I was in Colombia with the feeling of being further away than I ever had and looking out the window with my camera when I realized my camera had begun to mediate the look of the world outside exactly as I had begun to see and understand it--in layers of fluctuating importance, capable of going in and out of focus in a way which would obliterate portions of the scene only to bring them back again.

The technology I had always used to document or construct had somehow at that moment become what might deliver my emotional self to me. It could be that I had grown accustomed to the mediation it provided, however the translation that occurred this time was about myself instead of the external world. The conduits of translation were going in the wrong direction, and as lovely as I thought this was at the time, I have since begun to think otherwise.

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I don't have the same relationship with video as I used to. I suppose I became distrustful of it or myself when I began seeing my emotions reflected back to me in the LCD screen. This was the point, I guess, that the romance and enamorment needed dismantling. It's possible that some mystical force had actually begun working through my camera to deliver some deeper knowledge to me. Although it seems more likely that it was my desire for supernatural experience to come to me through video, as understandable a conduit as it had become. This is unfortunately not in keeping with the sense that the supernatural only functions properly when it remains in uncertain territory--when the grey area is created at the border of the possibility of human invention and actual phenomena.

Video and article by Maggie Foster.