Strip / Lakeshore East , Stripping
Panoramic, time delayed video installation, 88 minutes, varying dimensions
To make Strip / Lakeshore East, I rode my bicycle throughout the year, in all seasons, day and night, on multiple paths through “Lake Shore East”, a unique part of Chicago that has been completely transformed by human artifice, in the process losing any sense of a consistent ground plane or uniformity of locale: it consists of violent oppositions between landscaped parks, underground service tunnels, parking-caverns inhabited by impounded cars and homeless derelicts, three level underground highways, manicured lake-shores, luxury living condos and walled in observation decks, fountains and fireworks, garbage dumps and engine rooms- all stacked on top of each other within less than a square mile.
The piece weaves through this layered environment using a sideways-facing camera mounted on the bicycle. The continuous footage is reassembled into a shifting panorama: each frame is offset in time and thus, in space, creating a rippling, elastic visual field that expands and contracts based on the rider’s motion. The result is a fragmented but spatially coherent landscape that jumps between times of day and seasons while maintaining a continuous visual path.
ABOVE: Stripping is a live version of the piece, in which a real-time feed from a performer roaming the venue area is converted into panoramic video strips in real time, alongside manipulated 4 track field-recording tape loops. The performance is site-specific, and has taken place at Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, and at CentralTrak gallery in Dallas, Texas.
