®

®

ILLUSIONARY AUDIO-VISUAL EXPERIENCE IN THE 21st CENTURY

When I think about the amount of energy, time and the resources expended on all sides of this planet to make films, television shows, web series and all manner of pre-recorded entertainment, I find myself often shaking my head, and asking "why?". Why am I myself so dedicated to painstakingly constructing tall-tales, moments of escapist delight and manufactured worlds in which imagined lives unfurl and intersect with a complexity and dramatic flair that mirrors our own mysterious experience, but in many ways is altogether a very different kettle of fish. I edit a new web series while contemplating the new hard-drives I'll have to buy to contain the footage, and then super-hard-drives and cumulonimbus clouds of storage in faraway places I will never see that will keep my little story running on the internet for anonymous passersby. I worry about the electricity, the coal and plastic my little idea will consume in order to climb out of my head and into the "real" world. When I'm sitting in a movie-theater however, or at home in front of a smaller screen, and the film is a good one, all of these questions instantly vanish. There is no why, there is only the moment, the hyper-charged hour or two, in which I and a select group around me are receiving direct transmission of the cumulative thoughts, labors and essences of an incredibly talented and driven group of artists who have manufactured a dream, specifically for me to consume. And as I sit there in the darkened room, my neighbors and I don't notice the planet beneath us, silently turning on an axis, or the sun going down outside, or the universe beyond it, ever so slightly expanding in our wake.

                                                                                                                                                                   --Joseph Cahill 11/1/11