Infinite Jest

In David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest, a character devices a videotape that is so endless fascinating, that anyone who watches even a few seconds of it literally cannot stop watching, and will sit there transfixed, staring at the screen hour after hour (it plays on a loop), until death arrives by dehydration, starvation, or worse. 

Some time Saturday afternoon, I found myself with some free time on my hands (always a dangerous situation).  For some reason, I started a little project where I took a bunch of screensaver photographs I've accumulated and set them to music. I wanted to make it hypnotic by repeating some pictures in a recurring fashion, while keeping it interesting by introducing new themes and motifs in accordance with the music.  Somewhat facetiously, I titled the project Infinite Jest in honor of DFW.

DFW had the last laugh.  I started the project sometime around 8:00 p.m., and while still not finished, I didn't stop work on it until 3:45 a.m.   This morning, I met Britney for brunch, but as soon as I got home, I resumed work on the project and the next thing I knew it was already Sunday evening.  I missed the Celtics' game on t.v. (they won), I didn't get any chores completed, and I'm still nowhere near complete on the video project.  But like the titular Infinite Jest, it caught me (but not the viewer) in it's web, but fortunately I was able to break the spell before it was too late.

The video above is not the Infinite Jest project, but a video along the same lines that I produced several years ago, posted to give you an idea of what kind of project I had in mind before I almost lost my mind.