WITNESS

of ROSE Peter

UNITED STATES, 2002, 00:27:00

Production : ROSE Peter
Genre : Video art
Keyword : Sound creation, Experimental, Editing, Narration, Landscape

Summary :
Peter Rose’s films and videos are engaged with issues of perception, language, time, and mythos and have led to the generation of new cinematic structures, improvisations in fictitious language, and the invention of obscure journeys.

WITNESS include the works :

Omen (2001, 11:00)
Presents us with a series of slow transformations that elude language and that can only be watched with patience, simple moments of observation that witness mysterious conjugations of light and shadow and that seem to speak the language of metaphor. Linking these are a series of performances in which beams of light are used to “write space”, to provide dimensional discoveries through a process that is akin to both drawing and dancing. Sound is extremely important. There are moments of grand opera and there are faint suggestions of music heard way in the back of a distant space and that are on the edge of inaudibility. The viewer is carried along by a premonitory current of sounds, images, ideas, and metaphors into an unknown territory of feeling.

Omen has been shown at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and at the San Francisco Cinemateque.

The Darkening (2000, 8 min.)
A Stygian night journey animated by unknown languages, illuminated speech, and mysterious conjugations of light. The work is animated by the idea that if language is to give some shape to thought, it is language as invocation, rather than denotation, that we must consider, and from consequent experiments with a form of performative image-making that integrates speech, gesture, sound and light in order to conjure images through a kind of cinematic incantation.

It has been shown at the European Media Art Festival, at the Oberhausen International Film Festival, at USC’s Art In Motion festival, and in the Black Maria Film and Video Festival.

The Geosophist’s Tears (2002, 8 min.)
Shot during a seven week cross country road trip in the aftermath of Sept. 11th.The work is symphonic in ambition and offers a complex meditation on the iconography of the American landscape. Drawing on the strategems of the early geosophists, who believed that through the operation of a mysterious instrument landscapes might be placed in an emotionally meaningful correspondance with one another, the work uses a variety of visual algorithms to propose and discover surprising structural features of the uninhabited American landscape. Sounds for the work were produced by a remarkable antique slide rule, dating from 1895, that was untouched for over forty years and whose peculiar threnody is both mournful and rhapsodic. In its fractured and phantasmagoric reworkings of the horizon, the work offers us unstable metaphors for the state of the union and a respectful homage to the traditions of painting.

The video was shown recently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

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