The Outcast of the Universe (The One)

The One is a cinematic trailer constructed as a study in narrative form, memory, and belief. The piece follows Gideon Reed, once known as Michael, a young archivist recruited into a group called The Eternal Temple during a solar eclipse gathering at Cahokia Mounds in the early 1990s. More than twenty five years later, he appears again in the desert hills outside Lancaster, California, carrying the remnants of that earlier moment. The trailer is built as a formal experiment. Its structure, shot lengths, and editorial pacing are derived directly from the original theatrical trailer for Chinatown (1974). Each cut mirrors the rhythm of that trailer while introducing a completely different narrative world. The result is a new story that emerges from the skeleton of an earlier cinematic form. The project draws loosely from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1835 story Wakefield, in which a man quietly leaves his life and lives nearby under another identity. In The One, this idea of disappearance and reinvention unfolds across landscapes and fragments of memory. Filmed across locations in St. Louis and the Mojave Desert, the work combines practical landscape footage with AI assisted image generation and scripting. The trailer is part of a larger body of work that also includes medium format photographs taken at specific locations connected to the narrative. Together the photographs and video fragments construct the outline of a film that does not exist. Rather than revealing a complete story, The One presents a series of clues: an eclipse gathering at Cahokia, a mysterious organization, an archivist sent west, and a man walking alone into the desert decades later. Like the trailers that inspired it, the piece invites the viewer to imagine the larger narrative that surrounds these moments.