Video + Screen

A Colour Box

Len Lye’s A Colour Box (1936) is a vivid example of visual music. His abstract, energetic film was made by painting and scratching directly onto film stock. Lye’s process embraced spontaneity, rhythm, and a sense of joyful chaos, creating movement that’s disorienting but alive. His approach to motion and color strongly influenced my own video work, where I layer and mirror footage to create similarly unpredictable, immersive visuals. Like Lye, I aim to evoke feeling through visual complexity, letting disorientation become part of the viewer’s experience.

Mountain Castle Mountain Flower Plastic

Annapurna Kumar’s Mountain Castle Mountain Flower Plastic uses disorienting imagery and intense color to create a hypnotic, fractured experience. The shifting grid, surreal juxtapositions, and sudden transitions, such as mountains morphing into rooms, feels like glitches in memory or vision. It made me think about how both human and computer memory store and retrieve information, and how fragmented visuals can still evoke a complete sense of place or emotion. This connects to my own work, where I explored memory through childhood videos, thinking about which moments we choose to hold onto, and how those memories distort, layer, and resurface over time.

Foreman Gallery. 2024.“Mountain Castle Mountain Flower Plastic – Foreman Art Gallery.” Foreman Art Gallery. April 13, 2024. https://foreman.ubishops.ca/videotank-31-mountain-castle-mountain-flower-plastic/.

Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death

In Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death (2016), Arthur Jafa creates a film that feels relentless. The quick cuts and constant visual stimulation don’t allow you to look away, not even for a second. The clips of Black people dancing and expressing themselves, violently juxtaposed with footage of police brutality against African Americans, is especially confronting. Most of the video is made up of found footage Jafa pulled from across the internet: scenes from the Civil War, contemporary moments of Black enjoyment, weddings, protests, everyday life, and flashes of the sun burning. The background music, Kanye West’s Ultralight Beam, resonates immediately. Something about Kanye’s music always touches the soul, and here it carries an almost spiritual weight. The curator of the 2017 showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Helen Molesworth, said the film “suspends viewers” in an emotional state, forcing them to confront their own beliefs about race and the complex, painful space African Americans occupy in American society. And she’s right, watching it, you can’t look away, the quick pace of images leaves you in complete awe of the work’s beauty and horror.

The Reflecting Pool

In the film The Reflecting Pool (1977–79), a man dives into the water but his motion is suspended, and he remains frozen in a fetal position in the air as the pool in front of him and the forest around him continue moving naturally, slowly getting darker. Throughout the video, Viola’s body gradually fades until he disappears, and later, a man climbs out of the water and disappears into the forest. I find how early video works like this were made very interesting, especially how much time and care must have been taken to ensure that the still images lined up correctly without digital editing. The Reflecting Pool was extremely complex to produce at the time, Viola used a fixed camera and carefully faded several shots together to create seamless transitions between stillness and motion. The natural sounds in the video, with a slight echo, create a mystical and sometimes spooky mood. I also found it really moving that this piece reflects ideas about time, memory, and transformation.