{"id":4645,"title":"Constructing Eternity: An Interview with Van McElwee","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/constructing-eternity-interview-van-mcelwee","version":"6f8ad720d5fdb85e19823bccbb3e0bf2aba786707a1c0b044078bce1bc826144","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:00.9240627+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"T. L. Reid"}],"authorKeys":["Reid, T.L."],"subjects":["Interviews"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publication","value":"Afterimage","url":null},{"label":"Publisher","value":"Visual Studies Workshop.","url":null},{"label":"Date","value":"July/August 2000","url":null},{"label":"Place","value":"Rochester, New York","url":null},{"label":"Volume","value":"28","url":null},{"label":"Issue","value":"1","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC1779","url":null},{"label":"Interviewee","value":"Van McElwee","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Constructing Eternity: An Interview with Van McElwee.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/constructing-eternity-interview-van-mcelwee.","publication":"T. L. Reid. Constructing Eternity: An Interview with Van McElwee. Afterimage. vol. 28, no. 1. Visual Studies Workshop. July/August 2000.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/4645.ris"},"links":[{"label":"Scanned document","url":"https://archive.org/details/ETC1779","relationship":"linked document; contents not retrieved","contentType":"application/pdf"}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":30656},{"name":"abstract","source":"recorded publication abstract","generated":false,"characters":37},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":783},{"name":"archive_summary","source":"existing ETC archive summaries: ETC1779","generated":false,"characters":37}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"The expansion of consciousness, the creation of timelessness and the generation of new worlds embody beauty without boundaries in Van McElwee\u0027s video art. His reconstructed realities captivate participants with a mesmeric hold that lasts far beyond the temporal end of a work. McElwee generates consistent surface textures using a technique that can be seen as a contemporary and electronic extension of collage. Approaching his video art with an astonishing amount of image density and rich ethnography, McElwee layers footage from diverse global locations allowing innumerable images to collide at the same moment and within the same visual space. The pleasure present in McElwee\u0027s art lies in the delicate balance between his sophisticated style and his sense of playfulness. Since he derives inspiration from many sources--without extolling the value of one over another--his video pieces (eight to 18 minutes in length) afford numerous levels of entry that make them accessible to viewers with a diverse range of sensibilities. In Folded Follies--Improvisations on the deconstructionist follies at Pare La Villette, Paris (1993), he transforms the exteriors of buildings designed by Bernard Tschumi into a Pandora\u0027s box of shuffled angles and folded sound. What appear deceptively as inert objects or stationary structures are dynamically transformed into plasticized components free to move within the screen space with a metallic clang similar to a tuning fork. Architectural accoutrements gain graphic weight in McElwee\u0027s closest approximation of the silk screening process in Bindu (1993), Sanskrit for \u0022universal seed point.\u0022 Pictures germinate into shoots of primary colors that pierce a white video canvas accompanied by the sound of waves and wind. In Transfinite Loops (1996), the sound of wind underscores the lights of amusement park rides that adopt a graphic quality as McElwee interlaces multiple sinewy clusters of reemerging patterns. A vivid video origami erupts into a colorful blizzard of fluorescent Ferris wheel flowers leading out of time and space. By orchestrating fades to black in Folded Follies, Van McElwee cultivates an alertness in the viewer that he perpetuates through instilling such reflective moments in the midst of his kinetic art. The meditative fades in Fragments of India (1993)serve as calms before the storms as the sound and image whirl together like dervishes. As a viewer tunes into Radio Island (1997), the Japanese penchant for integrating modern structures into ascetic ones resonates revealingly. As frequencies soar into the stratosphere on McElwee\u0027s soundtrack, radio transmissions sound more pulsar-like and cosmic than human and terrestrial. McElwee makes visible the intermingling of manmade and natural elements as power lines become like organic branches and pagodas pulsate with an inner life. He supplies a fluid vision that stimulates neural enlightenment. McElwee delves into the nature of duality--dualities that the artist discovers and those that he creates. He toys with the real and its replica while finding familiarity in the foreign. In Luxor--a Moment in Hyper Reality (1998), McElwee integrates footage of Luxor, Egypt with its reproduction in Las Vegas. Egyptian bazaars and street life meld with Vegas casinos and slot machines. With its resplendent images, Luxor lures us into glittering hieroglyphic displays and sparkling sands as we ponder the mystery of where one location ends and another begins. McElwee also jumps from one location to the next as if merging into an altered state in Confluence (1999). He develops organic correspondences in the locomotion of faceless crowds by editing them into a new context while maintaining the interpenetration of time and space into one continuous form. McElwee cuts back and forth between live fish in an aquarium and meat in a butcher\u0027s case. A daytime shot in one part of the world interchanges with a night time shot in an entirely different space yet we register these two locations as one unit merely oscillating between night and day. The correspondence of architectural shapes highlighted by parabolic camera movement confirms the effectiveness of this illusion. McElwee contrasts convex and concave forms with building recesses and relief carvings. In Fragments of India, the wide-angle view circles within spiral spaces reproducing the form of a Mobius loop wrapping serpentine-like throughout temples. A bell clangs in a call to worship. When we hear its ring, McElwee focuses on a cupola as if metonymically matching the shape of the dome to the shape of the sound. McElwee tangibly constructs cerebral architecture with unifying and sculptural sound composing a mystifying temporal elasticity. In Space Splice (1994), McElwee\u0027s fish-eye lens steadily wanders among countless settings as he creates a new folded space that advances in time stretching out into infinity. Although traces of life are evident, we never encounter any actual people because the viewers are the subject of his work. Walkways, paths and trajectories collide to associatively link locales. Eventually these realms converge, transporting