Video Direction, Shooting, Editing, SloMosquito (2005)

Slomosquito was my admission to the SloMo Video Festival curated in 2006 by Ryan Junell. All submissions were one-minute long and were required to deal with the idea of slowness either visually or otherwise.

I shot several minutes of a group of mosquito larvae swimming in the shallow pool of a fountain with a Sony Handycam. The mosquitoes each looked like one single flagella, whipping back and forth across the bottom of the fountain. I tracked one mosquito in particular and chose a few moments from that footage to slow down. I received permission from an electronic musician, Four Tet, to use his track “No More Mosquitoes.” I overlaid “No More Mosquitoes” with a British Broadcasting Corporation’s recording of a lecture from neurologist V.S. Ramachandran.

In the clip, Ramachandran is discussing the sensation of free will. According to his research, the brain experiences the conscious feeling of making a decision after the neurons have already fired committing to that decision. The brain delays the feeling of choice (the illusion of free will) until the moment that the body takes the step forward.  Effectively, your brain has already decided to step forward but the brain delays the decision to coincide with the action. Ramachandran suggests there must be an evolutionary purpose behind this lag; humans benefit from the feeling of making a decision being experientially linked with the action resulting from that decision.

Watching mosquitoes fling themselves back and forth across the shallow pool in my backyard reminded me of this part of the lecture. Is there also an evolutionary purpose for the mosquito to believe that it is choosing to cross the bottom of the fountain?

Slomosquito was accepted into the SloMo Video Festival, which toured extensively. I was living in Los Angeles at the time and attended a showing of the festival including my film at the Hammer Museum.