Domesticity - Spatial Video

A projection mapped suburban nightmare

This video, made in Spring of 2020, was a product of the mundane day-to-day interactions spent at home during the height of Covid-19. It was a collaborative project with my long-time friend and collaborator, Marshall Karchunas, whose photographs of houses and suburban environments are used here.

A major focus of this work is the oscillation of depth and space. Marshall’s photos always have struck me with how deep they feel. The environments he captures just seem to extend back hundreds of meters. So, I wanted to explore changing the depth of those photos by changing the way in which they are displayed, which is why they are projection-mapped onto this surface. Then, I used some photos I had taken of body parts wrapped in plastic which have a black background, and thus no space, in the middle point to create three different ideas of space: the deep photographs, the flat projections, and the space-less photographs.

On top of this study of space, The content of the video explores wasted space and wasted time, and the insanity that can brew as one experiences the exact same thing over and over and over again, as I was at the time of creating it. As the space is altered, it still remains the same, no matter what one tries to do to invade it or change it. They can fill it with hobbies or they can rebel in their own mind, but that space and life is unchanging. Perhaps a solution is to burn it down?

The sound mixes and warps domestic sounds taken from the public domain sources at freesound.org, and creates a personalized perception of the various activities taking place in the houses pictured, and the insanity one feels at the most minor of things. The stress mounts, and there is nowhere for it to go until the lights go out.