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The Absent Presence Series

“Live Loops”, “Souvenir Loops”, “Projection Loops” 1998.

"Each time he encounters one of these double words, R.B., on the contrary, insists on keeping both meanings, as if one were winking at the other..." — Roland Barthes

Three independent but connecting projects came together under the Absent Presence Series, including Live Loops, essential constructed Camera Obscuras; Souvenir Loops, a collection of one-person hand-held film projectors housing looping super-8 film; and installations of architectural projections of looping films.

They were always borrowing from each other as they were all happening simultaneously, i.e. some of the Field Poems ended up in the Souvenir Loops, and the camera obscuras borrowed the concept of the live obscuras in About Place, etc. The looping and recurring absent presence theme in all the works tied them together.

The realization that I am never really here but there interested me. Whatever I am doing, I am somewhere else, i.e. If I am eating Chinese take-out, I am reading. I am not present and aware that I am eating; I am wherever the book takes me. I understood it was a way of coping early on. As a child, I secretly congratulated myself on utilizing such a constructive ploy. I hadn't realized until then that I was still using that tactic and similar approaches to avoid being here and now. But, the more I thought about it, I couldn't think of a single moment when I was present. Futuring, designing, planning, dreaming, viewing through lenses, all the ways I mediated presence rendering my physical self into an icon, alter ego or avatar of a person who was actually there, existing in parallel.

I began filming short sequences of the typical ways I do this and looping them to see myself outside of myself and explore the idea of this conceptually and abstractly, not to understand myself better or change things. I didn't particularly think I should be present. I was just curious about it. The souvenir loops started as a documentation of usurped present moments, but in the end, they became encapsulated as memories. The camera obscuras, were live until recorded; I would leave before opening the camera for these long exposures. The exhibition's projection of a burning house upside was intended to stand for change—as close as one gets to a moment of here and now. But there was a fire in the building, and the installation moved to a tent.

ARCHITECTURAL PROJECTION INSTALLATION PROCESS