FANCY HORSE FILMS
Analog Artifacts
The Wired Oracle
The Wired Oracle is a sculptural video installation built from a discarded 1950s console television, reconfigured into a speculative vision machine. A short-throw projector casts looping imagery onto the original glass, combining fractured color bars, signal noise, and a flickering masked figure suspended between human and machine. Above the set, a foam head fitted with goggles and exposed camcorder circuitry suggests a hybrid entity, with wires spilling outward like hair as if the machine is attempting to remember its former body.
Interwoven throughout are distorted images derived from anonymous black-and-white photographs (1920s–1940s), sourced from thrift stores and archives, inverted into negatives and processed through a glitch system to produce fragmented sequences resembling corrupted memory. The work explores memory without authorship, transforming forgotten photographs into dislocated visions—echoes of lives that persist as records while their subjects and histories have faded from view.
Video Demo: Click Here
The Witness
This video sculpture reconfigures a mannequin into a hybrid recording apparatus. The body is reinforced with wire and finished in industrial gray, while a functioning VHS camcorder replaces the head. Cabling extends from the figure to a small black-and-white monitor mounted on a pedestal.
The piece continuously records its surroundings, returning a delayed image of the environment to the viewer. This feedback loop creates a subtle temporal displacement, in which visitors encounter themselves as slightly deferred, almost spectral presences.
Rather than presenting as a static sculpture, the work is conceived as an observing entity—an embedded presence positioned at the threshold of the space, quietly witnessing the room as it unfolds.
Video Demo: Click Here
In this video, Sam talks about the ideas and process behind what led him to bring these sculptural works together. He also reflects on his interest in technology, memory, distortion, and the strange ways we use machines to see and understand ourselves.
Samuel Karow
Fancy Horse Films, LLC
(715) 305-6060
sam@fancyhorsefilms.com