Cinematic Voices
Pierce will introduce and speak about his new 27 minute video
Deck, followed by contextualizing conversation and some discussion about its first incarnation as a 14 channel installation at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India. He will also screen some other short works that preceded and fed into the concepts of
Deck, some of these short pieces have never been screened publicly.
Deck will become the second part of a trilogy. He will also screen
White Ash (27 minutes), the first part of the trilogy.
Through his years of work in sound, video/film and installation, Pierce has worked to embrace the fluid present and as well as the retrograde aspects of temporal perception. In his work, not only do we sense time passing in extremely personal and subjective ways, but the actual bodily markers of time are invoked, the rhythms that are our life itself are, as in life, always variable.
Deck brings emphasis to the bodily experience of temporality. The principle of harmonized rhythm underpins all of Pierce’s work from the shooting (live animation) performance, to its editing and sound design, and finally in situating its reception. In all of his video and sound art, repetition and rhythm manifest the echoes and arcs of our irregular and subjective conjectures of time.
How do we feel temporality, as in feeling it in the body? In video, how does each individual frame mark a certain moment? How does the flow of any one shot—“flow” meaning rate and texture of perceptual change—create a sense of fast or slow time? Just as our bodily markers of time constantly vary in rhythm and phase, in Deck, each individual video or sound element vibrates to its own variable clock.
Before making the single channel work, Deck, Pierce first explored these same visual and audio elements in a site specific 14 video channel exhibition in the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India. In that installation, titled Threshold of Affinity, the relationships among the 14 screens amplify and attenuate our sense of bodily time as we move through the space guided by sound and image. Within the room, recognized repetition (a factor of memory) sets up another layer of rhythm. And within the room there remains a common pulse among all the elements—too fast to be thought of as a rhythm, it becomes an underlying temporal texture.