In New York, sometime in my early thirties, I came upon a loose page from a 19th century travel guide to Switzerland. A sketch showed the picturesque Rapperschwyl, my future place of birth. Crowned by an ancient chateau on the promontory projecting into the Lake of Zuerich, the town has been widely known as the last independent republic of the Swiss Confederation. A less frequent feature is its citizens' man-hunt and capture of an alleged murderer, the last person to be guillotined in Switzerland, seven days before the outbreak of World War II. My youth was spent there, partly in the company of friends drawn by the shadier sides of life. Meanwhile, I traveled some, guided by chance and intuition. I lived in Rome, Berlin, Warsaw and Zürich, while keeping a base in New York. In all these places I kept extensive electronic, possibly sometime soon photonic records, focusing closer on their protagonist, light: in various guises, optical and psychical, stimulator of senses and bringer of memory and dreams. In video systems, light is transformed into an electric signal, processed, magnetically stored, and released again as an image of light. In my analogy, light enters through the eye into the body, assuming a volatile union with matter. Light as light becomes unrecognizable. In darkness, light separates from matter and appears as the bright space of our memories and dreams. As for the fiends of my youth - the other day, I saw one who had become a cameleer.

This guy's a thief, a killer - and he died long ago, I thought.

Try me, he said...