This video is called Momentum because it is about time. It is about how we experience the world around us when we are rushing through our daily lives, too busy with work, with family, with distractions, too busy to notice the simple things around us. And so our surroundings seem to speed by, too fast for us to keep up, and we are left behind, exhausted, overwhelmed.


     Momentum is a build up to a climax as the movement increases to a breaking point when we become incapable of processing external stimuli, when we are left with silence and a field of black. The mind shuts its doors, halting exposure to new information while the cerebral inbox is sorted, and a place is found for every item.


     In a world over saturated with visual stimuli, in this information age, we take in more than we need. We force ourselves to find meaning in material that is not relevant to us. And this distracts us from what is immediately before us. We miss what is before our eyes in the present moment.


     But what if we could stop a moment in time, slow it down, or speed it up? How would our perception of the world change? How would we see things differently, hear things differently? How would our brains make sense of a world that has been distorted to make time irrelevant? How would our perception change if we incapacitated our adopted habit of pressuring ourselves into the future, or locking ourselves to the past? How would the world change if we rooted our lives in the present moment? What would we see? What would we hear?


     In Momentum, movement is capture on video and manipulated in just this way. Images and sounds are slowed down or sped up until then become almost unrecognizable, not because the picture becomes a pixelized mess or the sounds become repetitious static, but because the material takes on new forms that inspire the human brain's need to identify and categorize sensorial experiences. No matter how abstract our experiences become, our minds impose meaning, hearing and seeing things that are not there. Truth and reality are secondary to the security we feel as a result of our constructed understanding.


     When context is removed, when the images and sounds become abstract, we impose our own perception. We are taken by the simple aesthetic beauty, or alienated by the lack of figurative content. We feel relaxed by the meditative rhythm, or enveloped by suspenseful anticipation. In the end, our imaginations determine the value of our experience. What we hear and see depends solely on how open our minds are to seeing and hearing what's there.