📒 Diagnosis

Diagnosis is an inventory of five years of watching things on screens. When I identified with a moment in a film or show, I made a super short video of it. When I had collected five such moments that could be combined into a new narrative arc, I posted them together as a Story on Instagram. In this way, each mashup was about what was happening with me, but in a way only I understood, films à clef. 

In this series, as in Equity and Visit, I'm interested in the often unrelated and unexpected thoughts that come up the moment we perceive something. So, recognition as well as association.

I’m also interested in commemoration. The mashups became souvenirs of viewing time the way photos are souvenirs. The series also came to be about narrative. I made these mini reflections of events my own, tidied them up and tamed them into stories. 

There were 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 mashup and when I post the mashup. (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 mashup must consist of five clips.
10. The order of clips in a mashup need not reflect the order in which I originally watched them.
11. Each mashup 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 mashup should suggest my intended meaning to me even with the sound off.
13. Each mashup soundtrack, listened to on its own, should be at least evocative, if not aligned with my perceived meaning.
14. A mashup need not pick up where the last one left off—there could be an overlap.
15. Mashups need not have the same time scale. (One mashup could cover a week of my life and the next several months.)
16. I must post completed mashups from color content to my color-photo Instagram and completed mashups from monochrome content to my monochrome-photo Instagram.

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.