Item 3145 - he sat on the glittering precipice

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Llengua: Inglés. Països: Canada

Master es dvd NTSC falta sinopsis en catalan falta sinopsis en castellano In August of 2006 my father died at home after a long battle with cancer. During the last 2 years of his life I spent a great deal of time with him. As the end grew near, he spent a lot of time drifting in and out of consciousness, sometimes not knowing where he was, confined to his bed. It was obvious that his perception of reality was shifting, and the idea grew in my mind to somehow capture his experience for us to share. I wanted to encompass his experience, my own experience being with him, and the philosophical and spiritual ideas that guided his life as a Hindu. I wanted to make something that was rooted in his and my actual experience of those moments spent together, of confronting mortality, and of letting go of a loved one. I decided to spend 24 continuous hours awake in my father’s room with him (it turns out that the material was gathered one month before his death). 24 hours awake of course presents the obstacles of boredom and exhaustion. Principles of meditation from various spiritual traditions in south Asia welcome these experiences because they give us an opportunity to enter fully into the moment. This process/moment of letting go (for there is nothing to hold on to) opens up a whole new universe to the perceiver, a world in which every moment is unique, precious and filled with wonder. The initial desire to be present mindfully for my father was ultimately to be realized by embracing the boredom, in the way that these spiritual traditions encourage. It is this state that I wished to present to the viewer, using the materials at hand: the sound of the room and the light from his window. I thought that there must be a way to present an altered reality, one more in keeping with my father’s experience at the time, and one that invited us into it. I decided to take each aural and visual moment and magnify it, examine it, and present it as a “long now”, a now that we can enter and be present in. Stretching audio by a factor of 24 without changing pitch results in a continuous drone of sound, subtly related to but much more intense than the raw, real time sound. I decided to use one feature of the room, the window overlooking the street, as source material for the visuals, referencing the visual aids of a flame or image that some meditation practices use. This combination of processed visual and auditory material is both my approximation of his mental state and invitation/aid to engage with the physical reality of space/time and transcend the illusory nature of existence. I like to think that both of these ideas were at play in my father’s consciousness as well, whether or not he was aware of it. The resulting 24 hour video is edited and presented as part of a multichannel video installation, with each presentation of the installation a result of the interplay of various video loops created expressly for the exhibition. Every program requires a mindful engagement with the processed source material to create the loops. In this way, the gestures of mindfulness and remembrance are continually revisited. Debashis Sinha, Toronto, 2008

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