Bloom, 1:35, digital animation with sound, 2013

About Bloom

Bloom’s layered motif originated as a wall drawing, for which I had produced a 2-D digital study. This study became the basis for a virtual 3-D model, which I animated by scaling, layer by layer. The animation resolves into an overall cycle, or loop, timed to a sound track I created by altering a recording of Mozart’s Mass in C Minor.

The opening bars of the Mass in C Minor, after an orchestral introduction, are purely choral. For Bloom, I isolated this 8-bar choral section and repeated it in reverse; I then doubled the whole 16 bars. Thus the full sound score of the film has an overall pattern of forward, backward, forward, backward. Because the attack of a large chorus lacks sharp edges, and because the rising and falling chord sequence is essentially symmetrical, it may not be obvious at first that the sections have simply been reversed. The animation, likewise, builds and retreats twice, though not symmetrically.

Bloom was first presented on a CRT monitor, playing in a continuous loop, in a show curated by Larry Walczak in 2006 in Brooklyn. Later, I reworked the piece. The current version was installed as a looping projection at The Outpost in Queens in a show curated by Caroline Cox in 2013. The original wall drawing, titled Excavation was installed at D.C.Moore Gallery in NYC in 2003, in a show curated by Mark Greenwold.