Destruction

This project is very literally the destruction of a moving image. Essentially, I've taken two videos playing repeatedly, and crossfaded one into the other over the period of half an hour. So at its most basic level, the project can be said to merely be the slow destruction of a video. This, of course, is not all there is to it, but I am loathe to say much more than that for fear of contaminating your interpretation of the project. However, I understand that I must divulge my thought process, and so I give fair warning that if you would rather let the project affect you without outside influence, don't read further. 

This project is as much a juxtaposition project as it is a destruction project. I couldn't get my head around the fact that our generation is so used to random juxtaposition, that we are hardly affected by it anymore. So this is as much as anything else an attempt to truly shock and offend people by juxtaposing two videos that I myself find shocking and offensive. To me, this project symbolizes the destruction of innocence, the pure, unadulterated joy of this child slowly fading into the most horrific form of self-mutilation imaginable. And the kicker is that the man in the second video was once that child, as we all were at one point in our lives. He isn't some anomaly. And while our forms of self-mutilation are hopefully much less extreme and physically manifested, we still find ourselves later in life committing acts against ourselves that one could never imagine the innocence of that child allowing itself to commit. I want to be clear that I don't mean any of this as a moral or subjective argument for a return to innocence later in life. Only just as an acknowledgement of where we are in relation to where we were, and all the things that must have been  destroyed along the way.