I am going to start here because I have to begin somewhere. If I were to start anywhere else, I would end up with a completely different rationale for this project. so here I am. This all began when I decided to generate video feedback loops. Feedback occurs when a video camera is connected to and pointed at, its own playback monitor. The delay in the scanning process between the input and visual output of the monitor causes visual loops to occur on screen. #backthen I was not really aware of my entanglement in this process. I made the loops by reacting to the monitor with my own hand held camera, little did I know that the frame rate of my camera, and the refresh rate of the monitor, were both affecting how the images appeared on screen. #backthen I was more concerned with the live visual effects. what I did know was, depending on how I moved my camera, interesting colours, patterns and geometric offsets would appear on screen. I recorded the feedback with a second camera, set up on a tripod. This did not capture my image, just the visual results of the live process I was co-creating. This information was processed through my camera’s image sensor and stored in a DCIM folder on the camera’s memory card. I inserted that card in the SD slot of my Macintosh computer, and copied those files from the DCIM folder to another blue desktop folder. at a later point, after viewing and deleting some of those files, I attached the USB cable from my portable drive in the USB port of my computer, eventually moving the folder of videos on to my Samsung portable external hard drive.
I have only mentioned some of the mundane steps involved in that process. #backthen I was not fully aware of any of them. I was not attentive to the in-betweens, the everyday habitual actions, not fully conscious of the prompts and instructions from the interfaces I interacted with. #backthen , when it came to working with digital material I relied on the muscle memory earned from the endless times I plugged cables in and out of hardware ports, copied files
from folder to folder, converted RAW to jpg, batch processed hundreds of image sequences in Photoshop, or emptied the trash to clear memory on my SD card. There were many things about digital material I just accepted. #backthen I knew those video files existed on my portable drive. They had some kind of presence. I trusted they would still be there when I returned at a later stage to open them again. #backthen (it was about three years ago), I was not thinking about the invisible process of data conversion, image compression, or the translation of live event into binary code. #backthen I was more concerned with the memory I had of the beautiful pictorial representations of feedback loops on screen.
