911 Retrospective...

A few weeks back I was contacted by the good people at L'Oeil de Links at Canal+ about making a piece on my memories of September 11th 2001. We are closing in on the 10 year mark for when it happened, and in memory of the tragedy, they have hired 11 artists from around the world to each create a video of 1 min and 11 sec to be shown in a special later this year...

It was really interesting to wrestle with a subject that is so personal and subjective to a lot of people. I had quite a debate with one of my long time collaborators (and best friends), Kim Svarer, whether or not I could show the actual event (the hit and the towers crashing) because it is such a sensitive topic to a lot of people. Kim is higly intelligent and a provocateur of the first rank, and we almost always agree on everything, so it surprised me that he was very cautious around this particular subject - but I am a very visual cat and the visuals of the day had a huge impact on my experiencing it, so it was out of the question not to include them in one way or another. - so if anybody out there are taking the imagery to heart, I apologize, It is not meant as offensive; It is just part of the way I remember the day.

I would have loved to do a visually complex treatment of it because as before mentioned the event opens up to a very rich visual memory bank. But the time restrictions and the budget on the piece set some quite strict limitations on me, so I ended up in GraphicsGale making it in 8 bit which is a super fast and quite intuitive way of going...

I will be posting the video and a proper post mortem on the clip when it airs on french tv. I do own the rights for the clip, but out of courtesy to the hard working boys and girls at L'Oeil de Links (that actually hired me to do it) - I think they should have the right to the first showing. I will however post a few frames from the clip...