One Second to Midnight2005

One night I decided I had to make a piece of work. I took up my camera and created a rule to follow, which was to video whatever was on the tv for 30 minutes and then create the piece from that. I should have known that my most random act would produce possibly my most potent piece of work: What the tv described was the beginnings of the modern era's refugee problems - which is in itself the human race speaking to itself about how it must become just in all of its actions. In the edit suite this became potent and I started to write the text which made clear to me what my epiphany was in an articulate way. Initially I recorded this in Russian with English subtitles because Russian seemed relevant then (and yes the Russians are still at play wreaking havoc killing their own spies and interfering with the Wests initiatives). A shot while later I re-recorded the voice in Mandarin because China became auddenly came into focus with its territorial insurgencies  its disregard of democracy in pursuit of its power over its populace and how things will go in the near future. I then showed this work to my friend the French video artist Robert Cahen and he said I must respond to this piece and then the ball started rolling. I also showed this to Gary Hill who critiqued it as part Hollywood as it did not unrelentingly stick to ‘art rules’ (the Hollywood reference is about appealing you dear reader). This in fact is the first of 18 pieces from around the world. The work is called One Second to Midnight because at that moment in 2005 we had an opportunity to recognise what we had to do…