Flowcoat, 1997, with Sue Doe, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

In the ’90′s I was known for a blacklight body painting act I developed with a dancer and performance artist called Sue Doe.  It was a sort of Pollockian erotic ritual of pouring, smearing, hurling, and squirting fluorescent paints.  Glowing colors would drip over contrasting hues in an ever-changing visual explosion, choreographed to music.  Our performance was featured on HBO’s magazine show “Real Sex“, as part of a segment about the neo-burlesque Blue Angel Cabaret of New York.  Occasionally I still run into people who remember seeing us on TV.

So we got a bit of low-level fame out of our act, but it was a little too wild and messy for the mainstream stage and we never made much money from it.  Eventually Sue moved out of town.  For several years I was known as the blacklight body paint guy and got gigs at parties, nightclubs, and promotional events, painting models or painting on the people attending the party, before I too tired of the nightclub life – dealing with drunks and taking the Subway home at 3:00 in the morning deafened and crusted in paint.  This post is a look back at some of the photos that survive from that episode of my career.  Some of the painting was done in challenging conditions, but I’ve refrained from retouching the pictures to make the painting look slicker than it did in reality.  In no particular order, here we go:

Vortex, 2002, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Not all my blacklight body art was of the splash and smear variety.  Often my painting was inspired by my intuitive sense of energy patterns within the body.  In this approach, I have no preconceived design, but just let the brush follow the form and the feel.  The result is a spontaneous image of the body electric.

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Mamma, 2002, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

A blacklight is a light source that emits mostly wavelengths too short for the human eye to see.  It’s like a visual dog whistle – the frequency is outside our range.  You might see a dull violet glow, but otherwise it’s pretty dark.  Fluorescent pigments, the kind used in blacklight paints, are made from naturally occurring minerals that have a special property: when stimulated by light of any wavelength, they emit light of their own characteristic wavelength.  Returning to our audio metaphor, imagine the dog whistle causing a string to vibrate a note lower down on the scale.

Fluorescent blacklight-activated pigments are also commonly known as DayGlo colors (actually a brand name), since even in daylight they glow in their own hues more brightly than any ordinary reflective material could.  Under powerful blacklights, the paint is as bright as neon.

Poesia, 1999, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Blacklights and Dayglo paints became very popular in the psychedelic ’60′s, and the effects tend to evoke memories of acid-rock discotheques, scary carnival rides, and vintage science fiction.

Brain, 2010, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Priestess of Horus, 2002, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

The paints behave quite differently than regular paints.  The range of colors is limited, and there’s no white.  Whatever doesn’t fluoresce, including bare skin, becomes a dark background for the paint.

The image below, and two others later in this post, are from an event with performance artist Amy Shapiro, from Neke Carson’s performance series in the back room at the Gershwin Hotel.

Amazon, 2002, with Amy Shapiro, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Here’s an odd effect, below.  The sensor on this early digital camera was actually sensitive to light in the blacklight range, but the lens focused those wavelengths on a different plane than the visible light.  Thus the paint appears in focus, while the face underlying it appears out of focus.  I find that a beautiful accident.

Mask, 2002, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Tetrapod, 1999, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Authentic Person, 1999, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

For the slathering performances I used cheap poster paint.  It looks great but dries crusty.  Cosmetic body paint is a lot more comfortable to wear on the skin.  Even in the cosmetic paint, the fluorescent pigments tend to be a bit clumpy.  I tried to make the most of this peculiar texture in the painting.

Scarab, 2002, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Under mixed lighting, the paint still glows effectively as long as the visible light doesn’t completely overwhelm the blacklight, though the black background effect on the skin is lost.

Channel, 1999, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Orange is probably the most intense of all the fluorescent colors.  It looks positively fiery.

Flame Tree, 2002, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Below, an unpainted strip up the spine creates a dark shape.  The dancer’s sinuous moves turn this negative space into a snaky object moving against a bright background.

Governing Vessel, 2002, with Amy Shapiro, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Couple, 2003, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

A camera light meter is useless in figuring out the proper exposure for blacklight effects.  In the film photography era, you pretty much had to take a guess.  The photo below, taken during a performance, is a long enough exposure to give motion blur.

