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Sanctum 1: A high-resolution video projection by Alex Haas with original music by Brian Eno

In 2002, I appropriated the term “Histograms” for a series of digital images made by extracting and reproducing an infinitesimal portion of an analog color photograph of flowers and plants. Sanctum is the continuation of my work on Histograms; it is based on the same principles as Histograms but is expressed through duration and motion. Because of its evolution from Histograms, to understand Sanctum I must first explain Histograms:

Because Histograms isolate and expand one segment of a plant or flower, they become visual metaphors, at once representational and abstract. Existing this way on the border between perception and representation, they offer the possibility for a new way of seeing and expressing time. The essence of the original photographs - the colors and their representational dimensionality – remains an unchanged fixture in the next generation of work. What does change is the specificity of the moment, so that no matter the final composition I choose, the image’s source, its DNA, becomes a minute slice of a slice of time. Even in their utter stillness, Histograms are exclamations of hope: they speak of metamorphosis, of the transmutation of time, and ultimately of a past that can be liberated into new perceptions of reality.

The same high-resolution scans I used for Histograms are the starting point and palette for Sanctum. In a series of computer manipulations, an abstraction of slowly evolving and meditative chromatic lines is created. As the colors are taken from the natural world, the experience, although abstract, unconsciously refers to the familiar.

While Histograms refer to a moment in time and perception, Sanctum adds duration and motion to the quartet of dimensions at play in the piece. In Sanctum, original photographs taken at speeds of fractions of a second, are transformed into 10- to 12-minute visual segments. In the same way, the music composed by Brian Eno was produced by “freezing” sounds from various instruments and letting them slowly “decay” over time. Therefore, the sounds and their visual counterparts become one entity. As the colors and sounds evolve and dissolve, one is transported through a 40-minute abstract narrative during which moods and feelings are triggered from the slow chromatic and sonic transmutations.

As both a musician and a visual artist, I am interested in the analogous thought processes and techniques in the recording of sound and the recording of visual imagery. In my work as a recording engineer, I think of the tape recorder as a sound camera - a machine that captures a moment of time by transferring sonic vibrations in space onto tape, much as a camera records reflected light onto film. Digital audio editing equipment allows me to view a representation of sound on a screen, so that I edit music using my sense of sight. In Sanctum, my collaboration with Brian Eno encourages the separation between sound and sight to fade and the critical issue of time to re-emerge as a medium to be manipulated and represented.

Sanctum 1 is the single screen version of the four-screen Sanctum 4. In this larger installation, four high-definition videos of differing lengths are projected on screens facing each other in a square room. A self-generative piece of music is locked to these visuals so that what is seen and heard becomes a meditative and ever-changing sensory experience, thereby adding to the seemingly random focus on the particular.

In Histograms and Sanctum, the works being sampled are original photographs by my late father, Ernst Haas, the celebrated Austrian photographer who, in 1962, became first color photographer to have a one-person exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. As the first photographer to successfully experiment with the multiple significations of motion photography, he developed a blurring of subject matter that suggested an unfreezing of time. His photographs and their evocation of time are the building blocks of my work. In the same way that my DNA originates with my father’s, his photographs are the molecular background component carrying the genetic information that allows Sanctum to exist.

New York, November 2, 2004