Adam Frelin

Pulse

single-channel video
4-minute and 35-minute versions
2004

In 2004 I was commissioned by the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis to create a new video piece that would be screened at their museum. Near to where I was living at the time I witnessed the pulsing of blue light emanating at night from the windows of a housing complex. The blue light was produced by televisions illuminating a darkened room. Because different people were watching the same station, their windows pulsed in perfect unison, though it occurred at varied and unpredictable intervals. In a series of anonymous apartment buildings and hotels I restaged this syncopated, yet random effect. The result inadvertently alluded to a collective loneliness that we, in the modern world, might be asked to share together.