Everybody collects something. In 1987 I started collecting missing children.

I don't know whether it is just a local phenomenon, but in San Francisco one receives in the mail advertisements featuring local automobile brake and clutch repair joints on one side, and on the other, images, usually a pair of images, of a child who has gone missing. The image on the left is a picture of the child at the time of disappearance, the image on the right either an age-progression by an artist of what the child might look like now (often decades later) or a picture of the abductor, most frequently one of the child's parents. Sometimes there is no picture on the right - probably the most worrisome.

These cards are the first item of junk mail that one discards, but it was not contrariness that made me start collecting them. Rather, a project beckoned: I was immediately struck by the likeness between the two images - the child and the progressed child, or the child and the parent. The project would have been kinetic, media-archaeological, probably inspired by Christian Boltanski's work from that period. Suffice it to say, some inner editor nixed the realization of that one. But I continue, to this day, to collect these most worthless items of all junk mail, even as my own horizon of what constitutes surplus information has expanded (only in 1989 did I get my first email account.)

"Dust" presents a fragment of this collection of likeness-pairs, scanned sequentially into the light-memory of phosphorescent powder. After a few minutes of exposure to the projected image, the powder retains a faint green image of the two faces on its surface, something akin to the 'latent image' of photographic film or the veil of memory. Unlike photographic film, though, the image starts to distort. Propelled by low frequency sound vibrations, the powder starts to flow and dance, first distorting the faces and erasing their likeness, then distorting them into patterns of abstract light in motion, with form and beauty all its own.