The Third Space
2009, 27:05
video clip

The Third Space grew out of my photo/movie blog, Quotidian New York, which I used as a portable studio to record and archive photographs and movie clips of my daily whereabouts. In this case, they include the Super King Laundrymat in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Coney Island on the Fourth of July, the village of Saas-Fee in the Swiss Alps, and the Chinatown Bus en route to Philadelphia from New York. Choices of text size and font styles, transitions and timing were determined by the limitations of iMovie.

The Third Space displays text from the books I was reading while making the piece: Non-Places: Introduction to the Architecture of Supermodernity, by Marc Auge; Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, by Georges Perec; Basic Concepts, by Martin Heidegger; and Hatred of Democracy by Jacques Ranciere.

This piece is a purposely low-tech, low resolution video edited with bundled iMovie software, the only equipment I had at the time. Software theorist Lev Manovich is fond of asking us to check our ideas against our software to make sure that the software isn't making our decisions for us. This video looks into Manovich's queries and reasons that necessity is the mother of creativity.

watch complete video on vimeo >