Drowning in the Ghosts of the Night Sea
Allison Kotzig
2014
video with sound
15 minutes

Discussion

The video is meant to evoke trance in its slow ,repetitive and hypnotic visuals and sound. Perhaps the viewer, in a quiet, private moment, can use this video in order to induce their own trance and such be transported to the psychic space needed for communion with the spirits.
Submerge yourself in the mystery of the universe, do not fight, you must drift, weightless, will-less. Ghosts surround you telling you their secrets… will you hear them? Here, in the dark terror and beauty of the Night Sea, finally you are able to see the spirits that always surround us. They clamor about you, pulling you deeper under the surface of the consciousness of modern society, taking you deeper into the original consciousness of the primitive soul. Time slows, images blur and streak across your vision, light is all that is left.
Silence occurs suddenly. Anxiety greets this sudden absence of Ghostly Counsel….have the Ghosts finished talking to me? Will they speak again? Have I missed my opportunity to channel the knowledge of the spirits? Here we confront the soulless emptiness of the world without spirit. Please, have no fear, trust in Spirit. Their Time is different than human time. Allow the process to carry you like a current. You are swept along under the surface now, drifting like plankton in the oceans. The sound returns, is it a frozen moment, slowed in panic or is it that this sound is stretched across infinite space.

At the same time that this is a long video, it is also a single moment, a moment of great shamanic connection. Time has frozen in the shock of the connection with spirits, after such a long time away.

Simplicity in concept is used as a metaphor reminding us to pare away the layers of civilization to allow us to regain the connection to the Universe and to the Spirit World. Color is eschewed as a distraction, as is any concrete imagery or iconography.

Rather than focus on the cultural signifiers of ethnic specifics of connection with the spirits, I have chosen to elucidate the dreamspace where all consciousnesses must go in order to bring back the messages of the ghosts of our ancestors as well as the messages and subtle directives of the spirits that roam between the planes of our existence and their own. Perhaps that roaming is the space where we connect in dreams or in tranced states.