8 minutes, U.S.A. (2003) | language: English
The video, "AMG Strain software applied to 'Way Up There: A Columbia tribute'," is part of a series titled "Strains of 2003" that improvises with the visually degraded images from web-streamed news videos collected with a slow (56k) computer modem. This video applies AMG software for the real-time manipulation of an msnbc.com news recording. The recording features Patti Labelle singing at a religious memorial for astronauts killed in the Columbia space shuttle disaster. It occurs in February 2003, as the USA prepares for the invasion of Iraq. Technologies of militarism and space exploration intersect with religious and pop culture symbols as we enter the dreamtime of the nationalist propaganda machine. The way to sift through a mound of sand is to start at the bottom, moving the hands upwards through it. The way to strain a flow of media is to move from the end of the flow to its beginning. The structural algorithm of AMG Strain software divides the video into multiple segments in real-time and plays back these dynamically variable-length segments in reverse order. The software interface is visible and emphasized as it manifests interactivity as conceptual and constructive labor.