Keeping Count (Annotated) is a develpment on the video work Keeping Count (2021). The works stems from the series A Casual Mathematics, where the artist articulates racial inequality via the language of number. Measurement, approximation, and their signs and symbols are placed in relation to Black liberation, the ways society has been constructed, and history told. In the recombinations of phrases, in the leaps between lines, this video expresses how complex lives cannot be reduced to fixed formulas. The artist engages with questions of solving for x as an exercise not of precision, but of willful approximation and miscalculation.
Original Score: Th&o. (Johannesburg, South Africa) Medium: Signal Channel
Film Excerpts (Prelinger Archives): Computer Calculator for Math and Science (Hewlett Packer, 1970s); Your Chance to Live: Earthwatch (U.S. Defense Civil Preparedness Agency, 1972); Frontiers of the Future (National Industrial Council, 1937); Some Fruits We Like (Unknown, 1920); Above the Clouds in Rainier National Park (Unknown, 1920); Basic Typing, Part I: Methods (Part II) (U.S. Navy, 1944)
Hand and Digitally Edited 35mm Film Trailer Teasers: Meteor (1979) The X-Files (2008)