Zach Duer

an inextricable mass of forms reach out under a broken dusk

Mass began as a simple programming mistake while working on Time Garden. I wrote a loop to generate hundreds of avatars spread out across a landscape. Instead, I accidentally put them all in the same place. However, they each started at a different temporal point in the motion capture recording. The result was powerful. Each moment of the recording happens simultaneously, with each small subsection appearing to be in an endless loop (even though it is actually one avatar after the next, each performing the same movements in sequence). The result echoes the early tape music experiments of Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and Alvin Lucier, in which the technological process of the loop bring out the subtle details of sound (or in this case movement) that might not otherwise be noticed.

Set in the dusk of a barren landscape, the writhing mass evokes vegetation, and the gasping interconnected lungs of dense population at the verge of collapse.