Video (color, sound); variable speed, ceiling-mounted, spinning LCD projector; DVD; DVD player. 2012 variation: fixed LCD projector.

This ceiling-mounted spinning projector was presented for the first time during the summer of 2003 in a collaborative exhibition with Michael Mercil at the North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks. The projected video depicts the Shaker text “my love is increasing,” which is from a sacred token, or spiritual gift, dictated in 1857 to Polly Laurence of Hancock, Massachusetts by the deceased Mother Ann Lee and presented to Nancy Oaks, a Shaker disciple.

my love, cast across the walls of the room by a spinning projector, depicts an engrosser’s pen point very slowly scribing the words “my love is increasing,” played as a continuous loop that repeats the sequence from the beginning, to follow the trajectory of the writing. In other looped videos, by comparison, a sequence plays forward, then in reverse, then forward again; then it repeats this sequence. (Sandy Mundy, a calligrapher, wrote out the text here and also scribed the penmanship exercises for across, 2002 .) The mechanism turning the projector changed speed as it rotated in a clockwise direction, from 2 rpm to 331⁄2 rpm (that of a long-playing vinyl record). The projection went from slow to a speed that blurred the image before it slowed again to the pace of the hand writing.