| Obsessive
Becoming Links Daniel Reeves' hour long documentary/ aesthetically experimental video. Obsessive Becoming, spotlighted his own morphing software and platform. His seemless morphing system was implemented on and executed from 7 linked Apple IIe's and perfected throughout the video's five year production. The video itself combines documentary, 16mm home movies, photographs, and recorded video--all of which stand by themselves and frequently meld into the other. Obsessive Becoming is an autobiographical piece which explores Reeves' own personal family trauma, parallels the family unit as a microcosm and reverberator of world trauma, and probes the haunting notion of collective memory. I find this work to be a landmark in digital-video artistry and paradigm for artists alike in that Reeves built 'from-scratch' a morphing technology that exceeded its professional studio counterparts. Morphing technology had not been frequently used by either hollywood or independent artists, both at that time or since. And although Obsessive Becoming did not further the cause for 'morphing' in either industry, Reeves' film inspired video artists to find new ways of generating imagery , opening up the medium to new ways of seeing, new ideas of what montage in video can be: a fluid amalgamation of diverse media formats, recombined by one's own authored-ware to produce a new aesthetic. Reeve's morphing 'experiment' removed the limits of tradition and analog, urging that the imagination is the only limit to creating a new type of visually emotional and evocative experience. Submitted
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