Gesture, 1998, bodypainting performance by Sue Doe and Fred Hatt, photographer unknown

The painting here almost obliterates the surface texture of the body.  It looks like a black velvet painting by a hypercaffeinated expresssionist.

Impasto, 2008, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Lightning Crouch, 1998, bodypainting performance by Sue Doe and Fred Hatt, photographer unknown

This one’s a good example of the neon sign effect.

Look Out, 2002, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Below, the shape of the lower back of a seated model becomes a kind of vase out of which a phoenix rises.

Phoenix Vessel, 2002, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Sometimes I imagine that if we could see hidden dimensions, bodies would look like this for real – bodies of light.

Power Plant, 2002, with Amy Shapiro, bodypaint and photo by Fred Hatt

Texture in Gray and Tan, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

I don’t usually think of my urban landscape photos as Fine Art Photography.  They’re just visual impressions, casually collected by technological means.  Unless it’s a job, I rarely go out specifically to make photographs.  If I’m going to the kind of event I think will attract a lot of shutterbugs, I’ll deliberately leave my camera at home.  But when I’m going about my business around town, provided I’m not too rushed or carrying too much other stuff, I often carry a camera with me.  Looking for pictures in the world around me is an exercise in seeing the world abstractly.  I like patterns and geometry, randomness (chaos) and design (order), elemental and optical phenomena.

Sometimes the patterns of shadows and light, when framed in the viewfinder, look like abstract expressionist paintings, especially when organic scatterings come together with rectilinear structures, as in the above image of mottled tree shadows falling across subtle bands of colored stucco and concrete.  In the picture below, the mottled pattern is light reflected from the windows of another building, a towering projection of fire in the middle of a monolithic shadow.

Light Within Shadow, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

Decorative ironwork makes the stark necessity of security an occasion for creative design, and the visual layering of the black iron and the dark shadows in afternoon sunlight make a complex tessellation.

Cracquelure, 2006, photo by Fred Hatt

At night, multiple light sources, of different colors, come from different directions, creating subtle patterns.

Stair Shadows, 2011, photo by Fred Hatt

Here, the sun shines through windows of beveled glass onto a tile floor perhaps inspired by Piet Mondrian.

Sunlight Through Leaded Glass, 2011, photo by Fred Hatt

A geometrical arrangement in red, beige, and dark gray frames an adumbral totem of modernity.

Cobra, 2007, photo by Fred Hatt

Another signpost is the figure on a ground of stippled gold and teal.

Park and Adelphi, 2005, photo by Fred Hatt

In a shadowy corridor, a beam of light shining through a skylight gives this brass number a soft aura.

Three, 2006, photo by Fred Hatt

In early morning sunlight, shadows and reflections from chrome architectural fixtures play like wild luminous graffiti across this stodgy corporate structure.

Plaza, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt

I think of this one as a study in polyrhythms, as the different repeating intervals of light and dark, thick and thin, angled and perpendicular, come together.

Interval Variations, 2005, photo by Fred Hatt

This composition of perspective and piebald is held together by the patch of bright orange netting in the corner.

Under a Scaffold, 2011, photo by Fred Hatt

Here, shadows of trees cast directly by the sun overlap shadows cast by the sun bouncing off of greenish glass, a vision worthy of a great abstract colorist like Joan Mitchell.

Shadows in Green and Gray, 2009, photo by Fred Hatt

Two lamps cast cones of light like sentries guarding this Romanesque arch.

Lamps and Arch, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

This porch light in the late day sun projects a robotic face on the wall.

Daytime Nightlight, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

Someone tried to relieve the ennui-producing rigidity of this building façade by putting the vinyl siding on at a 45 degree angle, but the venous shadows of bare trees are what finally do the trick.

Winter Composition, 2006, photo by Fred Hatt

Don’t rectangles and organic branching patterns complement each other wonderfully?

Storefront, 2011, photo by Fred Hatt

In this nighttime shot, the shadow of a cluster of signs and the crosswalk markings add their jagged geometry to a well-worn street corner.

Bold Stripes, 2008, photo by Fred Hatt

On this wall beneath an iron grating, two white lights and one yellow one create a network of stripes over the masonry.

White and Yellow Light, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

Light reflecting from (I think)  a bowl of water in the sun throws this ghost on an old tin ceiling, with a bit of a rainbow forming about the lower left edge.

