Strip I: North Spaulding Avenue

Panoramic video, 2009, 1.5 Hours

"Strip 1" is a continuous, uncut, fragmented panoramic video ride of North Spaulding Avenue, Chicago- a typical, mostly residential street that in Chicago-grid fashion runs straight for many miles, crossing the city from the downtown, less well to do Garfield Park in the south to the wealthier suburb of Lincolnwood in the north, passing through six other neighborhoods of varying character. The video is shot from the side of a bicycle, that becomes an engine to the entire panorama, driving it in a rippling, humanizing rhythm of starts, stops, twists and turns. What determines the fragmentation and stretching of the image is the time interval between the fragments, all taken from different moments within a single, moving video, and arranged continuously. These intervals are manipulated, shrunk and expanded, to suggest a different metaphore of "focus", in which only one of the main planes in the frame (mostly houses, cars and greenery) remain physically whole: what is not in "focus" becomes stretched and multiplied, or else cut up and broken. Owing to it's continuous, modular nature, the piece may be extended in width as much as is technically possible, until it becomes a Borgesian map, overlapping the street it depicts...

Exhibited: Xuzhou Museum of Art, China; Sullivan Galleries, Chicago

Media: Panoramic video made with custom software from a single source, varying dimensions (see above). Was shown as a 12 X 2.5 meter projection, and on 5 tiled 26" flat screens