Self-tending, 2008

Digital video, silent, running time 1 minute, continuous loop

Self-tending is a stop-motion animation in which clear blocks stack and unstack themselves into different architectures.

The block forms were cast from a crystal clear urethane.  When I cast them I was them unsure of what I would ultimately do with them but inspired to make them by two things: The first was a specific site I nicknamed “the Aztec” and that I had been photographing and video taping for a few years. An actual recording of the building appears in an earlier 3-channel work of mine, ADVENTURE NON-FICTION: Tracking the Void, and its form has been employed in my drawings. But I wasn’t done with this modern ruin, whose form most resembles Mayan architecture (not Aztec,) in a decaying Vegas shopping center. Simultaneously, I had been collecting information about Las Vegas casino projects from over many decades that had been realized in concept, some even in models and sketches, but never built. One in particular, Xanadu, captured my attention and in form had some resemblance to “the Aztec.” Informally, I proposed a public art project to a county official to present a suite of large translucent models of these projects in the same traffic median where the welcome to Las Vegas sign appears on the south end of the Las Vegas Strip. Though very well received, the project was unfeasible and unrealized. But the idea to use translucent or clear material to suggest temporal, elusive or transitory states remained. I was aware that a clear material that emulated the look of melting ice was provocative on many levels.

Once the blocks were cast I decided to have them make and unmake themselves into similar architectures as “the Aztec” and Xanadu and structures yet imagined. In doing so on a loop, the suggestion is architecture that can reinvent itself minus an implosion. Pointing to the role of contemporary architecture by brand-name architects as the spectacle of the moment growing out of urban centers around the globe (like Dubai World or CityCenter Las Vegas,) the animation playfully suggests the next development to come in the field of high-end destinations – spectacular architecture that not only builds itself but can continually reinvent itself.