High Visibility

The foundations of homes erode, video tapes degrade with each play, and digital images rot in ways imperceptible to the human eye.

In the summer of 2022, an apartment building in Kitchener Ontario was vacated and condemned after a fire. Over the following 8 months, the building was methodically demolished by hand. Slowly revealing the belongings and interior lives of the former residents along the way.

In a series of vignettes, High Visibility captures the death of a home, the treachery of memory, and the inherent falsity of images, both analog and digital. Questioning the co-option of these flawed, transient objects into tools to justify nostalgia and atrocities.

High Visibility is comprised of static long takes, analog tape loops and experiments, and digital abstractions made with homemade video manipulating software and Google maps.

Ghosts of the monument.
Rotting rotting rotting.

  • Callon Murphy
    Director
  • Callon Murphy
    Sound
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Experimental
  • Runtime:
    1 hour 18 minutes
  • Completion Date:
    April 6, 2025
  • Production Budget:
    5,000 CAD
  • Country of Origin:
    Canada
  • Country of Filming:
    Canada
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital, Video Tape
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Callon Murphy

Callon Murphy is an amateur filmmaker and software developer currently residing in Kitchener, Ontario on unceded land. His work blends personal memories and formal experiments through various DIY digital and analog techniques. Delivered with sparse sound design and typically without narration, Callon's films and videos deal with the falsity of image-making, the futility of technology, and historical subjectivity.

His films have screened at festivals around the world including Obskura (France), Engauge (USA), Winnipeg Underground Film Festival (Canada), Experimental Superstars (Serbia), FUSE (Croatia), Fisura (Mexico), and Suspaustas Laikas (Lithuania).

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

High Visibility would not exist if not for the urge I felt to document my neighbourhood’s ever changing landscape. The apartment building demolition featured in High Visibility occurred directly across the street from my home. I was left with such mixed and complex emotions while watching the slow demolition process of the building, I knew that I had to capture it somehow. Seeing the interior lives of my neighbours exposed to the rest of the world through crumbling walls filled me with equal parts dread and wonder. I was witnessing the perfect visualization of the transient nature of both our lives and the spaces we inhabit. At the same time, I was also digitizing my family’s and my in-law’s home movie collections. Watching the apartment building fall brick by brick, I constantly found myself thinking of the worn out, degraded images I had been attempting to preserve. I realized that the connection I had found between these two disparate acts of demolition and digitization was one that warranted exploration. The culmination of that exploration being High Visibility. A work that stems from the desire to capture my own anxieties towards the unreliability of images and the impermanence of all things made by humankind. This is a highly personal project and I’m so proud that its foundation is formed by scenes from my own neighbourhood and my family’s home movies.