Falling Off the Edge of Nebraska is an ongoing large-scale multimedia installation that presents a fractured memoir that draws on the American West and the counter-culture experience of the past half century. The artist uses this format to exhume a rich cultural and personal history, full of revelation and myriad contradictions. Livingston grew up in the region and lived there for most of his life.

The installation includes audio, video, sound, found objects, photographs, painting, drawing, and creative writing.

Note: Many of the artist's family have an inherited form of  essential tremor. Essential tremor is a neurological disorder that causes involuntary and rhythmic shaking. It can affect almost any part of the body, but the trembling occurs most often in the hands . As the artist ages, he has essential tremors. He embraces it. Throughout the work presented he retains evidence of this. Videos quiver, lines shake, paint  is raked, and the sound of his voice wavers .

The large-scale multimedia installation can be installed in a variety of ways. Here a small backroom is used with a single video with sound. In the entrance there is a portrait of the artists daughter from the early 1970's, printed on see through silk fabric, hung from the ceiling. Throughout the exhibition there are others depicted in this way. They are people the artist's life from the era. They are frozen in time, see through and gauzy. Some still alive, some not. Most appear in the text.

Included are  found objects collected from the sides of highways and roads, debries from the artist's travel and his exploration of car culture. Post accident  car parts, shredded rubber from tires flug off massive trucks moving at high speed, chunks of broken roadway and rebar. These readymades are full of dignity and beauty, tailmans of the everyday that often go unnoticed.

There are guitars placed throughout the exhibition with places for visitors to sit. The audience is invited to use them. Guitars were seminal to change within the counterculture of the past decades. Instruments that when electrified through amps make a massive sound— mimicking the industrial world, the war machine, the changing mechanized world. They are the most democratic of instruments. Easy to learn to play, affordable, and iconic.

The sound used on videos and in the installation is created by Livingston using avante methods including alt-tuning, feedback, and multi-tracking (influenced by new music and conceptual performance). This can be explored in real time by the artist, visitors, and by guest sound/artists who can bring their own take on the materials and the ideas presented.

The Falling Off the Edge of Nebraska installation includes text not only in the work and videos, but a series of short stories published together in a book of the same title. Like the exhibiton, which changes in each installation the book is published in small editions which include differing stories depending on the show.

There are future plans to publish everything together in a final book combining image and text. The stories are also recorded to audio, read by the author, and played in discreet locations within the exhibtion.

The short stories are all auto fiction based on aspects of the artists life and personal history.

Photographs of cars in western landscapes from the multimedia installation Falling Off the Edge of Nebraska.

Driving across the region is a key motif repeated in the exhibition. The artist has photographed many areas discussed from cars throughout his life. To replicate some the key locations, he was depicting he began to use small cars and google maps to travel back to key locations. He found by placing the cars in front of screens he could capture a sense of the landscape while toying with a sense of reality and playfulness.

He also began using old slides he had taken and collected over the years, digitizing them, and producing them in large formats.

Falling Off the Edge of Nebraska is a a "modular" installation. It can be exhibited in many forms, large and small. It could be in a closet or fill a museum gallery.

A part of the modules include a variety of series of paintings on paper and canvas.

These paintings take many forms. A number are dark abstractions based on what the flat western landscape of the great plains looks like at night  from car windows and trains. The land rushes by, blurred in the distance, marks seen on signs and on the highway. The prairie grasses and crops fly by in magnificent patterns, broken by side roads and signage. Various animals are glimpsed. Thoughts are depicted through words scralwed on the surface.
 

There area variety of subsets of paintings in Falling Off the Edge of Nebraska.

The Reflector Series are created silver paint and  reflector micro beads enbedded in layers of  clear medium. The micro beads are the type  used in highway signs. They light up in bright reflection when hit by car lights. These paintings change in light as the viewer moves in front of them.

The Highway Estatic Series  are painted with industrial yellow highways paint. They depict images drawn from the figurative style of highway signs to depict singular persons in various states of “being” and “ecstatic experience”. Elsewhere the same figures crop up as ciphers within landscapes.

The Car Series are a number of large paintings of automobiles that are  are similar to those once owned by the artist over his life, all reference in text and elesewhere in the exhibition. These painting are often combined with objects and some are used to project video on.

The exhibition includes a number of short experimental videos that combine text, sound, moving and still image. All sound used in the video is created by the artist using instruments included in the installation. The videos are presented on  high defintion screens and projected onto canvas and objects.