Play It As It Lays

Abstract

In the multi-channel looping video installation Play It As It Lays, I project the sights and sounds of a series of complete circuits around the Baltimore Beltway (I-695) at night, in a variety of special configurations. Inspired by a nocturnal experience of pleasurable disorientation on the Los Angeles freeway, the work draws its character from experiments in digital cinema, cyberpunk literature, postmodern and psychoanalytic theories of spatial practice, and the aesthetics of Baltimore'sbuilt environment ? at once a unique place and a generic piece of contemporary American highway. Guided by the thinking of Marshall McLuhan, Fredric Jameson, Michel Foucault, Margaret Morse, Victor Burgin, Mary Anne Doane, Laura Mulvey, and others, Play It As It Lays presents a series of trips through a familiar space made strange, a contemporary hyperspace built of artificial light and sound, contributing to an ongoing aesthetic project of cognitively mapping the self and the lived environment in motion, as they reciprocally affect and recreate one another in a mutually interdependent relationship.