Back in 2001, I hit a little bit of big time and used the money to invest in video technology. The result was a couple of shoe boxes full of moving images from a very strange time. Some of them were beautiful but, like most amateurs with lenses, I had a lot of trouble editing them into anything beyond indulgent loops. "How do you edit endings?" I asked my friend in the industry. "You shoot them." He said. I battled and struggled and managed to carve one piece into narrative form, then I showed it to friends. There were mixed responses. "Is all your work this raw?" commented one woman. She says she meant it as a compliment, but I took it as a catalyst to throw both shoe boxes of mini DV into Tallangatta Tip. A lot of the accumulated clutter of my life went with it - six wedding dresses, a vintage olivetti type writer, a boom box style record player, irish kitchen crockery that is now very bloggable.....
The experience got me thinking about technologies of remembrance, about what we hang onto and about what we let go of, and about the nuttiness of the capture and edit process. Immense mental and emotional energy required. This little light dance happened in our kitchen last week, and it's a replay of something that happened to me in Sydney over a decade ago. If I said I found god in the glow of naff little blue neon jukebox on the wall of the Judgement Bar on Oxford Street, would you believe me? The next morning, I walked from Surrey Hills to Glebe, though the tunnels around Central Station, and the early morning sunlight turned everyone and everything to gold.
Things are so different now. But the sun still comes up.
