📒 Diagnosis

Diagnosis is a documentation of the act of watching things on screens. The performance of watching is retained as an impression a few seconds long, a short clip. Each such clip is combined with four others to form tiny pentaptychs with barely perceptible and yet very intentional narrative arcs. 

The work accumulates meaning as it unfolds: When all 60 are watched together (300 moments), they suggest a personal story mapped onto this now recontextualized public footage. 

The series draws attention to the process of fragmentation and reassembly, and speaks to issues of authorship and agency, positioning the viewer as both participant and observer.

The series is shaped by conceptual rules:
1. Each clip must come from something I'm watching on a screen.
2. I must not seek out clips or watch things for the purpose of getting "good" clips.
3. I must not desaturate content that was originally in color to make a monochrome clip. (OK to completely desaturate monochrome content, though.)
4. I must shoot through a viewfinder (on my phone or tablet).
5. I can crop clips (as I would a photo).
6. Each clip must resonate for me when I record it, when I make the film and when I post the film. (I deleted stored clips if they stopped making sense for me.)
7. Each clip can resonate for me however I want. All beings, inanimate objects and scenes can be me. (Clips often resonated in a way not intended by the director or actor, if there was one. For example, the Gordon Matta-Clark documentary Conical Intersect (1975) was now about a surgeon making a hole in my body. A character played by Alan Alda in the 1981 comedy The Four Seasons (1981), who, having broken his leg skiing, is being moved while prone on his back, is me being rolled into position under a linear accelerator.)
8. I can store a clip indefinitely until a story arc may be found to support it.
9. Each film must consist of five clips.
10. The order of clips in a pentaptych need not reflect the order in which I originally watched them.
11. Each film must have a story arc, with the five clips feeling to me something like an exposition, rising action, a climax, and so on.
12. Each film should suggest my intended meaning to me even with the sound off.
13. Each film soundtrack, listened to on its own, should be at least evocative, if not aligned with my perceived meaning.
14. A film need not pick up where the last one left off—there can be an overlap.
15. Films need not have the same time scale. (One can cover a week of my life and the next several months.)
16. I must post completed films from color content to my color-photo Instagram and completed films from monochrome content to my monochrome-photo Instagram.
17. I must not use Instagram Stories for any other purpose for the duration of this series.

A more autobiographical statement follows. Spoiler alert.

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For me, Diagnosis shows the five-year period (November 2019 to November 2024) that starts when I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I was biopsied, studied, tested and prodded; I had surgery. Even before covid, but especially during covid, I had social contact almost entirely remotely. I changed my first and last names. I interviewed for jobs, pretending I was fine. I biked to and from the hospital 11 miles a day for a month to get radiation during the height of the pandemic. I was offered a job that meant moving from Manhattan to the Bay Area suburbs, was driven across the country (as I healed from radiation) and installed in corporate housing in an empty industrial area. I felt devastation and fear from current events and the climate. I never did see the inside of an office building, but worked day and night from home, then was sabotaged and fired. I kept making weird art and playing with my dog. I learned how to drive, practising alone in the middle of the night. I bought a car, got a new job, and moved to San Francisco. My dog got sick; I stopped sleeping; I tried dating. I watched my safe place go on the market and get sold, mourned my dog's death and the loss of my favorite human, and I quit.