© Psychotropic Films LLC 2017
Perception
Known as V1 or Vengeance Weapon 1,
by Germany during World War II, the
lineage of this flying-bomb technology
can be traced to today’s cruise missiles
and bomb-dropping drones.
I plan to visually depict in this work how
even a nascent technology such as the
V1, was an effective terror weapon
against a civilian population.
The implications of today’s drone
machines are more profound. The Dark
Ages continue.
MAN TRAP was created from the idea
to portray an industrial environment
through a series of textured visual
portraits. In this film, seemingly ordinary
factory images are transformed into
counter-intuitive symbols, disconnected
from the human spirit. The photographic
method intended to artistically capture a
hidden visual aesthetic; with images
derived from a seemingly an uninspired
mechanized landscape.
Integral to delivering the emotional
impact of the film is a haunting psycho-
active soundscape "You Send Me The
Message" by ambient-electronic
musician APRODUCE, from the album
ALTARA.
In CONTROLLED BLEEDING, the
consequences of our dependency on a
finite resource - oil, is brought to
consciousness through perceptions of
recent history. In this work, artistic
media images; juxtaposed symbolically
and imbued with a sense of tragic irony,
evoke epic human struggles: David vs.
Goliath, man vs. machine, and nature
vs. technology.
The control structure of oil, disastrously
linked to our very survival, has resulted
in our acceptance of managed chaos.
Played-out in the background for
decades by political, corporate and
military power brokers, the cost of
needless human suffering, economic
uncertainly and environmental ruin, is
seen as incidental to protect the largest
industry on earth.
CONTROLLED BLEEDING is a film of
that nightmare; a nightmare from which
we have not yet awakened.
Note: The film is neither a historical
account; nor a documentary. It is an
artistic work derived from various multi-
media and assembled the same way
the mind creates dreams - from
fragments of seemingly random
memories.
Vengeance
(under development)
Man Trap
(2004)
Controlled Bleeding
(2007)
This film is a symbol of the world we have
created…..
Using video taken by a cell-phone camera
then secretly published to the Internet,
this film depicts events beginning
moments before the execution of former
Iraq president and regional tyrant Saddam
Hussein on December 30th 2006.
I saw this work as an opportunity to again
juxtapose a situation Medieval in nature
with the power of digital technology (cell
phones & Internet) to reveal a history that
in the past would never have been known.
Video capture and encoding from cell
phones at the time in the mid-2000’s was
extremely grainy and at low-resolution, so
therefore I had to use restorative tools to
enhance the footage and create the
proper ‘texture’ for the work.
Employing this textured imagery, actual
audio and additional sound design, the
resulting horror surrounding this event is
not from what you see, but what your
mind imagines.
The Execution of
Saddam Hussein
(2011)
“The Dark Ages Film Series supports the premise that the Dark Ages never ended. The history
of being human is one rooted in evolutionary biology and driven by technology.”
"The psychology of perception is a model of reality as being like
living in an extremely complex and sophisticated simulator. Brain
processes take sensory information about the world and create a
simulation of that world." - Charles T Tart