Tape Eleven
miniDV + PixelVision • 4 min • 2008
A birthday present left to gather dust, Candy Eye's vintage Fisher Price PixelVision camera was unboxed at last in the filming of The Factory's impromptu eleventh project, originally titled Discretion.
A largely uncelebrated children's toy when first released in the 1980s, the PixelVision camera later earned cult status for the crude black & white images and muffled sounds it records amazingly onto audio-cassette tapes.
Driven by the wickedly retro and abstracted footage produced by the Pixel-cam, Candy Eye filmmakers JoEllen Martinson and William Rees set out to craft a mysterious artifact from a bygone era in which the words and actions of its on-screen subjects were restated and repeated until fragmented in their meanings.
As the video's trio of devious characters descend from the seedy streets of the city to the seclusion of a suburban basement, the ordinary is eyed with eerie emphasis and the taboo turns coldly clinical.
The video's participants find their underground desires distorted and deleted in the pixilated glitches of a forbidden, failing technology. What remains of the group's secret encounters is a degraded social experiment, caught on camera, and plainly labeled Tape Eleven.
