing the X button in the windows 95 layout panel.
This project is not complete. It never will be--until I go to
a place where none of it ever happened. It is lifelong, and the library of videos is ever expanding. It will grow as my artistic abilities do, and as I experience life.
I had originally intended for this project to continue to grow until I died, but it ended up serving its purpose on the network. It is now a time capsule of me at my artistic infancy. I am leaving it untouched forever. The videos available on the site recorded over the span of a few months in 2021-2022 will stay frozen in time. Many of the people shown in the videos are no longer in my life. Effectively, through death of a relationship but not of a person, we have already entered a place in which it is as if nothing we experienced together had happened. This is the ethos I sought out to capture with this project.
This project exists as a hub for my time-based art (available on my Vimeo) as well as my sound experiments.
1973-Cat is a hub for my writing.
