| A man is left alone in a room with a piano that he destroys with a simple crowbar. The piano, once used to teach children music, is callously torn to pieces and removed from the room. The imagery and sound were carefully edited so the destruction of the piano appears cloudy and unreal, like the unsteady aftermath of a traumatic experience. |
| Using archival footage of Bethlehem Steel and recently shot digital images, a mock-story is created of the destruction of the once-thriving industrial complex. What was in the beginning of the 20th century a symbol of power is, at present, a slowly decaying corpse. |
| Shot in an unnamed, unused mental hospital, footage of rotting walls and unfilled hospital beds is juxtaposed against archival footage of a prosperous and experimental facility where children and adults were examined and detained. The vacancy and eerie absence of life acts as a metaphor for the mind itself as being something of a hollow building, filled with many buried (and perhaps unknown) thoughts, dreams and memories. |
| Carmella Lotti, Matthew's 88-year-old grandmother, talks about the thirteen odd medical prescriptions she takes on a daily basis to keep herself alive. Intended as a new wave public service announcement, it offers a grim look at a future dependent on medication with no alternative recourse. |
| A long tube of clay that forms in a shower travels throughout a house like an alien appendage - it swoops down two flights of stairs and into the basement, where it discharges its contents into a drain. Once its purpose is served, it promptly retreats, recklessly - and callously - leaving the mess behind. The soundtrack, ripped from an unnamed horror movie, has been digitally altered and edited to accompany the images. |
| Using children's toys, like clay, a toy piano and stuffed animals, a film is made relating to the development of female genitalia. As the film progresses, the image becomes brighter and the sound becomes more distorted, representing the shrill transition between a naïve viewpoint of the world to a more developed and sexually advanced one that involves self-discovery and potential trauma. |
| A hard-working, routine-oriented man has his schedule disrupted by outside forces, so he must take drastic measures in order to return his life to its previous pattern. Shot with multiple DV and Hi8 cameras, with no dialogue and a miniscule budget, it's a challenging allegory for the extremes that may be taken to preserve normality. |
| Footage of several wars, news broadcasts, stock footage, surveillance video, commercials, video games, a modified version of the United States Terror Alert system and John Giorno's spoken word performance piece "Subduing Demons in America" are edited together to represent an extreme caricature of the constant visual bombardment an average American citizen receives almost on a daily basis via the media. In a way, the media becomes War Itself, and the result is numbing and visually jarring. |
| Hours of collected pornographic film clips were compiled and edited so that all that remains of most of the video segments are the eyes and small portions of the faces of the female performers. The focus in pornography is so often on the movement of the sexual organs that the rapidly changing facial reactions become secondary attractions. Whether the actresses are experiencing pain or pleasure - or pretending to experience pain or pleasure - and whether potential sexual pain can actually be pleasurable is a mystery to all but, in this case, the women themselves. |
| An environmentally-conscious reconstruction of footage from a June 2008 trip to Alaska shows America's "Last Frontier" pulsating with life and energy - despite being threatened by man's intrusion - as rain falls on the Mendenhall Glacier, a waterfall cascades down a jagged mountain and tiny chunks of ice spin around in the ocean. The looping footage is a playful visual nod to the fact that glaciers have the ability to either advance (move forward) or retreat (move backwards) and the complex, hand-edited soundtrack contains audible traces of (unseen) aquatic life. |
| An animated clip depicting a graphic sexual act plays in an insidious loop while an unseen audience reacts. As a companion piece to Seconds of Pleasure - with its fleeting sexual violence/joy - this questions whether or not constant gratification isn't a hell in its own right while simulatenously ridiculing standard notions of male dominance and female subjugation. In constrast with the crudeness of the imagery, the (relatively uplifting) soundtrack itself required close to two years to assemble, as it is comprised of clips of audience accolates from several hundred live recordings in all genres of music (jazz, classical, rock, etc.). |
| In 1903, Thomas Edison's film crew recorded the death of a female elephant, Topsy, at Coney Island (via electrocution) because this "rogue" elephant killed three men. In this slightly more optimistic, 'family values'-oriented rethink of that narrative, not only is Topsy brought back to life via electricity, but shortly thereafter she mates with a male elephant (with the assistance of some friendly villagers) and produces several adorable offspring. |