Refractive Projection, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt

The cable installers never seem much concerned about neatness, and the angled sun turns their tangle into an art brut scrawl.

Coaxial Cluster, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

The columns in this neoclassical temple are cast concrete, but sunlight and bare trees give them the veined patterns of Carrara marble.

Fluted Columns, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

Here the crepuscular rays of a car’s headlights cross the sidewalk slabs from one angle, while the elongated shadow of a bicycle, cast by a sodium-vapor streetlight, cross at another angle.

Crossing Light and Dark, 2011, photo by Fred Hatt

Here the shadows of decorative ironwork dance across the treads and risers of a New York brownstone stoop.

Filigreed Steps, 2008, photo by Fred Hatt

White stripes, orange splotches, dark windows, a looming presence.

Night House, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

A tree’s narrow leaves make the shadows on this security gate, but it looks like the work of a berserk calligrapher.  The sky blue and pink paint on the wall are the colors of baby announcements, but what kind of world are they being born into?

Shadow Gate, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

The shadow of an ornate carved wooden cross at a Lithuanian church breaks as it falls across a stepped wall.

Segmented Cross, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

When multiple light sources of different colors cast shadows of a single object, the colors neutralize in the bright areas but intensify in the shadows, especially where light of only one color falls.

Tinted Lines, 2011, photo by Fred Hatt

The city is designed and constructed of plane surfaces, but without the organic forms of trees and people in motion, it would be nothing.

Sidewalk Shadows, 2011, photo by Fred Hatt

Glass Bricks, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt

I’m feeling a bit oversaturated these days, both by the incessant rain we’ve been having in the Northeastern states, and by the relentless media focus on the tenth anniversary of September 11, 2001.  If you’re interested in a long-time New Yorker’s look back at that event and its cascading effects over the past decade, look at my post from last year, “Signs in the Aftermath.”  For now, I’d rather distract myself and my readers with shiny things.

Insistent Squares, 2003, photo by Fred Hatt

I live in a city of glass and steel and plastic, colored electric lights and glittering curves and facets.  The quadrangular grid is the fundamental pattern of the city, rigid, regular, and inhuman.  But the grid is only the substructure for a culture of remarkable frenzy and chaos.  Chaos manifests in the pure optics of grids of reflective materials, as the inevitable imperfection of flat surfaces introduces dazzling distortions.  Sometimes the details of a reflected view are fragmented and repeated, something like what an insect supposedly sees with its compound eye.

Emergent Image, 2008, photo by Fred Hatt

There are layers of reflections, as when an object of stainless steel, with cylindrical curves, is viewed through a window, whose transparent and reflective qualities superimpose the space in front of the viewer over the space behind the viewer.

Modern Lamp, 2005, photo by Fred Hatt

At night, metallic walls turn the various sources of light into swirling patterns like the methane turbulences of the planet Jupiter.

Steel Clouds, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt

Or like the op-art paintings of Victor Vasarely.

Diner Rays, 2005, photo by Fred Hatt

Or like the tormented patterns of Arshile Gorky.

Plexi Deli, 2002, photo by Fred Hatt

Frenetic jabs of neon and fluorescent light put a figure in an environment of cold fire.

Silvery Gate, 2003, photo by Fred Hatt

Stainless steel facets turn architecture into abstract expressionism.

Deco Shatter, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

Perhaps this view of reality, faceted, multiply reflected, distorted, layered, shows a reality that the classical image, with its hard-edged clear divisions, misses.  Objects are not separate, but exist only in a complex web of relationships.

Patchwork, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

A person exists only as a reflection of all that is around them.

Chrome Mannequin, 2005, photo by Fred Hatt

Our love of order and regularity makes us build an environment of reflective planes.  The imperfection of our planes reveals the contortions we like to think we’ve transcended.

Drunken Building, 2001, photo by Fred Hatt

Our grids are ragged and jagged.

Spasmodic Geometry, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt

The more we try to order our world, the more it asserts its unwillingness to be ordered.

Amoebic Grid, 2011, photo by Fred Hatt

The taillight of a car in the sunset becomes a scarlet thread in the steel quilt of a vendor’s cart.

Red Infusion, 2005, photo by Fred Hatt

A new monument near Union Square depicts Andy Warhol as the artist who reflected his surroundings, mirrorlike.

