An Excerpt from 29 Palms
Experiment 4 Hypercolor, Hyperreal Nods to cinematography, Languages of Music Video, 29 Palms.
I met Kris Nelson at a Starbucks in Joshua Tree while he waited on his mother. WE talked about skateboarding, punk rock and films. WE exchanged numbers and agreed to do a film together. Why not? He had almost died recently while on Ecstacy and we used it as a jumping off point. Kris was a skinny jean wearing long hair teenager that lived on the military base in 29 Palms, California. Kris began shooting documentary of his own life using a flip video camera. Soon afterwards, Kris and I co-wrote a fantastical story based on a near-death experience that he had in ‘real life.’In the fantasy his cousins and friends all perform a secret ritual that prepares Kris for his funeral and then for his re-birth. They all do ‘the ‘jerk’ a popular dance, as part of the ritualistic ceremony of reversing the sacrifice. The art installation took place in a homestead shack that was used to shoot a scene of a dinner party in the video the weekend before. All of the food from the dinner party was left on the table, decomposing from the time the film shoot happened. The installation contained sound, and several channels of video that were autonomous yet interrelated. There were remnants of costumes and props, local artifacts such as a salt crystal and desert brush, decomposing food, a dilapidated bed and rusty cans that were originally part of the shack.
