Chameleon Law
(2021)
Chameleon Law (2021, Digital video, 7:30 minutes, excerpts)
Film by Janie Geiser
Sound collage: Janie Geiser
Sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins
Digital Mastering: Astra Price
A few years ago, I was given a set of faded vintage 35mm slides by a neighbor. Recently, during this pandemic, I finally found the time to look at them.
Most of the slides had taken on red or pink hues, evidence of time and change, the loss of blue and yellow pigments. These vermillion hues gave the slides’ subjects –mountain landscapes, long-span bridges, tourist sites—a simultaneously sublime and corrosive appearance. In Chameleon Law, the time-altered images, alternately depleted and extreme, suggest a heated landscape of the past and future.
The title of the film comes from a concept articulated in the allegorical / surrealist novel Mt. Analogue. Chameleon law rocks us asleep and prevents us from seeing the other 99% of the possibilities that are at hand in each situation. With conventional ‘common sense’ we easily fall prey to the chameleon law. Like the witnesses in the film, we have a choice to see beyond what we know, to avoid falling prey to chameleon law, as the landscapes of the world fade to red.