christopher willits: opening

For years, I've imagined the work I do in music, photography, and video all coming into one space," says music-tech guru Christopher Willits from his home in San Francisco, "I believe that art has an ability to awaken our connection to everything." And that is exactly what he has set out to do with OPENING, the veteran Ghostly artist's immersive new audio-visual project. After building a library of footage and images from his travels around California, Hawaii, Japan, and Thailand, Willits will unveil for the first time a portion of his videos as an abstract film, the seven scenes of which each correspond with a song and photo from the album. The 45-minute piece uses music and a first-person perspective to tell what Willits calls "a very ambiguous story," much in the vein of ground-breaking experimental films Koyaanisqatsi and Baraka. Taken as a whole, OPENING is unlike anything Willits has accomplished before, and maybe that's because the audio-visual project is about expanding one's mind to become something new. Or, as Willits puts it, "OPENING is about transformation, the experience of changing oneself to be more of who you know you can be, and, ultimately, the joy that comes with that change.