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as the waves play along with an invisible spine (the workers die)

Les LeVeque

2010 00:10:40 United StatesArabicColorStereo16:9DV video
Tags:
Blu-ray, Found Footage, Hollywood, Image Processing, Literature

Description

as the waves play along with an invisible spine (the workers die) is a stroboscopic work that pulsates black and white at approximately 14 Hz. Buried within that field of pulsation is a 90 second algorithmically condensed version of John Huston's 1956 film Moby Dick. Huston's minimal close-ups of the doomed sailors flicker as afterimage ghosts as approximately 4Hz in the visually unstable field of alternating black and white frames.

So long as the creature lives

it must carry forth its vertebrae

as the waves play along

with an invisible spine.

Like a child's tender cartilage

Is the century of the newborn earth.

-- Osip Mandelstam, Excerpt from "The Century", 1923

This video is part of a series of short videos that experiment with incorporating alpha wave frequencies into the editing structure.

About Les LeVeque

Les LeVeque is an artist who works with digital and analog electronic technology. His projects include single and multi-channel videos and video/computer-based installations. His projects have been exhibited and screened internationally. His work is also represented by Kerry Schuss Gallery in New York City.

"In the work of Les LeVeque we encounter insights born — not only the formal strategies deployed, (condensation, expansion, reversal, mirroring...) — but of the ecstatic destruction of the reified "realities" of the consciousness industries, the purveyors of the spectacle. They remind us — and even now we are in need of that reminder — that these "realities," presented as eternal, are in fact shallow pliable, not fixed. They are subject to investigation; they may be reconfigured as games in which we are in control, where the terrors and seductions to which they subject us in their unilateral discourse may be altered according to our will, for our pleasure and amusement, for our provocation, for increasing our understanding of the machines of consciousness that process us. They are important viewing, and they are considerable achievements. They remind us that the insights and efforts of a single individual can be deployed via computational means to wreak havoc with the massively and expensively constructed tissue of lies that envelope us. And just as important: they are smart and they are fun."

— Keith Sandborn, January 15th, 2010