For Lucien

I create formal building blocks of ideas, characters, and concepts, layering them and interrelating them until I have built up a concise vision of the whole. I don't write the story, any more than I actually direct in the traditional sense. I am an orchestrator, or a conductor of situations, sometimes merely a DJ, spinning, sampling, and recycling, people, source material, emotions, and sound, all the while being informed by mass media, my own personal vision, the memories both strong and faded of my past, pushing that through a feedback loop of intense editing, recontextualization, and polarization, all in order to blur the lines between what is real, what is perceived, and what is pure fiction.

For Lucien is an investigation into how fantasy and reality become blurred, through the power of delusion. The character Lucien, who could also be described as a set of ideas, is comprised of three different characters both real and invented. Throughout the piece they border between endearing and pathetic, as they latch onto idiosyncratic, impossible dreams, which have been perverted from mass media influences. Lucien in his three forms is portrayed in varying degrees of escapism. At best he is completely emerged in fantasy, and at his weakest he is confessional and self-loathing. Although these forms of escapism, whether self-prescribed or constructed narratives, are obsessive and somewhat extreme, the fear, self-doubt and depression that drives them to such ends are real and human.