Threat

An award-winning solo video art work exploring themes of water scarcity, and water pollution.

Zieman covered an entire dance studio with large cheesecloth fabric, then directed the dancers.

It’s hard to re-imagine the technical limitations of those early days of video. With only B&W video cameras available, John added all the colors in post. No slo-mo available, so he re-shot images off a monitor. (“re-scan”)

He used “video feedback” to create special effects, like water and bubbles.

Simultaneously, his music composition includes aspects of “Musique Concrete”: the tradition of editing natural sounds into music, achieved by cutting audio tape with a razor blade, and splicing tape.

His field recordings of water sounds; droplets, faucets, pans, streams, kids in a park were sometimes modified electronically, processed through a Moog music synthesizer, layered, and mastered in a 4 trk analog studio.