Kasumi. The Drowning.

mage/sound: Kasumi
Dancer: Chan U Hong

3 video channels, 6 audio channels (mixed down for Vimeo)

The Drowning is a short remix - with a new sound design - of an earlier work "MO-SO," an EMPAC DANCE MOViES Commission 2009-2010, supported by the Jaffe Fund for Experimental Media and Performing Arts, Experimental Media and Performing Arts, Rensselear Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY.

The mysteries of cognition and the human ability to think in metaphor have become frequent themes in my work. In "The Drowning," I wanted to explore the impressions running through a man's mind in the moments before his death: the sensation of time slowing down, of heightened bodily perceptions, and the simultaneous unreeling of an internal cinema of images -- seemingly unrelated -- that create an unconscious narrative of personal history and emotion. The story in his head changes in the last seconds as the oxygen-deprived brain starts shutting down, speeding faster and faster, turning into a surreal, psychedelic collage of colors and primary symbols, the foundations of learned experience reduced to their individual blocks of information, electrified and dispersing like split atoms or dying stars.


Video - You Tube - link - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCUPFZDN6I0