My work as a filmmaker and visual artist really began as an offshoot of my interest in music. I’ve been a songwriter since the age of fifteen, and though I had an interest in photography as a child, it wasn’t until college that I began to explore moving media.
It began simply enough with a summer course in Super 8; actual film, editing rooms, splicing tape, hand-wind viewers and many, many late nights. I was hooked and quickly discovered that without too much difficulty I could double major in Psychology and in Cinema. The rest is definitely not history.
Binghamton University has one of the few experimentally oriented Cinema Departments in the U.S. and I did not fit particularly well within it. My experience with film up to that time was decidedly narrative -- and there I was taking classes with avant-garde giants such as Ken Jacobs and Larry Gottheim. Each film that I attempted became an effort to create something that my faculty didn’t outright hate. More often than not, I did not succeed. Though I may not have fully appreciated it at the time this was a very good thing. It pushed me to experiment with things like rhythmic editing, stop motion animation and optical printing while learning to appreciate the works of Maya Deren, Michael Snow, Stan Brakhage and Hollis Frampton.
When graduation came, I pursued more practical career matters, continued to create music, and spent a lot of time pondering how the unlimited potential of human beings juxtaposes with the very finite and uncertain amount of time that we are given to do anything meaningful. Working with archival footage from my wife, Nancy Kane (an early explorer in the field of dance and technology), I began to consider these concepts in a visual way. The first to emerge was Outside-In(finite), created for the TEKHNIKOS Dance and Technology Concert at SUNY Rockland. Since then, I have done several additional exhibitions at the local, regional, and national level. My films reflect my continuing explorations concerning potentiality, perception, and the finite nature of our time in this world.
