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arrangement after ash white, 2006, 04:53:00, no sound
Our culture shapes how we perceive the normal events in our lives as well as the ways in which we try to interpret life’s mysteries. Increasingly reliant on quantitative analysis in arriving at our worldview, we now come to conclusions and assumptions that, in the past, would have been explained by myths, fables and superstitions. Understanding the function of myths in a social structure serves to clarify various stages in the history of human thought and also helps us to better understand contemporary life. Mythological stories reflect the vulnerabilities of human existence through the manipulations of superhuman beings and our work explores this notion of frailty by building on examples from past societies where myth supplied models for human behavior. Looking at legends through contemporary eyes, we are better able to understand how we continue to be as manipulated by our culture now as we were in the past.
The video, arrangement after ash white, is taken from the biblical story about "the beginning". Before the earth, sea and heaven were created, all things wore one aspect, Chaos. Then God intercepted, the earth was formed and a woman blessed the earth. It was the "Golden Age". In this video we removed its narrative, producing an animation that becomes a visual cacophony of moving imagery, totally abstracting the original story while still reflecting its content.