“WAX or... ” is set in Alamogordo, New Mexico (1983), where the main character, Jacob Maker, designs gunsight displays at a flight simulation factory. Jacob also keeps bees. His hives are filled with “Mesopotamian ” bees that he has inherited from his grandfather. Through these bees, the dead of the future begin to disappear, introducing Jacob to a type of destiny that pushes him away from the normal world, enveloping him in a grotesque miasma of past and synthetic realities. The bees show Jacob the story of his grandfather’s acquisition and fatal association with the “Mesopotamian ” bees, in the years following the First World War. The bees also lead Jacob away from him home, out to the Alamogordo desert, slowly revealing to him their synthetic/mechanical world, which exists in a darkness beyond the haze of his own thoughts. There, he enters the odd world of the bees, and fulfills his destiny. Traveling both to the past and the future, Jacob ends at Basra, Iraq, in the year 1991, where he meets a victim that he must kill.
Independently executed over six years, “WAX or... ” is an odd, new type of story experience, where smooth and sudden transpositions of picture and sound can nimbly follow and fuse with fantastical, suddenly changing, and often accelerated narrative. The result resembles story telling in animated film. Yet location photography and archive-research form the backbone of the piece. This tape provides an example of a new type of independent “electronic cinema ” that will become more common as the 1990's progress and demonstrates the narrative and visual forms that are emerging as the wide availability of new technologies are developing.