Words: Aubrey Bramble
Images: Mark Thompson

I was first exposed to the work of Mark Thompson at a performance of local band Jarvik 7. His grainy, underexposed images moved almost hypnotically with the music, drawing me and my fellow audience members into a reluctant yet seraphic trance. Beautiful, at times otherworldly, and almost always unnervingly nostalgic, Mark's images are a swansong to the Tampa Bay area and to the nooks and crannies of our collective subconscious.

REAX:  How did your relationship with Jarvik 7 begin?
Mark Thompson:  I've been friends with Mat and Bill for a long time. I remember coming down once and just sitting in their practice space. I was tired, just got off a plane, kind of in and out of consciousness. That was one of the first times I had ever really heard them and they had gotten to a really good place. And I was like, "that's what Tampa sounds like." That kind of something that's evolving and slow, but then underneath there's a beauty. Then there's kind of a roughness. So I already knew when I was going to start doing visuals for them what I was going to shoot. I was going to go down to the Port, go shoot off of Bayshore… just get these kinds of things to compare.

REAX:  How did you record your images?
MT:  I shot mostly on digital but then tried to make it look like 8mm. And then I grabbed some tracks from them and put together a music video. And that was for the song "batten." We put it together and it was really really tight and I submitted it into some festivals, and it traveled around the world. Something just kind of hit with their music and people reacted to it. So I did that and it showed online; it ended up winning a contest and it was funny because it was a contest sponsored by Levi's. It was one of these things that in order to get the money I had to relinquish the rights for a year. So when I told them everyone was happy, but we were all fearful that this thing was going to show up on TV and we were going to have this Levi's commercial on our hands.

REAX:  Was the Jarvik 7 stuff the first professional foray you had into filmmaking?
MT:  Prior to working with them I was doing video in Gainesville. I wanted to go into film school at one point and then I started to talking to some people in film; it was something else. I was drawn a lot more to video art; something that's trying to change film. It makes perfect sense because you have the ability to evolve a medium. Once the video got into the computer I was so happy because it was plastic and I could do whatever I wanted to with it. So, I was doing video collage or video painting.

REAX:  What equipment do you use?
MT:  My bread and butter commercially and artistically is AfterEffects. With Jarvik 7 one of the things we started using at the last show was this software called Modulate and it's basically a video synthesizer. So that was interesting. If I can grab an HD camera every now and again, I do. I'm not really that partial to one or the other. Film is like oil painting. It's the high medium that everyone kind of aspires to. It's expensive and it can be clumsy. It looks great, but there's these people who just kind of champion it for the sake of... content was always more important to me than medium.

Mark is currently involved in creating moving visuals for the Sundance Channel's Iconoclasts series. You can check his incredible roster of professional and personal projects out on his website, www.skylab5.com.