Video work — environmental duration

Ambient II records a sequence of environmental moments captured during an architectural river tour in Chicago in August 2019. The recordings preserve the city as it appeared from the water while the boat moved slowly through the Chicago River, passing beneath bridges and alongside the surrounding architecture.

Each video is a static environmental capture. The camera remains still while the environment moves through the frame — buildings shifting perspective, bridges passing overhead, clouds drifting across the sky, and water reflecting the skyline.

The piece consists of five vertical recordings arranged in the recurring exclamation-point structure used throughout the Ezra corpus. Four images form the vertical assertion. A fifth image functions as the punctuation mark.

The structure does not dramatize the architecture.

It stabilizes the moment.

All five recordings originate from the same afternoon on the river. The locations remain within Chicago and within a narrow window of time, producing a sequence that feels continuous even though each frame is independent.

The recordings were made during a trip to Chicago shared with the artist’s mother.

It would be the last time the artist saw her before her passing in January 2020.

The soundtrack accompanying the work is “Sister Owls” by Monster Rally, a group the artist and his mother loved and listened to together for years.

The track had been added to the artist’s music library two days before these videos were recorded and was being played repeatedly during the trip. The music therefore functions not as a soundtrack chosen after the fact, but as part of the lived atmosphere of the day.

The viewer is invited, through the opening data frame, to play and loop the song independently while watching the video sequence.

Sound in this work does not illustrate the images.

It preserves the sonic environment in which the moment occurred.

The pairing may initially feel unexpected — the relaxed, drifting rhythm of the music contrasts with the monumental scale of Chicago’s architecture. The connection becomes clear only through context.

The song belongs to the memory of the day.

Within the broader Ezra system, Ambient II demonstrates how environmental presence, memory, and sound often stabilize meaning long after the moment itself has passed.

The architecture remains unchanged.

The river continues moving.

The music holds the moment in place.

Meaning emerges through duration, attention, and time.

Credits

Recorded by Seth Dager

Edited by Seth Dager