Basilisk Prayer

A few minutes into the video the jocular, 1950s-inflected voice cheerily suggests nuking the Mojave desert - ashing all those iconic not-trees and glassing the dunes - to build a straighter highway. The art direction is excellent: a crater composited over the desert floor followed by the dark schematic of a highway boring through the map of California. I see it. I let my camera eat it.

When I was young I devoured every book in the library about science and technology and drank whatever I could from the TV. I remember these things being mostly positive, hopeful even. Utopia was being made. Now, beneath their wondrous coats, I can better see the forms of our beasts. Basilisk Prayer is my ongoing exploration of the media portrayal of technology coupled with the ramifications of technology’s gaze in the everyday.