Space Age II

Commissioned by Ben Russell’s “Tales from the Space Age” screening for MoogFest, Asheville, NC, USA, May 2016. Space Age II is a short video responding to JG Ballard's short story Memories of the Space Age. Memories become still as migration south moves forward. With vocal accompaniment by Jenny Graf. 

Dr. Edward Mallory, a former NASA physician, and his wife Anne are each afflicted with the 'space sickness' slowly infecting the country. The disease is a result of human's space exploration cracking a temporal element of evolution, the afflicted fall into fugue states, eventually to stillness entirely. Mallory and Anne camp in the abandoned motels and hotels around Cape Kennedy. There is much more to the story, plot and intrigue, but I've responded to Mallory's obsession with flight and fugue state of hotel living. In a way the video, like Anne, is in the end stages of the sickness, unable to progress beyond a seductive stasis and repetition.