Clip from "Wonder," video, 2007, by Anna Peach. From the series "Bait."

It was midway through an exhibit at the Whitney that I began to rethink the roles of chance and control in my work. So many focus their attention on my highly controlled sculptural works where everything is ordered, realigned, yet teetering on chaos. They are in many ways temporary and unsatisfactory solutions to problems. Showing my interest in paradox. These inquiries often lead to questions of how I could work in an opposite fashion in my video. The series in Newfoundland is greatly a study of chance, not unlike a visual field notebook of a scientific explorer, capturing my investigation in a series of hundreds of takes that explored the edge of the sea in detail that only a scientist could love. I considered it a visual mapping technique. In a place where all things converge: Atlantic/Arctic, deep/shallow sea creatures, sun/wind/water, as the moon pushes the tides, it is hard to decide when to stop. Every day brought a new combination that would play out like a card game. Those videos, as seen in posts prior, examine the ocean from the vantage point of just below the surface, which would be the angle of a drowning person. It is the most chaotic part of the ocean; a point of convergence. Due to it being where all things combine, chance became the subject. Never knowing where your camera would end up or if you would see it again was all in a day's work.

So I returned to the "Bait" series as a means of exploring the ways in which I could increase the amount of control I had in my video. When the storms came, I had to withdraw from the sea's edge for my own safety. The "Bait" series became a meeting point for the crows and I. They were trainable, allowing me to film them in flashes here and there. The other factors like the angle of view and the timing of their approach were still well beyond my control. I learned that they watched me as I was watching them, a sort of double surveillance. It also felt more like a collaboration rather than a bribe. The bribe became a ball of Wonder bread that I crafted and let them eat. The "Ball of Wonder," as I called it became my way of seeing their social network, while they were also watching me.