When I awoke in the middle of the night, I could not even be sure at first who I was; for it always happened when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt to discover where I was, everything revolved around me through the darkness; things, places, years.


Overture is taken from the Library of Congress' archive of early film documents developed for Edison's highly popular kinetoscope. A massive cataloguing of the land in the newly colonised West was occurring; Muybridge¹s early work in the Yosemite Valley, he was one of many glass_plate, mule_borne photographers conquering that landscape. In the period, the copyright laws did not cover this new media of moving image. To protect a film work, it was necessary to turn each frame into a still image, composite it as a book, and register copyright over the book, in an inversion of the flip_book process. Douglas re_constituted this anonymous work frame by frame and blends the originally silent film with Proust's Memory of Things Past. In a seven_minute loop, a train passing through a sequence of lightless [ and soundless ] tunnels of the Canadian Rockies, circling around and down "..with mild stacato.."1, in an endless oroborian spiral. Like the double_helix, the Victorian panorama_scapes and Muybridge's zoopraxiscope, the unseen steam_engine wraps the mind in strange, hypnotic perspective.
    These shifting and confused gusts of memory never lasted more than a few seconds; it often happened that in my brief spell of uncertainty as to where I was, I did not distinguish the various supositions of which it was composed any more than, when we watch a horse running, we isolate the successive positions of its body as they appear on a bioscope.

Time passing ....
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