Last night I took a 42 second fly-through of my Artomatic 2008 exhibit that I recorded on Friday afternoon and stretched & reversed the footage into a 3 minute and 30 second abstract animation. The video starts at the RECORD book, then pans & zooms into Freedom Plaza on Federal Triangle Quilt #4, pans across Nova et Accvratissima Totivs Terravm Oribis Tabvla [2008], zooms up close to Charlotte Spheres, and pans back over to Nova et Accvratissima Totivs Terravm Oribis Tabvla [2008] and ends.

Audio is from two tracks on disc one of Cold Krush Cuts by DJ Food & Coldcut (Ninja Tune 1997). It features a sermon I believe to be from Rev. Billy Graham about the Bug’s eye view versus the God’s eye view.

::::::::::Text of the sermon::::::::::

People who fly have a different view of the world than those who spend their lives on the ground. A very wise man once wrote a poem while he was flying, and he called this poem “The God’s Eye View,” and he said that this view was entirely different than the view he always had on the ground, which he called “The Bug’s Eye View.”

Out there, somewhere, in the air we fly through, exists an old Persian legend much like this poem about a bug who spent his entire life in the world’s most beautifully designed Persian rug. All the bug ever saw in his lifetime were his problems. They stood up all around him. He couldn’t see over the top of them, and he had to fight his way through these tufts of wool in the rug to find the crumbs that people had spilled on the rug. And the tragedy of the story of the bug in the rug was this: that he lived and he died in the world’s most beautifully designed rug, but he never once knew that he spent his life inside something which had a pattern. Even if he, this bug, had even once gotten above the rug so that he could have seen all of it, he would have discovered something – that the very things he called his problems were a part of the pattern.

Have you ever felt like that bug in the rug? That you are so surrounded by your problems that you can’t see any pattern to the world in which you live? Have you heard anybody say lately that the world is a total mess? That, my friends, is the Bug’s Eye View, and seeing only a little of the world, me might be inclined to think that this is true.

A better quality version of the video is viewable on Facebook.