Love Songs #1

Love Songs #1 is composed of three pieces that pose questions about urban culture, race, and politics. Found footage images are manipulated and juxtaposed with popular music; the effects are unsettling, ironic, and sometimes humorous. Blow #2 is a description of digitized female forms juxtaposed with text and set to a Delfonics classic. The pixilated visual environment eventually crystallizes into an image of potential violence/beauty. Nurture is a meditation on the anthropomorphic trends in “hardcore” hip-hop. In the video, rappers become animals, animals become rappers, all in a context of mediated nihilism and the environmental trend toward self-destruction. Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s classic 1996 song “Brooklyn Zoo” is the engine for our discovery channel nightmare. Riotously ironic and self consciously deployed, the director poses the question: “Where my dogs at?” Over Above is about the physical and social distances through which everyday horror is seen. Airplanes, buses, and helicopters: these provide the windows that filter our perceptions of early 21st century America, where not quite seeing has become the dominant mode of vision. The visual “effect” is two fold: the first, composited through a helicopter window, is the beating of Thomas Jones by the Philadelphia police on July 12, 2000. The second is a view of a scene from a bus window. With music by Cibo Matto."