22 Light-years
(2021)
22 LIGHT-YEARS (2021), digital video, 17.5 minutes)
“In the experimental films of Janie Geiser, the shadow itself also becomes the space of projection, the space where the imagined other, in the form of a video image, makes its unexpected return.” – Dennis Cooper
A time clash in suspended time, light-years away and light-years long. A house / home is imagined and re-imagined, inhabited by a family who never met. They leave and return. This goes on and on and on.
22 Light-years draws on a range of visual sources, including photographic negatives, diagrams, found patterned papers, and archival footage. These sources merge, sometimes uncomfortably, with video that was screen-recorded while operating desktop home design software. By creating digital floor plans, landscaping, and roofless homes in real time, and manipulating those videos to move them further away from the software’s intent, Geiser fabricates a digitally lush, elliptical, uncanny world, where home planning never results in a tangible home. The familiar material elements (negatives, diagrams, flower seed packets) wear the skin of the immaterial realm, suggesting time as simultaneous, mutable, and unknown.
Film and Sound by Janie Geiser
Sound Mix: Kari Rae Seekins
Digital Mastering: Astra Price