Dan Browne – memento mori

Biography
Dan Browne is a filmmaker, photographer, composer and multimedia artist. He holds a MA from the York/Ryerson Joint Program in Communication and Culture, a BFA (Hon.) from Ryerson University’s School of Image Arts, and is currently pursuing his PhD in the Communication and Culture program at Ryerson.

Abstract
memento mori is a layered time-lapse exploration of the total photographs captured over the course of a lifetime—over 100,000 in total. The evanescent interpretation and interaction of human memory with the encroaching omnipresent contemporary digital archive, which has come to pervade all traces and elements of space, forms the inspiration for this work. In reflecting on past fragments of an archive through its resurrection in movement and time, images are blended through combinations ranging between subject, object, percept, dreams, and experience, to form an encyclopedic index of the possibilities of sight at the speed of light itself. The fleeting nature of the images, constantly subject to transformation and flux, echoes the acoustic nature of electric environments, wherein space is transformed from a fragmentary visual field into a pulsating, vibratory experience felt by the entire body. The soundtrack combines a polyphonic layering of archival recordings (shortwave radio, sounds of nature, folk music, lectures) with original electronic and acoustic compositions in a meditation on mortality. Amidst the complex visual and sonic rhythms of the work, there exists a stillness and peace that manifests itself to those who, like the sailor in Poe’s story about the maelstrom, are willing to open their experience to their environment and confront the horizons of perception.