us to a higher level. Space Splice climaxes with a collage of so many layers that it ends in a storm of video snow and audio drone. Every door in this assemblage of spaces leads inward as we are left to ponder if we ever truly penetrate. Although many of McElwee\u0027s perceptional vehicles exist as single-channel videotapes, their dimensions have also been extended in his gallery installations. These extensions allow spectators the luxury of passing through McElwee\u0027s video spaces and choosing which dimension to occupy for any particular duration of their journey. This past spring, Vienna\u0027s Trabant Gallery exhibited an installation of Radio Island at Amsterdam, Brussels and Frankfurt art fairs. People attending these fairs could view the work on four screens. The images present on this tower of monitors became architectonic. Vertical structures gave the appearance of beginning and extending from the first screen on the bottom to the fourth on top, expanding the terrain of the image as well as inviting the mind to explore the constructed geography. Where many video structures might entropy, McElwee\u0027s visual sculptures instead accelerate into an energizing overdrive without depletion. This effect is durative; it persists as lingering traces in one\u0027s consciousness--an eviternal amalgamation filling a given moment in order to transcend it. Past and present merge to move into an ever-changing yet everlasting awareness of the future. McElwee\u0027s work is challenging; it compels us to experience, perceive and ultimately to live more fully. McElwee\u0027s oeuvre includes over 30 videos and installations that have been exhibited extensively in festivals, galleries and museums worldwide. This summer, the Forum for Contemporary Art in St. Louis has filled its entire third floor with McElwee\u0027s single-channel work and six video installations including Cloud Catcher, Equilibrium and Procession (all completed earlier this year). A recent video installation, Transport, was purchased by Columbus, Ohio\u0027s Science Museum. This piece is projected onto four suspended screens in the museum\u0027s new facility. McElwee\u0027s video art has been broadcast widely in Europe and has been shown on 260 PBS stations in the United States. In addition to receiving seven fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts Independent Production Fund, he was given a travel grant from the Government of India, awarded The Experimental Video Award at the Athens International Film and Video Festival and garnered six nominations for the International Award for Media Art (sponsored by ZKM in Germany). His much-deserved awards include The American Film Institute Independent Filmmaker Award and the Director\u0027s Choice and Director\u0027s Citation Awards from the Black Maria Festival. His videos are archived in numerous international collections and are distributed by Argos in Belgium, Heure Exquise! in France, The Kitchen in New York and The Lux in London. (T. L. Reid originally conducted the following interview with Van McElwee in August 1999 at Webster University, St. Louis, MO. Text from multiple follow-up inquiries has been integrated.) T. L. Reid: Please describe your artistic background Van McElwee: Actually, I started off in painting and printmaking. I was also experimenting with sound recordings as a way of structuring time in a spatial, non-musical way. In graduate school I made a transition into time-based media: film, video, audio synthesizers and multi-track recording. At first I saw video as a form of electronic printmaking. It\u0027s funny now, but the notion of combining images and sound in video was a revelation to me. It was a huge breakthrough to realize that both directions could converge in one medium. Now I\u0027m using video to generate still images. I\u0027m extracting images from their temporal flow and creating new relationships between those images. For example, I am almost finished with a piece entitled Polychronon. It consists of about 500 video stills clustered in different ways and pinned to a wall. TLR: How do you think your familiarity with the art forms of assemblage and collage has influenced your own technique? VM: The important thing about collage is how the viewer completes it and creates his or her own relationships. Video is naturally a collage medium with a multitude of possible combinations between images and sounds. I did traditional collage before I did video. TLR: You use very distinct and textured musical scores that seem to emanate from the actual source. How do you discover your soundtracks? VM: Sound and image are two aspects of one composition that work in a back and forth relationship with one another, seemingly in constant conversation. But the actual piece is something else; to me, it is a synaesthetic form that is structured by editing. It\u0027s a pattern that coordinates pictures and sounds. One of the problems with video is that images can rob sound of its power to evoke images and sound can rob images of their silence. So what can sound and image together evoke? One answer, I believe, is a sense of being, a quality of existence. TLR: In Confluence, is it natural sound that you are manipulating? VM: It\u0027s the sound from the location. Both sound and image were recorded together and edited into a pattern of relationships. TLR: At times, the sounds are similar to percussive music. VM: It is similar to music but ultimately something different, a different creature. I think of my work as existing somewhere between architecture and music, which articulate time and space in different ways. Video can play among the boundaries between those two worlds; it can claim its own territory there. TLR: Where do the inspirations for your pieces come from? VM: I keep notebooks. I draw and write down ideas. Connections form from these, sometimes slowly, sometimes suddenly. They form clusters and when the clusters light up, I start shooting. TLR: How do you find the locations that you use in your work? VM: Usually I start with an idea and then I find a location. The work is almost the opposite of documentary, which explores a subject, revealing aspects of it. With me, a subject is a jumping off point. The recorded image is not an end but a beginning. It\u0027s a material to be manipulated. Fragments of India came from thinking about universal aspects of temple architecture, of structures that are shaped and disciplined by religious symbolism. I wondered if it would be possible to translate those elements into a time-based medium such as video. I received a grant from the government of India and permission from the Archaeological Survey of India to shoot at certain sites. Fragments of India includes images and sounds from Hindu and Jain temples, Muslim tombs, mosques and market-places. At the Experimental Television Center in Newark Valley, NY, I was able to restore the quality of red ","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":30656,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}