(2011, HD video projection, 41:43' loop) A handheld video, shot mostly out of focus, of Cao Chang Di Road, a Beijing art district street. Passing vehicles and people trigger the camera pans. Fluctuations in the original ambient soundtrack control the amount of grain. Blur and grain varyingly obscure the details - fuzziness of recollection and forgetting. At the time, it seemed like filming an ordinary place: the estate of artist Ai Weiwei to the right, eventually, two women waiting to be let in. In the wake following the artist's detention, the reconstructed wait feels permeated by the tensional atmosphere present in covert or ubiquitous surveillance footage, foreshadowing imminent perpetration in even the seemingly most inconspicuous places.
A caveat to the on-line viewer: the web codec, by its nature, defeats much of the quality of the pointillist grain characteristic of the original, non-compressed HD video playing off a hard disk.