The plot behind one of the hottest pieces of "electronic cinema" showing at universities and in art houses and libraries across the US, Europe, and Japan is pretty straightforward:
`Jacob Maker makes weapons guidance systems and keeps bees. While tending his bees, he falls into a reverie and visits roughly rendered spaces where linear thought struggles with warped axes of time and space. Agents of dead souls, the bees insert a crystal television in his head. The TV guides him to the planet of the dead, where planar, skeletal animations take him through the creation of the world and into the eye of God. (God's eye, it turns out, is roughly equivalent to a cathode ray tube.) When, in the form of a smart-bomb's gun site, he murders Iraqi tank commandos in the desert near Basra, all is right with his past, and he has secured his future.
Or something like that.
Don't expect to understand David Blair's WAX or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees, it's not your typical narrative movie. In fact, it was mostly circumstance that turned WAX into an 85-minute meditation on bees, death, war, and science fiction, Blair said.
"It started as a three-and-a-half minute piece, a sort of experimental graphic piece," Blair explains. "Then I added a story to it."
Leavened with distorted visions of William Burroughs as ancestral father, and the dead masquerading as letters that form the language of Cain, WAX has been called a "surreal video dreamscape" by reviewers, a film with a "rigorous interior logic that puzzle aficionados should enjoy deciphering."
Living from grant to grant, Blair took six years to make WAX. "That's a lot of living time," he said. Blair, 36, describes his work as video art, and WAX as "a science-fiction film first, but it's a little like hypermedia without the visible interface. There are a lot of ideas and changes of place...you have to relax and let it happen to you."
As with most art, it takes more than one viewing to appreciate WAX. But "intellectually it is not supposed to be a puzzle, unless you want it to be," Blair said.
With WAX enjoying solid reviews across the country (it's playing at the NuArt theater in Los Angeles April 27-28), Blair is ready to move on to his next film, which he has given the rough title Jews in Space.
"It's sort of a What-If: What if 400 years ago the entire world was Judaic and filled with technology?" he said.
Blair's film is still in concept stage and will probably take four years to realize. Meanwhile, he is selling a limited number of signed and numbered WAX videocassettes for $36.
David Blair: PO Box 174, Cooper Station, New York, NY 10276 (artist1@rdrc.rpi.edu).
ELECTRIC WORD
Wanna Go to the General Magic Press Backgrounder?
LaserActive CD Player: One Slot Fits All
WAX or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees
Getting Wired on Capitol Hill: Charlie Rose and the New Digital Democrats
