Site/Recite (a prologue) (1989)

Overview

With startling precision, Site/Recite moves across and around a table-top graveyard — bones, butterfly wings, egg shells, seed pods, crumpled notes, skulls — in a series of seamless edits that present a continuous flow of detailed close-ups. This taxonomy of dispossession, "little deaths that pile up," is juxtaposed to a narration on the linkage between semantic self-consciousness and visual experience. Through the window of this text, the objects on the table come to model how consciousness affixes itself to material manifestations and how memory is constituted by the collection of empty vessels. Site/Recite is a prologue for Which Tree, an interactive videodisc installation that presents viewers with a maze of interconnected branch points, allowing them to wander through its forest of images and words to discover the "texts" of their own thinking patterns.