22022022 (2023) Animation (work-in-progress).
22022022
22022022 is the date I entered the King's Chamber at the Great Pyramid of Giza at sunrise, as part of a project with photographer and filmmaker Oliver Halfin and musician and public speaker Matias De Stephano. One hundred people gathered in that ancient stone space and sang together. What happened next is difficult to describe in ordinary terms.
The experience produced a collective altered state — something felt by everyone present, profound and disorienting and real. I was commissioned to make an animation that would make visible the stories and perceptions shared by myself and the others who were there: to find a visual language for something that resisted straightforward documentation. Not to explain the experience but to evoke it — to capture the quality of what it feels like when perception shifts, when the boundary between interior and exterior becomes uncertain, when something ancient and resonant moves through a group of people singing in the dark.
The animation was made for the premier screening of the documentary film pilot, and sits within a long-standing preoccupation in my work with altered perception, hallucination and the things that happen at the edges of ordinary seeing.
The project is currently developing into a new audio visual installation work, bringing together the animation, sound and the testimonies of those present into an immersive experience.