Text by Steve Roden

Distance Piece was part of a body of work called Stone's Throw, which was related to my grandmother's death and in particular, a group of unfinished carved stones (my grandmother was a sculptor). The entire body of Stone's Throw included paintings, drawings, sculpture, a sound piece, and a 16mm film shot with artist Mary Simpson. While we were filming, we also recorded all of our actions during the making of the film. When I began to edit the film, I realized that the sound was too much for the film, and I was interested in making a film about sound without any actual sound - although sound actions were a visible presence, inviting the audience to build the sound in their mind. The accompaing sound piece - Distance Piece - consisted of local elements: cars and birds, the actions during the filming: Mary speaking, myself tapping stones, the sounds of the camera, bowing a cymbal, tapping a cymbal, stones tapping together, etc. Distance Piece is essentially a series of processed field recordings with an added structured element in the form of electric guitar notes whose notes were determined by a score based on the vowel structure of a text, written by Henry Moore (the sculptor), that my grandmother had taped to her studio wall. In 2011, the film and sound were both presented at the Sculpture Center in Long Island, New York. Distance Piece was playing outside of the museum, while striations played silently in one of the dark underground spaces. Striations, the film, has a duration of 6 minutes and runs in a loop. The film unabashedly gleans inspiration from Dennis Oppenheim's early films, Gary Beydler's film hand held day, and an early film by Jess Collins that suggested a victorian magic lantern show. Mastered by Chihei Hatakeyama.