HOTEL FATA MORGANA

with Andy Zuliani, as Magazinist

Found video collage with live sound for synthesizers, samplers, and tape. 30:00 duration.
Mounted at Left of Main, Vancouver, October 2019.

Hotel Fata Morgana explores the textures and contours of the unreal.

Its namesake is a particular kind of cosmic glitch, the most complex and rare form of superior mirage — the fata morgana, a dizzying multiplication and inversion of images atop the horizon. This atmospheric architecture was once thought to be the entrance to the land of the fairies; now, it presents different avenues of escape. The phenomenon of the fata morgana is suitably fraught with ambiguity and paradox. It is an otherworldly phantasmagoria — and yet, as simply the product of light and water vapor, is also bluntly mundane. It can be subsumed to myth, but also to science. It is nebulous, yet documented; it is an ephemeral wisp with an extensive material trace.

Hotel Fata Morgana takes a core sample of this collective imaginary, drawing its material from the vast proliferation of fata morgana videos uploaded to the web: from shaky smart-phone footage of bizarre atmospheric events, to bootlegs of obscure documentaries and educational television; from the speculation of amateur meteorologists, to the spectacularization of action news; and, reflecting and refracting this wavering archive, the painstaking and elaborate video posts of those who find in these documents the intimations of global conspiracy. These fragments of video are combined through collage techniques which, in the nesting, overlapping, and scrambling of images, seek to break apart the picture plane and flatten out the distinction between surface and depth.

The approach was to exploit the limits of technology — the glitching of chroma key software, the bitrate reduction of online hosting surfaces, the mistranslation of video across different encoding languages — and, in so doing, to make visible the warp and weft of our digital image-world. The video's score pursues the relationship between the passage of sound through intervening substances and the effects of heat gradients on light. The composition uses granular synthesis and digital sampling to generate warped microtonal melodies, shimmering rhythmic patterns, and slow-oscillating drones — the optics of refraction rendered in psychoacoustic terms. Voices and recordings are stacked, overlapped, reversed, shifted up and down in register, until they drift far from their provenances into the territory of the new and strange.

A study in distorted sonic and visual realities, Hotel Fata Morgana questions the seductiveness of false horizons and fairy-tale architectures. It asks: what might hazy morphologies of light and sound tell us about our desires for sublimity and entrancement? How might such material hallucinations be linked to other, more complicating visions — from the conspiracy theories of the "flat earth" movement, to the vast global imaginary of colonialism?