Color Bars
Like the Desert of Tabernas in Spaghetti Westerns, the landscapes featured in stock videos traded on websites selling HD video tagged with simple keywords loose their geographic and historical specificity, instead becoming memories of an idealized landscape for a future viewer within the context of newly edited work. Beginning with the standard vertical bars used to calibrate screens for proper re-transmission of color on video, Color Bars recreates a seascape using anonymous stock footage. The structure allows for an isolation of the material, energetic, psychological and spiritual elements that constitute our vision and understanding of the landscape through what Merleau-Ponty refers to as the “insurpassable plenitude which is for us the definition of the real”.