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Bill MacKay & Nathan Bowles Joy Ride
Video release 1.27.21
Overhead projection, drawn animation, night footage.
Bill asked me if I wanted to make a video for one of the tunes on his and Nathans record, we imagined breaking the song up into a serialized set of shorts and left it to ponder for a while. Then, this last June, while hanging out in a cabin in northern Michigan, I witnessed a large brown (or common) water snake give birth to living snakes! It’s a truly wild thing to see and I became infatuated with ovoviviparous snakes. The idea that these creatures were born into their own egg universes, then released into a second cavern of the mothers body, and then finally released out into the untethered world. I couldn’t get the image out of my mind. I started imagining vast networks of snakes like giant rhizomorphs emanating from some larger central snake body. With little wigglers spreading out into the atmosphere, forming grasses and trees and further out into space pulling on the gravitational strings. The possibilities of this multiplying force became the fuel for the animation. And some time during the last years insanity the serialized sections merged back into one “Joy Ride”.