Silver Andy ("The Andy Monument", by sculptor Rob Pruitt, 2011), photo by Fred Hatt

Regularity and symmetry are an illusion.  The world we move in is dynamically unbalanced.

Red Distortion, 2001, photo by Fred Hatt

Our reality is a membrane that seems to have an inside and an outside, but those two worlds are both implicit in the membrane, and their separateness is an illusion.

Winter Fruit, 2001, photo by Fred Hatt

An image like this exists only because of the conjunction of the car and the building reflected in its surface.  Light makes them one thing.

Pathfinder, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt

A red printed number is on fire with orange and blue-green light.

$9, 2007, photo by Fred Hatt

New shiny, curvy, minimalist architecture exists visually only as a distorted reflection of  old, opaque, classical, decorated architecture.

Fragmentation, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

In many Asian businesses, the beckoning cat invites prosperity.  This silvery one also captures the colors and light of its surroundings.

Beckoning Cat, 2005, photo by Fred Hatt

Water is also used as a decorative element in the city of glass and steel.  Its light distortions are dynamic, always in motion.

Plaza Pool, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

Here mirror reflection, reflected light and shadow, and a sloped glass wall are framed by flat and rounded opaque geometric structures.

Recursion, 2011, photo by Fred Hatt

This combination of gridlike patterns and irregularly reflective surfaces is the visual essence of the twentieth century city.

Glass Loom, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

Unsh, 2006, photo by Fred Hatt

Language is meant to flow like water.  It conveys meaning through cadence and syntax, tone and undertone.  It is the river in which our minds swim and spawn and take the bait.  Fragment and blow it up and find the weirdness in it, as you would find the odd creatures in a drop of river water seen under a microscope.

Ampersand, 2005, photo by Fred Hatt

The English language is littered with mismatched characters and syllables and ideas, a jumbled rummage sale.

Hair, 2007, photo by Fred Hatt

Words on signs aren’t just signifiers, they’re physical objects that poke out, catch the light, rust, run in the rain.

Tunod Niwt, 2006, photo by Fred Hatt

Alphanumeric characters are wrought of our fundamental elements of form.  They become abstracted by accident, or by design.

Peace, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt

All these pictures are from New York.  The city’s characteristic graphic mode is uppercase bold, and as long as a sign communicates no one has time to polish the raggedy edges.

Iquo, 2006, photo by Fred Hatt

Heavy fonts in all caps speak with chesty syncopation.

Clear, 2003, photo by Fred Hatt

Script fonts sing.  Big and bold script fonts are Broadway belters, pitching the tune to the cheap seats.

Grace, 2005, photo by Fred Hatt

“Mosaic” is thought to be from the same root as “museum” and “muse”, but spelled the same way the word also means “having to do with Moses”, the Hebrew liberator and lawgiver.  Words in mosaic form look old and authoritative, even when they’re new.

OthS, 2006, photo by Fred Hatt

Words as signs cast shadows and coexist with all the manifestations of Nature.

Shops, 2006, photo by Fred Hatt

Big words are styled to give aesthetic force to what they signify, to convey qualities like whimsy, modernity, or sobriety.

Authority, 2005, photo by Fred Hatt

Many big signs these days are overly familiar corporate branding and generic marketing, but you still see a lot of high-spirited 20th century design.

S Broiled S, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt

Like the babble of voices in a crowd, words on display can get lost in the layers and dissolve into multicolored noise.

Og & Cat Fo, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

Sometimes I see hidden messages in segments of words.

Land Rot, 2005, photo by Fred Hatt

Some words shake their booties like shameless drunks.

Rub Righteous, 2007, photo by Fred Hatt

Others proudly proclaim their dullness and conformity.

Building Mart, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt

Basking on glass, a word is projected on the underlying soft fabric.

Stones, 2006, photo by Fred Hatt

Choose me!  I am exotic in a fun and happy way.

Opt, 2006, photo by Fred Hatt

I dare to be illegible but dashing, an arabesque in gridland.

Villency, 2005, photo by Fred Hatt

We have everything you could want, and all of it is all lit up.

Neon Menu, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt

In all the jumble and agita of the hard world, we offer you light and color and atmosphere.

Light, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

Curvy swooping lines that sell a fantasy of elegant luxury contrast or merge with the jagged overlay of winter survivors.

