Black Box: This is not my father
"Black Box: This is not my Father" includes the only video footage I have of my father to explore our attachment to the photographic image, the paradoxical links between chance and fate, and the perpetual cycle of life and death. I shot the video footage of my father while travelling on a boat near the island of Culebra where we were documenting the devastation and aftereffects of Hurricane Hugo. It was during this trip that my father decided to make plans to visit a friend in Venezuela the following year. This decisive moment ultimately ended in a tragic plane crash that took my father’s life.
"Black Box" is made up of 2 primary parts: 1) the only video footage I have of my father, whose plane crashed during that visit to his friend and 2) an audio reenactment read from the transcript of the black box/flight recorder documenting the exchange between the Spanish speaking pilot and the control tower during the last minutes of the flight. Other water and flight related images are edited with this footage. The original video is approximately 2 minutes long while the audio is about 3 minutes long. Edited in a continuous loop, the longer audio and shorter visuals change their relationship with each repetition of the loop, creating new associations as the loop repeats its cycle. “Black Box” uses this fluid correspondence between the sound and image to reflect on loss, and how in the face of death we may look to photographic images to fill a void left by another’s absence. After my father died I found this moving image of him among the documentary footage we had shot on the island, and immediately wished I had shot more video footage of him— having the strange realization that I was associating the moving image as a kind of close approximation of him in his absence. "Black Box" explores the emotional power of video and film as a moving portrait, and yet at the same time considers the ultimate impotency and incompleteness of such visual surrogates to capture the essence of human life and relationships.Black Box: This is not My father
