DRIVE IN EVITABLE 2010

I live 2 blocks from a dangerous train yard that intersects a busy, cross-town street. Commuters go psycho when the train comes: speeding up to beat it, flying down one-way streets the wrong way to beat it, lumbering over the neutral ground to beat it, etc. It gets scary...and loud. The dings, bells, and frantic, atonal whistles are with us 24 hours. I thought it would be nice to alleviate some of the chaos by turning the train into an impromptu "drive-in" theater. Since we were/are all stuck there waiting, why not be entertained? Thus the "Drive-In-Evitable" began.

The first "screening" for the Drive-In-Evitable happened in April, 2009 and involved projecting videos of friends, neighbors, and myself singing karaoke songs about trains, waiting, being stuck in the middle, etc. I put up handmade silk screened posters to advertise, ran 100s of feet of extension cord from my house to the tracks, plugged in my computer and projector and waited. When the train finally came, what happened was funny, thrilling, clumsy, and absolutely cathartic. The notion of literally projecting one's frustrations onto our object of torment gave us release. We tried to turn the waiting into fun, and it worked. People in their cars asked us questions, laughed, and maybe even forgot about being stuck for a second or two. 

Since the 1st “screening”, I have gone back to project onto the trains about 10 more times--each time with a new video loop to test on the trains. Instead of employing “entertainment” as a mode of projection, I began to recognize the communicative potential of more formal, iconic imagery. Using high contrast white silhouettes of the human body in motion as subject matter has allowed the videos to become more singular, more about analytical motion. These projections were engineered to focus more so on formal aesthetic qualities achieved by projecting movements onto something moving in a way I can predict, but not control. The train cars themselves become like frames of film through a gate, or like a zoetrope, and often the simple and/or complex movement of the figures light up the cars in beautiful, unexpected ways. These trains move linearly but sporadically, sometimes slow, sometimes fast, sometimes to the right, sometimes to the left. The resulting happenstance is what I’m interested in capturing. 

The DRIVE IN EVITABLE is a collection of sounds, images, documents, and objects edited to showcase my best train projection work—the moments in which the moving figures play out surreptitiously in rhythm with the alternating fluid and jolty movements of the train. These selections have been made into video loops that play in rows (split-screen, 4-channel, etc) arranged to reference rectilinear sequences of train cars. This concentrates the special moments of the (often dull and expectant) projection experience. The incessant bells and horns accompanying the trains remain essential elements of the experience, as does the moving graffiti of the multi-textured surfaces of the train cars.

The DRIVE IN EVITABLE Model Train Set is a condensed, small-scale, tactile experience in which the viewer is able to “drive/walk-up” to the miniature train in a gallery and watch a micro-demonstration of a pico-projection in real time. Rather than simply show footage of these projection events, I attempted to recreate the essence of the happenings within a gallery context.