…a late summer prairie storm as heard from above – someplace between this atmosphere and the next…

A night sky filled with stars, or an emulsion bearing the marks of hand processing, a flashing smudge of red and then blue, as if you were wandering down a hallway before stepping into a brightly lit room, the shock of colour arriving before language introduces a name and a face, before the world becomes familiar again, and unseen, invisible beneath the words.

It’s raining, the storm has begun, the analogue crackle and hiss rhyming the emulsion transport. Across this broken field a yellow butterfly, then blue, then yellow and green, then yellow, makes its way across the screen. It is only a shape, a contour, a silhouette, the small wings flapping, the brilliant colours changing and changing again. No beginnings and no end. We are always in this rain, we’ve become this storm. We’re on the way. No use asking when we’ll arrive, we’ll be dead then. [Mike Hoolboom, 2007]