Articles Tagged with: a harras / crossmyheart
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Recomposing time: short-form video as conceptual EP

When I put together the crossmyheart (a harras reworks) project, I thought about how to use short-form video as a creative tool. Since the project is built around transformation, I wondered what would happen if these short-form videos weren’t treated as excerpts or promotional fragments, but as a form of remix in their own right. Something closer to a parallel way of working with the same material, but under different time conditions.

Each short video takes material from the source and reworks it under a different duration. Some are extremely short—almost loop-like rhythmic units where repetition becomes the structure itself. Others allow more space for gesture or change. In some cases, they use footage that never appears in the main videos, even though it comes from the same source sessions.

What connects them is not narrative or sequence, but time—and who controls it.

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What happens when a machine reads experimental art?

A few years ago, I posed a question—whether an AI could interpret one of my poems. It’s something I keep coming back to: how, or if, a machine can make sense of art. So I decided to explore this again. What follows are the results of an experiment in AI interpretation during the making of the crossmyheart video, exploring what happens when a machine reads experimental art through production data.

First, a bit of context. I used Gemini for support while making the piece. It helped me with software features I wasn’t familiar with and supported me in achieving some of the visual effects. I’d describe what I wanted, and it would suggest tools, effects, and settings to get there. I couldn’t have made the video without that help.

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The rumors are true (or, how one thing becomes another)

I’ve seen the headlines. The rumors are true—or so it seems.

For the past few years, I’ve been working inside the strange world of a harras—a cycle of surreal and absurd poems that slowly expanded into a book, an album, and a short film. The project has always been about change, so in some ways it feels inevitable that the music itself would eventually transform as well.

Today I’m releasing crossmyheart (a harras reworks), a remix album built from the original vocal recordings but radically reimagined musically. The result moves through ambient atmosphere, industrial textures, ceremonial rhythms, and flashes of pop energy—what I’ve started to think of as something like synth-pop poetry.

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a map of fragments

A close-up, black-and-white image of a person holding their head in their hands, eyes closed, with a distressed or contemplative expression.
Still from a harras video by luke kurtis

i took some time to myself the past year or so. last summer i went to Austria and Hungary, where i made a conceptual photo-text work. i didn’t tell many people about it, because that’s what i needed—creation without expectation, burden, or responsibility. if you know me at all, you know i’m an introvert to the nth. and sometimes art-making in a public way is too much.

if i’ve learned anything, it’s that art is best when it’s on my own terms—when i don’t worry too much about how it will exist in the world (if it even needs to). there’s a certain rawness i’m still figuring out how to hold without smoothing it over.

i went to Japan for the winter—back to my beloved Tokyo for the first time since the pandemic. spent a few days up in Sapporo for the snow festival (bucket list moment), then settled in Osaka for a while. Osaka was grand, but Tokyo will always be the one. there’s just something about being alone in the biggest city on earth, but never feeling like your introversion is an obstacle. which is pretty much the opposite of New York—a city that dares you to keep up or get out. no wonder punk was born there (among other places).

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