MAJESTY, 2:14, digital animation with sound, 2024

 

ABOUT MAJESTY

In the Fall of 2023, James Esber invited me to design a flag for his ongoing rooftop project in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Grand Flag, which overlooks a prominent corner in a neighborhood that has become ground zero for affluent youth consumerism. (James and I were among an early wave of artists moving into the empty industrial spaces of what was then an immigrant working class neighborhood, playing our role in the inevitable sequence of gentrification–– but writ extreme in Williamsburg by a sudden gold-rush rezoning of the industrial waterfront into luxury hotels and high rises during the period when New York City had a billionaire mayor.)

My flag was raised just before the 2024 presidential election, and remained flying in the aftermath for many months. For the design I needed a fluttering American Flag and decided to model it digitally, in part to learn more about realistic 3-D simulation, in which programmable factors such as gravity, stretch, stiffness, weight, and wind—each of these with dozens of components containing their own programmable channels, ad infinitum–– interact dynamically over time. For the flag design, I chose a single image from one of the successful animation tests.

The many test failures, however, suggested an idea for a film: start from realistic settings and booby trap them to produce unpredictable digital chaos. Unlike my other animations, in which I control the imagery frame by frame, with MAJESTY I could only experiment with settings and evaluate the results. A visual narrative, nevertheless, began to suggest itself. The present film, minus the titles, can be shown as a loop, with the end frame matching the beginning. The film is neither optimistic nor pessimistic. 

Douglas Henderson composed the mysterious soundtrack from digital breakdowns of his own devising in response to the animation. The film was installed inside a privacy booth left behind by a bankrupt tenant at the pop-up 30th Anniversary Exhibition of Pierogi Gallery in December, 2024.