single channel video (trailer)

2014/2015

HD, DCP, 76min

music by Bobby Previte

for screening and exhibition rentals please contact the Video Data Bank in Chicago

“One of the most terrestrial exchanges between humans – the sale of a plot of land – is the beginning of a bizarre American odyssey when the artist duo eteam buys an acre of the Southwestern desert on eBay. The deed never arrives in the mail, so eteam attempts to track down the phantom seller, a porous Internet characters operating as Larry and Radonna, Eclectic Treasure Collection, or the Barefoot Shaman. A virtual search for them turns actual when eteam travels to confront him in person, children in tow.

Their first destination is a suspicious little house in Colorado where no one, thankfully, answers the door. From there the family embarks on a peculiar road trip through the indelible landscape of the American west, with its forlorn chain hotels and abandoned pool patios, over-bright restaurants and otherworldly geological formations. Larry the Barefoot Shaman becomes an allegory for the Information Age, his shadowy digital existence contrasted by the overwhelming physical presence of the Grand Canyon, the Crater Fields, the Painted Desert. In this setting, caught up in a hopeless pursuit, the family feels more acutely foreign and unmoored, guided by ghosts and haunted by cultural associations that are increasingly surreal.

At last, they arrive at their single acre of desert. The family camps there for three days, until two Navajo County Sheriffs crash into their obsessive fever dream. Writing up paperwork in their air-conditioned sedan, the officers reduce the family to its informational constitution, while also vividly punctuating Space Delay’s strange post-human Western.” – Rebecca Cleman, Distribution Director of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI).

Trailer and more information here