technical: Viewers sit on a seat in the poppy-covered mound to lay back, look up at the video suspended overhead, and listen to an audio narrative through the cone-shaped speakers.  One hears a man’s voice recite historic passages written by poets under the influence of opiates or about opium, that is interspersed with a female voice speaking in contemporary language, referring to the man as if he is there in a ghost-like manner or there physically, but appears rather out of it.  The video was taken from a moving train of the track-side green grasses and dots of red poppies that pass.  When he speaks the video pauses to a still, and when one hears the contemporary voice, the image speeds along.

content: At the turn of the century there was a nervous disorder called neurasthenia, thought to be a disease of modernism where people were described to have shattered nerves, a fractured psyche, and high anxiety.  At the time there was great experimentation with drugs.  Opium and opiates were frequently prescribed to calm one down. As these symptoms easily emulate the condition of today due to the prolonged sense of heightened anxiety, this piece is about the desire to be numb and the result of becoming numb due to stress.