[-empyre-] We are all Kinoks

[Lynne Sachs]

Hello empyre friends,
I wanted to share a somewhat prosaic but oh so satisfying experience I have
had over the last two years.  I've been going through all of my drawers of
video tapes dating back to 1985 when I bought my first oh so heavy VHS
porta pack.  As all of us have been discussing, it would have been
impossible to know, though we could certainly have imagined, for sure what
the future would bring.  It seems to me that back then we would have looked
at the cartoon "The Jetsons" and figured out that visual telephones were
coming our way. But, for the most part, we thought the force of
technological invention would be about transportation rather than
communication.  How wrong we were. It still take about four hours for me to
fly to California, but I can take a tour of a forest or a living room or a
night sky via someone's cell phone any time I want. Anyway, I have been
working with a small digital facility in Greenpoint, Brooklyn to transfer
all of my VHS, 3/4" Umatic, Beta SP, HI8, and DV tapes to files.  What
struck me as such an incredible moment the other day was that I can now
order my work and my life as I saw it through a lense in a chronological
order, all within one hard drive.  The value of this year-by-year
historical sense of progression allows me, my children and anyone who takes
an interest to see the world change and evolve through one artist's
vision.  This collection of hundreds of moments (for what else is is really
but a sliver of time preserved) is also a record of a relationship I, like
all of you, have with the camera as an extension of  the mind through the
medium of a 20th century form of technology.  We are all Kinoks, grappling
with the shot and the edit, building our manifesto, trying to articulate
our own particular understanding of the relationship between our bodies as
organisms and the machine.

Lynne Sachs
www.lynnesachs.com
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