Space Delay, single channel video, HD, stereo, 76min, 2015
for screening and exhibition rentals please contact the Video Data Bank
“Beautiful Views Forever! EXCELLENT survivalist piece” — that’s how an acre of land in Arizona was advertised on eBay, the online auction site. We clicked on the listing, won the auction, and paid the sellers $700, with the promise that they’d send us the deed, making us the rightful owners. But the deed never came. Instead, we got excuse after excuse until the communication eventually stopped altogether.
Not knowing what else to do, we typed the names and email addresses of the two sellers into Google’s search bar. Google had plenty to reveal. We found their address in Denver, Colorado, booked a flight, determined to meet them face-to-face and discuss their morals in terms of conducting online business with real land and real people. But when we knocked on their door, no one answered.
Google sent us to their favorite local restaurant , which they had reviewed and we ate the food they ate. We showed the waiter a picture of them. He recognized them, said they were regulars and asked, since we looked so similar – if we were relatives. We left and stayed the night at a motel they had reviewed online during one of their travels with their two kids and imagined that we slept in the same beds as they did. Step by step, our google search results led the way to places they’ve been and might still be. Deeply engaged in this spiraling journey through the American West, it eventually dawned on us one night, that we – the followers – had slowly turned into the ones we followed. Yet by then it was too late. Immersed in our pursuit, the digital web we had entered, was too tightly woven into reality for us to just close a browser window and escape.
“One of the most terrestrial exchanges between humans – the sale of a plot of land – is the beginning of a bizarre American odyssey when the artist duo eteam buys an acre of the Southwestern desert on eBay. The deed never arrives in the mail, so eteam attempts to track down the phantom seller, a porous Internet characters operating as Larry and Radonna, Eclectic Treasure Collection, or the Barefoot Shaman. A virtual search for them turns actual when eteam travels to confront him in person, children in tow.
Their first destination is a suspicious little house in Colorado where no one, thankfully, answers the door. From there the family embarks on a peculiar road trip through the indelible landscape of the American west, with its forlorn chain hotels and abandoned pool patios, over-bright restaurants and otherworldly geological formations. Larry the Barefoot Shaman becomes an allegory for the Information Age, his shadowy digital existence contrasted by the overwhelming physical presence of the Grand Canyon, the Crater Fields, the Painted Desert. In this setting, caught up in a hopeless pursuit, the family feels more acutely foreign and unmoored, guided by ghosts and haunted by cultural associations that are increasingly surreal.
At last, they arrive at their single acre of desert. The family camps there for three days, until two Navajo County Sheriffs crash into their obsessive fever dream. Writing up paperwork in their air-conditioned sedan, the officers reduce the family to its informational constitution, while also vividly punctuating Space Delay’s strange post-human Western.” – Rebecca Cleman, Distribution Director of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI).
Space Delay, single channel video, HD, stereo, 76min, 2015
Concept, Script, Editing, Sound Design by eteam
Music by Bobby Previte, Title Design by Enrique Maitland,
Thanks to: Mara Miranda Ittel & Louis Leopold Lamprecht
sound effects from freesound.org
Support for this project was provided by a PSC-CUNY Award, jointly funded by The Professional Staff Congress and The City University of New York.
Additional funds were provided from the Media Arts Assistance Fund, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts, Electronic Media and Film, with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; administered by Wave Farm.
