“What is being organized in this case, is not any object, but devices for mediation, each with their individual histories and temporalities. In the AV tech closet, indexes of time crystalized in each media technology can exist amongst each other, outside of the timeline in which they appeared. The live-streamed video captures my motion in segments bounded by the mechanical time of 25fps. My motion, however, can capture temporality dynamically. In the closet, multiple metrics of time exist on top of each other - from when the technologies were created, to when the equipment was acquired by me, to how far along the equipment is in its own timeline towards decay. As I try to understand the many different temporalities and lay them out in space, I see myself as the needle on a video progress bar that is now self conscious. Instead of treading forward at a steady 25fps, it travels from a 1983 Sony Trinitron CRT TV to a 2021 M1 MacBook via the constant flux of my body moving up and down the shelves.” (excerpt)
“Through devotion, I seek to transform myself into a medium (within the medium), channeling the sociocultural ghosts that haunt the material residue of media post consumption. In the closet, I act out the functions of media on their existential circumstances. Through exposure, this labor becomes the media. Live-streaming is one method, but the assemblage of media devices in the closet is also inherently a communication device for an exclusive audience. What I have enclosed of myself, within a carefully crafted system of organization, can be reanimated by other users of the closet in their own embodiment of the mediating process of organizing.” (excerpt)
”The AV tech closet is itself a physical space behind your back. The closet is there to support the recreation of reality through a variety of mediums. Inside, the real mechanisms of this form of representation are bare and exposed. Through organization, the material constituents of media are put into motion and rearranged into my own assemblage of moving-image machines.” (excerpt)
Organizing the AV tech closet as media
May 2023
A performance (and an essay) to justify the act of organizing the AV closet as media itself.
