This is a sound and video art experiment entitled Self Portrait that I created a few years ago. I used software of my own design to give the slightly morbid impression that my face was ‘decaying’ over time. What it actually did was subtly layer the shadows of my face over one another as I attempted to sit still for several minutes. The less I moved, the less the software was able to take effect. Of course, even without realising it, my body was moving imperceptibly and causing the inevitable degradation of the image. I attempted to reflect this in sound by creating a minimalist sound track that similarly blurred or smeared over time.
Although this was only a small work, it served as a vehicle to explore several ideas that I was interested in at that time. Specifically, the unavoidable pain of the human condition despite our best efforts avoid suffering, and our attempts to cope with this by resisting change, ageing, loss, and the like. I was also interested in certain ideas involving phenomenology and the body, and one’s sense of time and space as reflected in undeniable change over time, regardless of how imperceptible this may be at any given moment.