Rafael Fajardo
Director, SWEAT collaborative
Associate Professor,
Emergent Digital Practices
University of Denver

 

Projects: Blessings of Liberty

These video-poems are visual investigations into the nature of the blessings of liberty. An edition of fifty CD-ROMs of this collection were pressed and packaged. Each disc was serialized with the name of the intended recipient and hand delivered as best as my travel itinerary has allowed.

Future
1999
variable bit-rate QuickTime™ movie
600 pixel x 150 pixel x 24 sec (loop) silent greyscale
will load progressively then begin playing automatically and then loop indefinitely
I appropriated the clip of the bulldozers and mixed it in with animation and text that I created.
Source: Bulldozer soccer from www.cnn.com circa 1997
still frames

Bill Wants
1999
variable bit-rate QuickTime™ movie
320 pixel x 240 pixel x 20 sec (loop) silent greyscale
will load progressively then begin playing automatically and then loop indefinitely
I shot a figurine as a series of sixty still frames with a surveillance camera and then assembled the collection of frames in software, mating them with a text I had written.
Source: figurine found in a curios shop, El Balay, in Bogotá, Colombia
still frames

Çeci n’est pas Juan
1999
variable bit-rate QuickTime™ movie
120 pixel x 240 pixel x 23:24 sec (loop) color
will load progressively then begin playing automatically and then loop indefinitely
I appropriated animated “gif” frames from the Juan Valdez site, then recombined them in software, combined with my singing/chanting of an appropriated melody, which was aggressively filtered.
Source: www.juanvaldez.com accessed in 1998, © Colombian Federation of Coffee Growers
Source: “Superman” from R.E.M.
still frames

I had a dream . . .
1999
variable bit-rate QuickTime™ movie
600 pixel x 240 pixel x 110 sec (loop) silent greyscale
will load progressively then begin playing automatically and then loop indefinitely
I borrowed a toy helicopter from my son and shot it with a surveillance camera, and mated it with footage of the figurine and a text I wrote documenting a recurring dream I had.
Source: figurine as above in Bill Wants, toy helicopter from the collection of Esteban Fajardo
still frames