Disobey This Command!, 3:18, digital animation with sound, 2025

 

ABOUT DISOBEY THIS COMMAND!

This film began as motif on paper some 25 years ago, a motif that eventually grew into a 17-foot-wide wall drawing installed at the Drawing Center in New York. The film Disobey This Command! is a cinematic exploration of this recursively-bracketing motif, in collaboration with sound artist Douglas Henderson, whose synesthetic accompaniment was composed to the animation. The paradoxical title is taken from the writings of cognitive philosopher Douglas Hofstadter as an example of a “strange loop,” a term that might describe the film’s abstract narrative, wherein at the brink of visual and aural overload the accelerating motif returns, by an unexpected shortcut, to its original proposition, a single bracket.

The film itself has grown over many years. It began as part of the Drawing Center installation where a monitor displayed my animations taking the drawing as a blueprint for a 3-dimensional object. Each week I was able to add a recursion, arriving by the end of the exhibition at the full eight-generation double rotation of the spiraling motif I had drawn on the wall. Some years later I reshaped the material, and then invited Henderson, whom I had known and admired in Brooklyn before he moved to Berlin, to compose a sound accompaniment. In 2007 this original version of the film was installed as a loop at Pierogi, Leipzig with 6-channel sound. I later showed the piece on monitors in several group exhibitions. In 2025 I refined and revised the film to be shown as a one-time projection.

Following is Douglas Henderson’s statement about the sound composition:

For this piece I chose to work with a very few sources, only 3 recordings: actions on a large tomato can, a set of door latches, and a thunder storm. The first illustrates the simplicity of the origin shape in the video, the second the more literal interlocking of parts, and the third imagines the possible scale of the whole. The sounds are all heavily manipulated, notably using cross-synthesis. Every sound heard has been synthesized with examples of the other two sounds, as well as iterations of itself, using “convolution”. Convolution is a process of frequency multiplication outside the time domain, thus related to the multiplication of forms in the image. The synthetic result is alien, yet believable as something that could exist in our world; these artifices then insinuate themselves as necessary constituents of the seeming concreteness and simultaneous unreality of the video.