Epic A
Came out of a desire to recreate an experience I had while aboard a train, on my way back from visiting family on the east coast. The passing landscape got me to thinking about time and its relationship to space. Left with musings of relativity, and the way navigating through space along a fixed path inadvertently create a narrative, I set out to explore this further in my studio. I immediately thought of making an animation, or some sort of composite video, but felt frustrated by the limitations of the medium.

There was something inherently physical about the experience that I found valuable or informing that I wanted to preserve in the experience of the piece. I began looking into Asian watercolor landscape and scroll paintings. With that methodology of landscape painting, I found a very immediate connection. This paradigm of creating a landscape that had a visual duration. Unable to see the entire image at once, the landscape could only be experienced in moments, revealing sections at a time. The participants memory was the reference point for the image; as a memory, the piece becomes an experience rather than a static element or image object.

So I started making my own scroll. This involved creating various line drawings of transportation objects, like sail boats and air planes and abstract grids and patterns of lines which I Xeroxed and cut out into collages. I was beginning to fill up my studio with these Frankenstein chunks of landscapes, and I had not resolved the way in which I could share this material.

The microfilm connection came to me in the form of a daydream. Throughout my experience growing up, the library has been a source of inspiration, a resource for curiosities, and a necessary pat of my formal education. I often would take breaks from doing “real work” and head to the section reserved for archives and microfilm/microfiche. In some way navigating the information stream of the microfilm was like a videogame. I enjoyed the physical interaction with information, and there was some tangible aspect to the optics that I often found more interesting than the magazine, journal or newspaper ‘s content that was being projected.

So my eureka moment was followed by the most obvious of bummer revelations, how the hell am I going to print this onto microfilm. The answer was a result of me complaining on the phone to my mother, and immediately finding out our good friends the Zulia family, run a business called Allied Infotech, a medial records storage and archiving facility.

I spoke with Mike Zulia over the phone, and could took his
enthusiastic response to my idea as a sign of hope. Afer meeting with and getting a tour of his facility, he gave me some basic conforming instructions, and I prepared my landscape to be transferred to 16mm microfilm. We used a roto-line camera, it’s a type of camera that us used to read fetal heart monitor transcriptions. My landscape was 56 feet, and 8.5 inches tall. I fed it into the machine, and the film moved at the same rate as the paper feed, recording the continuous image. We made a few different prints of the scroll at different exposures. The Zulia family was so accommodating, they sent me back to my studio with three microfilm readers, and I was able exhibit the piece later that month.