A fortunate misstep many years ago brought me deep into the belly of the film archives around the world where I became interested in the beauty of decayed film. Much of the old nitrate film had some level of “vinegar syndrome”, mold, and even a little crystallization which created beautiful aberrations in the images. It made me think about the strangeness of what was once a fleeting moment of illusory life, of an actor on a set, acting and simulating a moment that was so far from reality, yet the mechanism of the moving frames, the shutter, the projector, created the illusion of a dream unfolding before us on the cinema screen. And now I hold that dream, broken, discarded, decaying in my hand. The material medium is all that survives. I felt an urge to capture the fantastical allure of that illusion and bring it to material form. To make it tangible and alive again. To be able to investigate it from all angles, not just the view we have on the cinema screen.
We think of recording an image onto film, a picture or moving picture, as a true document that is now static, fixed. But, looking at aged film made me realize that nothing is static or devoid of life, not even a reproduction—it will eventually decay and grow into something new with the natural process of degeneration. This project Is how I am exploring this idea, of accelerating and participating in what nature and time want to do anyway. I took found film added to the existing decay by growing crystals on the s
