Artist: Seth / Ezra Dager
Year: 2020–2026
Medium: Five-channel digital video installation
Status: Complete
Archive Context: The Field Archive

Overview

Ambient III is a five-channel video work preserving environmental moments encountered across multiple cities and years. Recorded in locations including Mexico City, Copenhagen, New York, San Diego, and Saint Barthélemy, the work assembles places that share no geographic continuity, only the fact that they were kept.

Each recording remains fixed. The camera does not move. Motion occurs only within the environment itself—clouds drifting, water moving beneath a bridge, aircraft crossing the sky, or the brief presence of the body entering the frame.

The five recordings are arranged in the recurring exclamation-point structure found throughout the Ezra corpus. Four videos establish the vertical assertion while a fifth completes the punctuation.

The structure does not connect the places.

It preserves them together.

The accompanying Data Frame identifies the work’s sonic field through “Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five” by Quantic, inviting viewers to recreate the durational conditions under which the recordings were assembled.

The locations remain independent.

The attention does not.

Position

Ambient III demonstrates that places need not share geography to share meaning.

Distance separates them.

Attention brings them into relation.