Pinktoned and Pinktoned (Exploded View)    


(2025, 5 channel installation with sound, 16mm to HD, looping, dimensions variable)

Originally conceived as an instalation for the Made in LA Biennial at the Hammer Museum, Pinktoned (Exploded View) is a meditative passage through the streets of Los Angeles and a rumination on how moving images function amidst paranoia and state violence.

Drawing its title from an esoteric audio test tone used in the motion picture industry in the 1990s, this is a process and technique based image piece.

The center or heart of the film is a series of found 35mm slides taken in 1976 on the west side of LA. These images document the work of wheatpasting movie poster advertisements up at various intersections. Upon closer inspection the posters are revealed to be for Underground ("The Film the FBI didn't want you to see"), the incendiary 1976 documentary by Emile de Antonio, Mary Lampson, and Haskell Wexler that depicts the Weather Underground hiding in a Los Angeles County safehouse right after the Fall of Saigon. The posters are seen amidst advertisements for All The President's Men and Logan's Run. The color of the slides has aged and faded to a palette of pinks, magentas, and reds. This color continues out onto the walls of the gallery.

These 1976 images are juxtaposed with my own contemporary footage of passersby filmed out the window of my East Hollywood studio. Photographed in close up detail, these images show gestures of figures on the street; tapping out texts on touch screens, flicking ash off the end of a cigarette, gripping a coffee cup, passing money for bus fare.

These color images are interspersed with stark black and white animation generated with open-source video synthesis software and rephotographed onto 16mm soundtrack stock frame-by frame. Akin to early computer animation these fast moving abstract shapes suggest systems  and movement in flux.

The soundtrack of the film is composed of the 30 tones that made up the pinktone test audio, tape echo feedback, and the noise of 16mm optical sound silence. The soundtrack is not only heard in the space, but seen as a video channel, with a full-frame scan of the 16mm optical track that generates the sound for the space. 

The picture-lock edit of the final film is situated at the end of the gallery on a CRT monitor. This video loops in sync with the soundtrack and interweaves all of the disparate elements of the exploded view into an 11-minute piece.





Installation photos by Jeff McLane 
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