4000K is a project invested in recuperating intimacy and privacy through documentation. In contemporary culture, our private and silent spaces are endangered by the ubiquity of government surveillance or even more prevalent our own self-documentation. In cities, small towns, and rural areas, we are all subject to a vast array of digital capture. This content is circulated immediately and translated into the public domain. Events, moments, and stories that once held a secret or an intimate resonance, are replaced by the compulsive need to document. In my ongoing project, I play upon our desires to document, while also reinserting the poignancy of the secret, private, hidden, and silent.
Each month, I invite a subject to sit for a video portrait under the light of the full moon. The subject and I travel to a location of significance free of light pollution. Once there, I ask the sitter to consider a secret that they will share on camera. After pressing record, I leave the subject alone to offer their story to the camera. I disable the audio recording. With no aural record of the subject’s dialogue, there is a chilly disjuncture between the confessional quality of the video and our inability to access their thoughts. While exploring our shared environment, I record the ambient sounds on my solitary adventure and apply that soundtrack to the video portrait in place of the subject’s dialogue. When the sitter has shared their story in its entirety, they end the recording. 4000K represents my subjects in moments of solitude and vulnerability but the silence of the video simultaneously maintains a boundary of the unknowable.