Forest of Fallen Trees

Forest of Fallen Trees is a videoproject consisting of four video screens. The project is a continuous search of finding faces in white noise signal through the exhibition period. This will be screened on a monitor.

For this project I`m utilizing a program I have developed in Max/MSP/Jitter that searches and find faces in video, quite similar to face detection found in todays cameras. Each time a face is recognized in the white noise, the program draws a white square around it and counts every face it finds. The total findings will be counted in the bottom of the left side on the screen.

Death & the other side

Video, like photography, has a history and connotation linked to death since the image is a storage and a representation that can outlive a person. In old times, when photos were expensive and you had to get a photographer to take it, you often took a photo of you, your family and your dearest belongings to stage a representation that would outlive you, by which  it also often did.

Video has a link to the other side, and continues a link from the mirror to be a portal to the other side, that can be seen in the famous movie Poltergeist. And for example there is phenomenon or saying that the audience that laughs on american TV shows are old recordings and the people are

now deceased of age.

Earlier I have worked on projects concerning the images of war and death and the technological and historical links between the camera and the gun. This project both expands and continues the research with an old paranormal belief that one can communicate with the dead through the TV when it is not showing any video signal, only white noise.

Edison the inventer

Thomas Edison were one the believed that it would be possible to communicate with the dead:

"If our personality survives, then it is strictly logical or scientific to assume that it retains memory, intellect, other faculties and knowledge that we acquire on this Earth.  Therefore, if personality exists after what we call death, it is reasonable to conclude that those who leave the Earth would like to communicate with those they have left here.  I am inclined to believe that our personality hereafter will be able to affect matter.  If this reasoning be correct, then, if we can evolve an instrument so delicate as to be affected by our personality as it survives in the next life, such an instrument, when

made available, ought to record something." -Tomas Edison

Although it was believed that Edison worked on a prototype for this invention until his own death in 1931, models or plans for this telephone to the afterlife were never found.

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