"Imagery never exists as such. It's determined by what people are told the image is going to be . . . The fact is the fovea cuts out most of what we see and the brain constructs an image out of almost nothing. . ."

-Harry Everett Smith in 1977 interview with P. Adams Sitney.

Think of the Self Speaking: Harry Smith, Selected Interviews, 1998.

My art is a celebration of seeing as a creative act. As Harry Smith said, our vision is an interpretation of the light that hits our retinas, and highly suggestible. Since we fabricate visual reality out of thin air, it's important to question what we see. Art is a dialog about ways of seeing; my role as an artist is to encourage viewers to open up their eyes and minds. These days, electronic light is the best way to make this appeal.

I'm inspired by the pioneers of video art, as well as Proto-Cinema, Personal Cinema and Expanded Cinema, but my earliest inspiration was analog computer animation seen on Electric Company. Like my predecessors, I'm pushing for a future in which a "total plasticity of sight and sound"* enables cinema to flow like conversation in a universal language that transcends cultural boundaries.

I am known for making video in realtime. The work often begins with the design of a visual 'system' that incorporates optical, analog and digital technologies so that the idiosyncrasies of each combine to yield unique artistic possibilities and limitations. I typically use a hodgepodge of custom software, quirkily functioning consumer tech, elegantly built old-school synthesizers, obsolete TV gear and a handful of lenses and objects. This mad scientist approach yields anomalous 'visual timbres'. By borrowing and expanding upon tools and techniques from the span of cinema's history I simultaneously pay homage to a rich visual legacy and push further into the unseen.

Much of my work may be considered part of the "visual music" tradition. Like music, visual abstractions may capture something of what it means to be human and speak to the primitive parts of our nervous systems.

~benton-c, the bronx, fall 2008

*thanks, Bill Etra

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