James Carpenter discusses a film he made on salmon migration with Buster Simpson. Oral history interview with James Carpenter by Barb Elam and Jesse Merandy, September 20, 2018, JCDA Studios, New York, New York. Clip length: 02:30.

James Carpenter: I did a lot of work in film in the seventies which was a little bit of this outgrowth of doing, actually etching film images onto glass and projecting light and images on glass in the early seventies. And it morphed more into actually doing small films, sort of groups of films, that were shown, basically connecting back to the Nature Lab and all of that too. Going to one of the ones that is in the museum over in Germany is that going in, while I was being at Pilchuck with Buster Simpson who was one of the other people who helped start Pilchuck, we set up a whole scaffolding over a river and used a series of seven cameras looking down into the surface of the river and there was actually salmon migration taking place. So we actually have this group of films that are moving up the stream, and you actually get them from one film frame to the next one, next one, the movement of the fish going up. And that was sort of shown as a sculpture of film installation sculpture so you walk into the gallery and there is basically a river running on the floor and the fish are moving up through it. But, what happens is that if you change the timing of the film a little bit, slow it down slightly, print a couple frames for each regional frame, you can then then actually get a more staccato sort of movement, not slow motion, but more like little electrical quality to it. It made you realize what you’re actually looking at when you hold that image for a second longer—is that certainly you are looking at the bottom of the river and the fish in the river. But you—all of the sudden you realize you are looking at a perfect image of the sky overhead. So that, that in a way I use that as a way of thinking about glass, it’s this material that has sort of a field of information on the top of it, and it has a field of information within itself, and then there is obviously a field of information beyond it.  So the glass has this, for me, a capacity of being a way of collecting fragments of the world around us into what is otherwise referred to as a transparent material. And I find that very odd, that we think of glass as a transparent material where is has no physical presence, it’s basically just an aperture to the world outside, but it’s not being given any characteristics of its own, other than transparency, but  within transparency is this opportunity to get reflected image and refraction, you know there is more to the optical properties of the material.