America Afterimaged is a 3D installation that exists at the borderline between moving and still photographic image as well as between waking and sleeping — fragments of a dream just barely recalled on awakening.
The work conjures an urban afterlife out of predawn darkness, with its scenes emerging gradually from the mists and glimmers of the sleeping city. The imagery is in motion, but not steadily or smoothly. Sometimes it advances tentatively until it alights on a striking composition. At other times, though, the imagery may skitter by; or superimpose; or mirror itself, with bottom reflecting top.
All of this is called forth by piano notes. The piano-playing is speculative, exploratory — the music tries things out, sees how its phrasings and rhythms advance us into the imagery. When a note is sustained, so too is the image, even as the note fades into silence; and when the pianist’s hands continue up or down the keyboard, the image also moves on through different fragments of footage until the next perfect shot is discovered and settled into. When key images reverberate in the viewer’s mind, they are colored with the bell-like quality of the piano sound.
Intermedia collaboration by Marc Downie, Paul Kaiser, and Jaroslaw Kapuscinski.