Pulse

Single-channel video / 3:51-minutes / 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.