Action: You Must Relax ("Talking Artifact" Video)

Last fall, when the poet Jill Battson told T. Foley that Bob Holman, producer of the PBS series The United States of Poetry was going to lead a residency program for Associate Artists at ACA, Foley quickly got her application materials together and sent them in. Having worked on a series of videos called "talking artifacts" for the last couple of years, and having recently completed a poetry video commission for Pittsburgh's City of Asylum, Foley thought she might find spoken word artists to collaborate with at ACA. The "talking artifact" approach to making videos renders picture subservient to audio--Foley painstakingly edits the video track so that individual still frames appears on screen for the length of time it takes a person to iterate one syllable of speech.

Here's what the edits look like in Final Cut Pro's timeline window:

"You Must Relax" is a Neat Series collaboration that was screened at the INsideOUT event. For the audio track, Foley and Salpico continued their game of rearranging found text (the book was discovered in a pile of discarded materials sitting on the counter in the painting studio), and Foley shot original footage on ACA's campus and at New Smyrna Beach.