Trump Palace, 2009, photo by Fred Hatt

Rustic and quirky means wholesome and real.

Organic, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

That’s in contrast to the traditional corporate style, respectable intimidation.

Time War, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

Neon words are spelled with bent tubes of glass holding luminous gas, little labyrinths of light.

Monum, 2006, photo by Fred Hatt

Stone words are the traditions that stand through the centuries, defying the ephemeral.

Crucified Again, 2005, photo by Fred Hatt

Shiny metal is the dazzle of the technological era.

All, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt

A word can be like a vine, florid and tentacular.

Primary, 2006, photo by Fred Hatt

Another word embodies the neatness and assertive simplicity of the modern style, even amid a jungle of decor.

Optic, 2006, photo by Fred Hatt

Fun can be manufactured on an industrial scale.

Thrills Whee, 2009, photo by Fred Hatt

Silliness and idiosyncracy can be picked up in a shop.

Parties, 2001, by Fred Hatt

We can make you think of the most intimate sensory experiences while you navigate the canyon of towers.

Smell, 2001, photo by Fred Hatt

When you come to a corner, hang a 90 and keep on trucking.

Groc Ery, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

Pop art is all about abstracting icons and remixing ideas in the field of commerce.

Vote, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt

It takes some patina to fulfill the classical style.

Hand, 2005, photo by Fred Hatt

When the power is turned off, the word means its opposite.

Open, 2005, photo by Fred Hatt

Letters condensed to be readable from one angle look like broken stairsteps when seen from another angle.

School, 2005, photo by Fred Hatt

In our time we are not ashamed of our desires.  They are the meaning of our lives!

Urge, 2007, photo by Fred Hatt

It is all about getting and getting more and more.

Receiving, 2007, photo by Fred Hatt

Even when it is all eroding out from under us, we shall consume.

Fresh Donuts, 2010, photo by Fred Hatt

The only alternative to satiating our desires is lashing out in our anger!

Rage, 2003, photo by Fred Hatt

Luminous Interval, 1991, still frame from video by Fred Hatt

Making a work of art that goes beyond the sketch level is like cooking: ingredients are chosen and combined, subjected to the controlled heat of the artist’s craft and sensibility.  You might conceive a recipe and then go about gathering all the elements that will go into it, but most artists, in whatever medium, keep a kind of pantry of ideas, sketches, and fragments that they draw upon to make a dish.

My blogging process works the same way.  My pantry contains my archive of new and old work, sketches and experiments, things I’ve seen, ideas and fragments of writing.  When I feel the need to whip up a blog post, I see what’s in the pantry and try to figure out what I can make from it.  Last week’s post was a kind of stew, a bunch of unrelated morsels that were simmered together in the stock idea of spatial perception.

This week I’m going to look at this art of combining ingredients through “Luminous Interval”, a video piece I made twenty years ago, one of my earliest attempts to make something meaningful out of the random results of unguided experimentation that tend to fill my pantry.  The illustrations are still frames from the video piece, interspersed without particular reference to the adjacent text.

Luminous Interval, 1991, still frame from video by Fred Hatt

In the mid-1980’s I was living in Oklahoma and had a job producing local television commercials to run on cable systems in small city markets around Oklahoma and Texas.  I used to drive to these markets in a production van with industrial U-matic video equipment.  I wasn’t making my own films, but I often experimented with the equipment, filming the highways and motels on my way.  When the gain was turned up on these old tube cameras, for shooting in low-light levels, the results had a weird, hyper-saturated glow.  Other effects arose from filming with condensation on the lens, or from changing various settings while shooting.

Another kind of experimentation I enjoyed was video feedback.  Pointing a camera at its own monitor creates the same kind of endless tunnel effect you get by facing a mirror to another mirror, but with a slight delay, and moving the camera or changing settings produces blooming, morphing forms of colored light.

Luminous Interval, 1991, still frame from video by Fred Hatt

I moved from Oklahoma to New York and got another job that gave me access to video and film gear, working as Operations Manager at Film/Video Arts, a nonprofit media arts center offering equipment, facilities and training at subsidized rates for independent and noncommercial film and video projects.  I borrowed a spring-wound Bolex 16mm camera and shot some film while visiting a waterfall and stream somewhere in the woods in the Catskill mountains with a dancer friend.  Later, I experimented further with this footage on Film/Video Arts’ film-to-tape transfer machine, which allowed film to be run forward and backward, in slow and fast motion, and converted to negative, with tonalities and colors reversed.

