2019 | 9 min | USA
What's a Life? is a project that developed over the course of a few years incorporating material recorded on Super 8 film, cell phone video, and audio recordings. The recordings are a mix of portraits of musicians as well as diary material focused on sound and music. While the project was "alive" and I was still accumulating new material, I would present it as a multimedia installation or as expanded cinema performances involving multiple television screens, video and Super 8 projection, cassette tapes, and mp3 audio playback, editing the material anew for each presentation and incorporating varying amounts of chance and site-specificity into each version. After a few years of letting the work live, breath, and grow, I decided to stop it's life in this form, and have since edited an hour and a half long single channel video work, some sections of which (the one you are seeing now for instance) may be shown independently.
Dicky Bahto lives in Los Angeles. He has exhibited work made from still and motion picture photography, sound, performance, and written words at a variety of museums, galleries, microcinemas, film festivals, conferences, alternative spaces, and scenic locations spanning the Northern Hemisphere, from the Museum of Modern Art to the Seoul Festival of Experimental Film, in private home kitchens in Pasadena and London, traditional exhibitions at Jancar Jones and Et al. galleries, performances for broadcast on the internet and radio, and inside a series of nooks, crannies, cracks in the sidewalk, and underbrush along and under Sunset Blvd. He is a member of the virtual experimental music group The Ensemble Whose Name is Uhhhhhmm... (formerly known as Lil' Jürg Frey), and has an unnamed IRL performance trio with Tashi Wada and Corey Fogel that he hopes he will one day be able to perform with again. He is not actively making films at the moment, and is instead focusing his attention on writing short stories, learning to speak Sureth, and teaching himself how to play long-necked saz.