Deluge (Radiant Sleep / Helium Ash)


Single channel video / color / sound / 19:30

Left: video still
Right: Installation of Deluge..., with Rotting Flame, "Color In the Shadows: Bay Area Cyber Art," Oakland, CA, 1994


The structure of the video piece Deluge (Radiant Sleep/Helium Ash), 1994, is an alphabetical listing of the names of neural chemicals that sequentially appear and then dissolve into the exhaust flame from the site-performance work, Oculus: Dead Sea / Oil Field, 1988. The video image of the firing used for Deluge... has been slowed down to 1/10th the speed of the original tape.

A statement about flux, transformation and poetics, Deluge (Radiant Sleep/Helium Ash) is in the tradition of Heraclitus and his famous river, the ‘Natural Philosophy’ of Goethe and the systems of Nietschze and Deleuze. The dissolution of scientific terms describing enzymes, amino acids and psycho-active brain chemicals into the elemental fire emerging from an abstract oculus is a enlargement of rational, linear descriptions of consciousness onto a primal landscape where “time becomes emotion, chemistry spirit and matter theater”1.

John Roloff, 1999

Videography: Eric Manabat
Titles/text/editing: John Roloff
Video processing: BAVC, San Francisco

1Roloff, John _Artery Magazine_, Feb-Mar 1983,
See: Kiln Projects: Material and Process Experiments in/of the Landscape