On watching the first cut of I Told Them My Camera Was On

photographs by Linda lai

Feeling strange and alienated
I stared at images I made forming a new world I did not know.
Acquiring a new appearance
Born into a new life I’m yet to discover,
I found myself in a void of immobility,
Stuck with the 21-gram lightness to recall
Where these images came from,
From what stories I had trespassed,
And from whose histories I had appropriated.

Flashes of the aging process,
Flashes of swelling bodies,
Faces that defy the containment of a shot…
They tell me nothing…
They tell you nothing…
Torrents of voluntary presence, or streams of the unconscious
There, being there.
Here, not there, never there ever.

Each face a token
Each other face the mockery of that token.

The optical unconscious,
Or energies in a flux?

 

/ Linda Lai (March 9, 2004)

I Told Them My Camera Was On is my video work experimenting with ideas of documentary, narrativity, and visual ethnography. The work was completed with 2 versions in 2005.