"The installation, titled When you cut into the present, the future leaks out (2012), seems like a real-time representation of a mind’s eye in r.e.m. sleep and shows off Caplan’s knack for spell-casting in the language of cinema." Christian Holland, dis/patches, June 1, 2012

STATEMENT

The exhibition OUT OF THIS BODY (2012) was comprised of three individual works: a 2-channel video installation titled When you cut into the present, the future leaks out*; an untitled sound installation with two subwoofers embedded in the gallery wall creating a low vibration in the space; and a slide carousel containing eighty 35mm original images, also titled OUT OF THIS BODY.

The photographs in the slide carousel are distillations of moments. These are images of being lost in a moment, staying to linger, contemplating and reaching for transformation. The manually advancing slide projector allows the viewer to linger on each image as long as they choose.

When you cut into the present, the future leaks out uses digital recordings of human experience, reduces them to data, and reassembles that data to create human experience in the gallery. This piece is situated in our impersonal, digital, post-internet (or pervasive internet) culture, yet it is one of the most personal works I have made to date.

Two wall-sized video projections cull data input from 200 very short video clips.  Synced audio is played in sound domes. I shot the footage over a six-month period in the winter of 2010-11.  However, linear chronological narrative is deconstructed.  Custom-built software chooses the clips and sends them to the projectors in randomly generated sequences.  The total running time to play all of the clips is 35 minutes, and then they begin again in a different random order. 

Though the sequence of events are non-linear, events are revealed in the footage that mark  time and memory, each clip building the story by association to the previous, slowing piecing together a winter of intense emotion.  There are birthdays and holidays, funerals and dance parties, hospitals and lovers.  The narrative strategy enacts the feeling of a period of personal chaos, disjointed with information given in small fast bits for digestion, with some moments fading back and some taking precedence, ultimately shaping a story. 

This installation also has a motion sensor.  Motion in the gallery triggers the video clips to cycle faster, without completing individual clips before skipping to the next clip, creating even smaller fragments. Personal video content turns into chunks of data controlled by the viewer’s movement, referencing the way in which we influence the events in our personal lives by our actions and reactions.

*“When you cut into the present, the future leaks out” is a William Burroughs quote made in reference to the cut-up technique he and others used to reorganize texts and images.