Karl Hugo Erickson

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This Is Hell
2017, 1:00 minute

Our belief structures have collapsed. In their place is a cacophony of voices drowning sadness with volume and bile. If our current predicament is Hell, what does the future hold?

Life Can Be Difficult
2017, 1:45 minutes

A reaction to the gut-wrenching wretchedness of the current predicament in which our small, fallible world is trapped.

Time Travel Through Water
Sound by Justin King, 2015, 4:01 minutes

This video combines three bodies of water (in Vietnam, Tennessee, and Louisiana), that I traveled through in 2013 and 2014. By combining these three location, I allow myself to be in three places at the same time, a physical impossibility, but one that happens in our minds and bodies recurringly. The distortions of each section are created by mapping the time and luminance information from the previous section onto the following one, causing sections of the image to  skip or drag behind in time.

Memo to William Reed (re: Hyperborea)
sound Chris Colthart, 2014, 4:20 minutes

Produced while on the Arctic Circle Expedition residency and shown as a group in the exhibition “Monotonic Surfaces: An Account of the Arctic Regions,” Colthart’s hypnotic drone put me in the meditative, transportive state I experienced on the voyage, falling into worlds and dimensions long hidden. The video is a view from within the hollow earth. William Reed was an 19th century philosopher who theorized that the Earth was hollow, with holes to the core at the North and South Poles.

Stand By Me
sound by Careful (Eric Lindley), 2013, 2:09 minutes

The ecstatic feeling of the 24hour sun is tempered by the fragility of the Arctic landscape. Lindley’s gossamer interpretation of Stand By Me captured these emotions perfectly, and the video moves towards the ever shifting landscape, physical and emotional, of Svalbard. Produced while on the Arctic Circle Expedition residency and shown as a group in the exhibition “Monotonic Surfaces: An Account of the Arctic Regions.” 

We Could Be Transcendent Apes-Elevation Module
1:20 minutes, 2016
Sound by Kelly Marie Martin and Karl Erickson

We Could Be Transcendent Apes-Elevation Matrix is part of a series re-telling of the film Robot Monster in the form movie trailers and commercials frames the narrative of a space invader seeking transcendence through communion with humanity.

We Could Be Transcendent Apes: Encounter Module
8:34, 2016
sound by Kelly Marie Martin and Karl Erickson

Part of the series We Could Be Transcendent Apes which tells a story of personal evolution. It follows the journey of a traveler, a monster sent to earth to destroy the human race. Though programmed for destruction, he finds himself seeking a soul purified by the movement of the body, a self evolved through communion with the other. In his search for enlightenment, the monster journeys across diverse landscapes and pursues new forms of bodily expression of dance, movement, and meditation. Seeking the unattainable, he moves forward but never reaches his destination, in a constant state of ‘about to be’.