ARTWORK

What was Almost There
2025

Movie file
43:05

What was Almost There is a meditative video work that lingers between presence and near-presence—where perception begins to fray, and subtle forms of awareness emerge.
At first glance, almost nothing happens. A fixed-frame view plays at 40% speed: a ripple of wind, the passing of a boat, the smallest shifts in light.
At irregular intervals, jump cuts silently interrupt the flow of time.
Some viewers notice. Others do not.
This differential perception—between what is seen and what is missed—is at the core of the work.
Floating above the landscape is a sonograph, generated from the ambient sounds of the site.
But here, sound is not merely vibration or data; it is treated as a trace of the “eight million presences”—a Japanese animistic sensibility that holds even wind, water, insects, and silence as carriers of spirit and agency.
The sonograph visualizes these subtle agencies as delicate constellations of particles.
Over time, the particles drift apart and dissolve—evoking the quiet return of presence into invisibility, or the erosion of memory before it ever formed.
What was Almost There is, then, both a poetic and philosophical inquiry: an invitation to re-engage with the thresholds of awareness, where sound becomes image, and presence is always partial.
It is a looped space in which something speaks—not loudly, but just enough to be nearly heard.