This video depicts an inverted
reflection in water of a golden figure. The water is relatively
calm so you can almost make out a figure, and because it’s inverted
the figure is the “right” way up. It’s more or less obvious that
this is what has been done. The image has been slightly manipulated
to give a little more glow to the centre of the screen, so it
slightly throbs.
You can’t quite make out what the figure is, you could say it’s the
essence of a person, but not a person at the same time. The water
never stays still long enough for you to register the details, so
you are left with a kind of “essence body” that only remains in
view as long as the natural conditions like the rain and sunlight
allow it to exist. As soon as one of these conditions changes, the
figure evapourates from the surface. And that’s what happens. 25
times in an hour.
Explanations...
Epiphany number one: I had a special experience with a Bill Viola
video once, especially when I watched “The Passing” at the
Edinburgh Filmhouse. "The Passing" is the single screen version of
the material he was making in the early nineties with night vision
cameras, filming himself sleeping and a child being born and his
mother dying interspersed with shots of Californian deserts,
underwater sequences of fabric and himselfunder water in his
trademark ultra slow motion.
At the viewing my breathing slowed down, because it became in synch
with the breathing on the soundtrack, so my physiology was being
played with here. Because my breathing changed, my mind followed
suit and the breathing on the soundtrack became a strong anchor, a
strong basis to hang images onto. This meant that my concentration
became quite single pointed watching the video. This usually only
happens with a good story in a film to hook me in, but my
concentration was pretty firmly rooted on something that appeared
to be an anti narrative videotape. With much video art, my mind
gets bored quite quickly. What the skill here was, was to use
something physical, visceral even to affect the usual boredom and
projections of my mind.
Epiphany number two:
Watching the film "American Beauty" years ago, I loved the scene
where Jane and Ricky bond over camcorder footage of a plastic bag
"dancing" in the wind, which Ricky considers the most beautiful
thing he has ever recorded.
It was that rare thing - the film articulated something difficult
to articulate. It provided a visual metaphor but it had something
elemental about it too - just wind and chaos - and out of that wind
and chaos, a gentle hypnotising effect happened. It must have
touched my pineal gland in my brain, the part connected to the
mythical "third eye" - because I was rooted on the spot in what the
Sankrit scriptures I was reading would have described as "Samadhi"
- one pointedness, concentration, but gentle and focussed.
I wanted to make something that allowed the viewer to enter that
state of kind concentration, of beneficial focus but was not the
austere terror of the meditation hall, nor the noise of life. I
called the piece a "bridge activity" between the two states. At
worst my piece is ambient telly, but it seems to calm without
nullyfying.
Essentially all Samboghakaya is, is an hour long piece of an image
coming into existence and then being blown out of existence. But a
curious play of wind makes for an interesting dance, almost a
gentle tussle for the survival of the image at one point. But when
the energy of the weather dissipates, the water calms and the image
is reborn, reborn over and over again.
The piece is based loosely on two Buddhist doctrines, the idea of
the “archetype” in Mahayana Buddhism and also the “Bodhisattva
Vow.”
But sometimes, depending on who I speak to, I rename the piece
"Concentrate Kindly."
