Sniff

1997 / 5 Minutes
English
NTSC / Stereo / Color / B&W / Betacam SP video
Distributed by: Video Out, V Tape, mingyuen@earthlink.net

 


Winner, Driector's Choice Award for Best Experimental work, Images Festival

Sniff is an experimental videotape that uses structural repetition and video degeneration to create a sense of memory and loss. It is a meditation on the relationship between promiscuity, technology, memory, fear of death and AIDS.

In a stark white room, on an unmade bed, a naked man is crawling in circles. He is trying to remember the men he had sex with on the bed by searching for traces of their scent left there. This scene is shown five times, each with a different edit. The footage degenerates as if losing the memory of each scene in its pixelation. The haunting soundtrack layers a fragmentary account of the man's sexual encounters with a dense electronic soundscape of whispering voices and sampled elements from the popular HI-NRG hit “So Many Men, So Little Time" by Miquel Brown.