This installation is an immersive room-size composition in video, optical glass, and music. One wall holds a massive, rear-projected video of a sublime and unstable seascape, blinking on and off with a warm, artificial thump. The other three walls hold five wooden shelves, each with one or two glass objects sunken into a slab of cement. An embedded video screen in each shelf fills the glass objects with a collage of original and archival family footage. Each glass/video/cement shelf is choreographed with one instrument in the four-channel surround soundtrack. In the room, the sound of each instrument is spatially linked to the position of its corresponding glass object. The composition loops every six minutes. 

"Unfamiliar" was inspired by the uncanny terrain of memory and its relationship to focus and presence. The video uses three generations of family recordings and barely-moving footage of the natural world to get at the strangeness of what we choose to remember and the feeling of close focus, attentive listening, and total presence in wilderness exploration.