Ghost

"I made this work because I wanted to try out the idea of floating images in midair that had come to me when making THUNDER. The entire work was shot frame-by-frame with long exposures. I filmed this in the company dorm I was living in in the middle of the night after I had come home from work, and thought I might die from what had become my daily pattern of sleeping for two hours in the morning then going off to work." - Takashi Ito

At one time in my life, when the circumstances of my depression brought together a healthy balance of narcissism and ... self loathing, I would often make stop motion films and sound collage works in the middle of the night. In the case of the films, I would creep around the corridor that lead from my parent's room to the bathroom, smearing soap on a camera phone lenses and taking pictures of lights with different coloured socks and shit on them.

https://i.imgur.com/lyBNINq.png

"Wow, what's this piece of absolute complete bullshit?" Well sure, you're not wrong in thinking that, but this is just a frame from a series of images making up a film, chill. The use of masking was important to the art. The fabric let through little clumps of light that the camera wasn't able to render into a coherent image, and the refractive property of the soap scattered these parcels to further confuse things. Unfortunately I had trouble conveying the feeling of isolation that would have led to these images having any emotional weight, because I don't really know what I'm doing.

If I had been smart like Ito, I would have used the space itself to create my montage, given that it is actually possible to parse the intellectual context of the imagery that way. His use of colour and space within the frame is excellent, but even better is that this virtuoso composition is paired with a kind of clumsy tracking that grounds the film in the idea of "being made by some weirdo". Vulnerability makes the work accessible and emotionally sharp to the kind of person who knows what it's like to creep around at night making shit that almost no one else in the world will possible ever care about and being immensely proud of it.

Unfortunately I do have one small gripe with this, and that's the use of the quivering shadow people. It forces me to look at the work in a light that I think doesn't suit its aesthetic sensibilities. Introducing "actors" into a work that I feel is more about the space undermines the idea that I have of the work just a bit.