CONFLUENCE

A video installation for six monitors and six video sources.

Confluence applies a complex editing score to images and sounds gathered by a video camera moving through crowded places. Among these scenes are a market in Cairo, a carnival in St. Louis, commuters in Tokyo, and a funeral in Varanasi. The unique edit-form of Confluence weaves these streams of movement together like notes in a musical score. Events are broken loose from their normal flow and are organized into autonomous clusters. The result is a transformation of the recorded world and its projection into a new temporal matrix. The tunnel of time becomes porous; crisscrossed by passageways and escape routes. Winner of the Director’s Choice Award at the 19th Annual Black Maria Film and Video Festival.

14:00 minutes, stereo. 1999

Confluence is also designed as an installation of 5 monitors/sources, arranged in an irregular grouping. Different parts of Confluence play on each monitor, constantly overlapping and interacting in different ways. This activates the space of the gallery and creates yet another level of temporal clustering.

Direction, production and primary postproduction by Van McElwee on all works.

These animations describe a set of monitor installations that were shown variously in the US and Europe in the 1990’s and 2000. Venues include: The Kitchen in New York, Gallery Trabant in Vienna, Argos Gallery in Brussels, Art Amsterdam, Art Brussels, Scope London, Art Frankfurt, The International short Film Festival in Lille, France, KunstZurich, Switzerland, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, and St. Louis University Museum of Art.