Luminous Interval, 1991, still frame from video by Fred Hatt

I found myself with a stack of tapes containing the results of all this aimless playing around.  I loved the imagery, but something more coherent would have to be made from it to make it worth sharing with others.  My starting point was the contrast between the lush eden of the Catskills stream and the alienating, isolated feeling of the highways and motels.  The architecture that grows around the modern highway is functional, generic, and hard.  It aims to keep us moving along, no rooting or flourishing allowed.  In this context, the forest stream images could be seen as memories of the richness of life.

Luminous Interval, 1991, still frame from video by Fred Hatt

I had recently been reading the Bardo Thodol, or Tibetan Book of the Dead, a text that views death as a transitional state, a passage between worlds in which visions of peaceful and wrathful deities test the spiritual state of the soul on its way to finding a new womb of rebirth.  Though I was young and healthy myself, mortality was on my mind.  This was at the height of the AIDS crisis, when so many of the creative of my generation, and so many of my friends, suddenly wasted away in their prime.

The Bardo Thodol gave me a rough structure, inspiring the six numbered “chapters” seen in the video.  The edition of the Bardo Thodol that I had described the “bardo” as a “luminous interval” or transitional state between realms, so “Luminous Interval” became the final title of the piece (some earlier versions were screened under the title “Baptism”).  My idea of this structure was also influenced by the 1963 electronic music composition “Le Voyage”, by Pierre Henry.  “Le Voyage” is also based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and had been a favorite album of mine when I was a kid.  Some fragments of this piece are used in “Luminous Interval”.

Luminous Interval, 1991, still frame from video by Fred Hatt

To sharpen the idea of the journey of rebirth, I borrowed a National Geographic film called “The Incredible Human Machine” from the public library, appropriating some of its amazing medical footage, especially the material showing the fertilization of the ovum and development of the embryo, to layer in with my other material.

Luminous Interval, 1991, still frame from video by Fred Hatt

All the original video material I had to work with was silent.  I felt that having some sound on it would make it easier to find transitions and moments in it, so I simply dubbed entire sides of some of my favorite LPs onto the source footage tapes.  I chose atmospheric pieces that seemed to fit the moods I saw in the footage, but once the sound was laid down I did nothing to move or alter it.  In the edited video, wherever the video is cut the audio is also cut, and wherever there are two pieces of video superimposed, the two sound sources are also mixed.

When I’d finished a rough edit of all this material around the Bardo Thodol structure, it did seem a mystical, psychedelic journey, but I felt it still needed a stronger narrative element.  I found the poem “The Flight of Quetzalcoatl” in Jerome Rothenberg’s “Technicians of the Sacred”, a collection of his poetic renderings of myths, songs and rituals from traditional cultures all over the world.  “The Flight of Quetzalcoatl”, from the Nahuatl Epic, depicts the exile, mortality, and rebirth of the Mesoamerican deity of the dawn, the Feathered Serpent.  This poem seemed to fit my narrative like a glove, so I added excerpts from it as a voiceover.  Like the music excerpts, the poem is fragmented and re-ordered.

Luminous Interval, 1991, still frame from video by Fred Hatt

This is how a finished piece was made out of material that came out of pure play, without any vision of the finished product guiding the creation of the source material.  Much of my work is done this way, not only video work but also drawing and painting.  In my larger drawing works, I often begin by sketching unplanned overlapping figures, only then trying to discover some structure in the resulting chaos.  You can read a description of that drawing process here.

You’ll notice that there’s quite a bit of material in this piece that I’ve appropriated without permission.  When the film was made it was only shown in noncommercial screenings, so it wasn’t an issue, but now it’s going up on the internet.  I think the “fair use” argument, that only fragments of the music and video and text sources are used and that they’ve been made into a substantially new work that does not compete or infringe on the original sources, applies here.  Full credits are seen at the end of the film and can also be found in the info section on the video’s Vimeo page.

The video itself is embedded at the bottom of the post.  I believe subscribers who receive the blog by email won’t get the embedded video, but will need to click to the blog site or to follow this link to the Vimeo site for this video.