I made this piece within my first year of using Facebook. Dozens of people I’d thought I’d never hear from again were suddenly accessible to me in mystifyingly dynamic, flattened form. The cognitive dissonance wrought by this collision and collusion of past and present, distant and immediate, provoked me to dig out a strange artifact: a VHS compilation tape produced annually for three or four years at my high school. It was spearheaded by an A/V club teacher, produced by students, assembled via Amiga Video Toaster, and sound-tracked by corporate royalty-free music libraries. I enjoyed the most exquisite horror when I first slowed the bonfire scene down and turned its music up. I did not enjoy seeing my teenage theater self again, but thought it only fair to give him a cameo. This video marks the only time I’ve played with a split-screen two-channel form, maybe I’ll do that again someday. I think I lost at least one Facebook friend because of this video. As of this writing, I haven’t been on Facebook in over a month.
