Transmission 3: Mt. St. Helens (2023)

• 72%
• 2023
• Jared Pappas-Kelley

From author, visual artist, and video artist Jared Pappas-Kelley comes Transmission 3: Mt St Helens, one of a series of literary media art dispatches harvested from personal moments expressed by a voice emulator and visually paired with minimalist animations based on Pappas-Kelley's drawings. Teetering in-tension between the personal and the de-personalized, between human and machine, and aurally synchronized with a maximalist electronic score, Transmission 3: Mt St Helens induces an internal pressure sympathetic to the storied volcanic Mt. St Helens and its 1980 eruption. On stark display is childhood and innocence spliced and deftly rendered with destabilizing technique. The slow, slurry realization of possibly running away crests in an aural drone. And the existential monotone telling of the volcanic eruption oozes a lasting eeriness about how like a snow day it was, but apocalyptic.