All That is Solid - single channel video, 10.5 mins. (2005-7)

All That Is Solid is bittersweet global city symphony that stars the webcam, its presence revealed through traces and technological artifacts: wires connecting it to the Net, reflections in window glass behind which it hides, without an operator to attend to the dirt and rain that obstruct its view as it records time passing by. The video depicts the asynchronous time of the Internet, where the speed of time-space compression meets the dull, slowness of real time, non-stop flows of information, This is a world where physical geography no longer determines travel times across continents, where time zones become visual signs rather than bodily experiences, and where boundaries between private and public shrink as wired private locations joined global public networks.

Made from footage culled from private security webcams from around the world, specific locations are traceable by faces, signs, architectural details, or domain names, and sometimes not at all. Jumpy, mechanical movement and low-resolution images reveal the technological conditions that produce the images, which, despite their high-tech origins, are reminiscent of early cinema and photography. These marks of technology indicate the limitations of real-time image transfers over networks and remind us of the separation between the spaces of the local depictions and their global access.

Fragments from recordings telephone calls made during Lyndon Johnson's presidency intermix with voices from call-in radio programs, and reveal personal, and sometimes gripping intimate details of the callers' lives, fragments of lives as just more random information moving without purpose, across public networks.

All that is Solid is part of Network Movies, a series of videos and video installations Bookchin produced between 2005 and 2007, in which she sampled data flows of images from online security webcams from around the world to create portraits of global landscapes.