This final weather diary travels through some rough inner and outer domains.  Social interactions blend more smoothly than the clash of air masses which threaten to clobber a prairie town in a vortex of violence.

Flashbacks and flashpoints flare-up along with thunderheads that loom and boom with vibrations of doom, their every move charted with vivid vibrancy on videographic maps which detail developing devastation.

Desire and death are in the air along with some aromatic wisps of ethnic edibles, so be sure to sniff it all.

Hydroglyphs pictographic writing in water, is a work that experiments with the lyrical qualities of shapes, colors, and forms occurring in water reflections and how these elements create an electronic painting unfolding in real time. Filmed from a canoe in the Great Swamp of southern Rhode Island, the imagery begins with subtle colorization and builds to a visual complexity that maintains a layered, watercolor effect throughout.

Immaterial Terrain is a film made by Emily Richardson along a seven-mile stretch of the UK coast between Sizewell nuclear power station and the mythic drowned city of Dunwich. Camera in hand, over the duration of a year Richardson repeatedly walked this coastline. These walks – pilgrimages and acts of protest – structure a film that documents a singular and fragile landscape at an uncertain moment. Plans to expand the nuclear power station at Sizewell will have a lasting impact on the environment. 

A hallucinatory portrait of a man traveling from Finland to Greece in search of the utopian summit described in René Daumal's Mount Analogue (1952) - a fictional mountain floating in the sea. Equal parts non-fiction cinema, concert film, road movie and spirit quest, our protagonist's journey is accompanied by immersive musical performances from Finnish guitar trio Olimpia Splendid and American percussionist Greg Fox.

Director / Editor / Camera Operator - Ben Russell
Steadicam Operator - Chris Fawcett

The Island Weights is a two-channel synchronized video installation. A composite of the two channels presented side by side in one video is available from Video Data Bank for educational use only.

Just a Soul Responding is a four-channel synchronized video installation. A composite of the four channels presented in one video is available from Video Data Bank for educational use only. 

A voyage into the labyrinthine memories of a Uitoto man, who worked for the drug Lords in the Colombian Amazon back in the 80s. Following his path between the forest and the ruin of a Narco's mansion imitating the Carrington mansion in the soap opera Dynasty, the film unfolds the hallucinatory account of a near-death experience.

Lesser Apes tells the story of a love affair between a primatologist, Farrah, and a female bonobo ape, Meema. Bonobos are the species with which humans share the most DNA, but unlike our species, they are matriarchal, live without conflict, and are unabashedly sexual. A paean to perversion, the film combines animation, live action and song to challenge attitudes about sex, language and our relationship to nature.

Lesser Apes tells the story of a love affair between a primatologist, Farrah, and a female bonobo ape, Meema. Bonobos are the species with which humans share the most DNA, but unlike our species, they are matriarchal, live without conflict, and are unabashedly sexual. A paean to perversion, the film combines animation, live action and song to challenge attitudes about sex, language and our relationship to nature.

"Let Each One Go Where He May is the stunning feature debut of celebrated Chicago-based filmmaker Ben Russell. Having its world premiere in Toronto, the film traces the extensive journey of two unidentified brothers who venture from the outskirts of Paramaribo, Suriname, on land and through rapids, past a Maroon village on the Upper Suriname River, tracing the voyage undertaken by their ancestors, who escaped from slavery at the hands of the Dutch 300 years prior.

"We are happy. (Silence.) What do we do now, now that we are happy?"

-- Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

September 24th, 2016, North Avenue Beach, Chicago. It was a sunny day. According to the weather report, the temperature was 75°F, with the barometer reading of 30 inches height and the wind speed of 13 miles per hour. The time was 2:27 pm, I was standing by the Michigan Lake. In my hand there was a waterproof camera that weighs 2.6 ounces. I pressed the record button on the camera and threw it into the lake. The camera sank into the lake immediately and embarked on a mysterious journey. During the journey, it was elevated, pressed, panned, rotated, and spun by the water.

Lunar Pond is part of an audiovisual series about lunar cycles and rhythms in an attempt to evoke, integrate and develop the mythical presence of the Aztec lunar goddess Coyolxauhqui, thus evoking the eroded contemporary landscape of our time.

In these lunar paths the moon is the celestial body of brilliant colors that crosses with its cyclical and mythical dance the dark space of our present time and in whose dance the moon enters, moves away, approaches and lies on itself in a cycle rhythmic of celestial agitation. These are the shamanic ways of the moon. Part of the Lunar Films series.

This waltz is a set of circular and fragmented compositions, in which a rhythmic and haunted dance hides an eroded lunar landscape. The microscopic rubble of our contemporary civilization. Part of the Lunar Films series.

Nobody counts the hours and nobody cares how the years are piling up. Souls begin and end. Then comes the night. A snow landscape of souls.

This video-lament for Mother Earth is a collaboration among Jim Barbaro, sound; Tobe Carey, cinematography and video editing; and Brenda Hutchinson playing a long tube.

"Made right after Covid lockdown, my art gave me an opportunity to rejoice, grieve and sonically face impermanence via sounds and a Chicken Dance I’ve been performing for decades. The beauty of this video is that it looks like Chicken Linda can finally FLY!! Please interact if you wish and dance, sing, cry, and FLY HIGH."

–– Linda Mary Montano

In the film Mad Ladders, the prophetic ramblings of an unseen narrator recount fantastical dreams of the coming Rapture, as crystalline imagery of rolling clouds gives way to heavily-processed video of moving stage sets from The American Music Awards telecasts of the 1980s and early 1990s. Blooming and pulsing in and out of geometric abstraction, this swirling storm of rising curtains, spinning set pieces, and unveiled pop idols forms an occult spectacle, driven by its impassioned narrator and an 8-bit leitmotif.

The Making and Unmaking of the Earth turns to geology as both a metaphor for and a psychic container of women's emotional states and embodied experiences of physical pain. Combining archival footage of earth processes with interviews describing mysterious physical experiences and emotional attachments, this film explores how everything we bury deep inside eventually speaks through the geology of the body.

We recently went to Guinea Bissau to research the guerrilla schools of the mangroves. Instead, we soon became ourselves the apprentices and the first lesson we had to learn was how to walk. If you walk straight, placing your heels on the ground first, you promptly slip and fall in the dams of the flooded mangrove rice field or you get stuck in the mangrove mud. You need to lower your body, flex your knees and stick your toes vertically into the mud, extend your arms forwards in a conscious and present movement. In the mangrove school the learning happens with the whole body.

We recently went to Guinea Bissau to research the guerrilla schools of the mangroves. Instead, we soon became ourselves the apprentices and the first lesson we had to learn was how to walk. If you walk straight, placing your heels on the ground first, you promptly slip and fall in the dams of the flooded mangrove rice field or you get stuck in the mangrove mud. You need to lower your body, flex your knees and stick your toes vertically into the mud, extend your arms forwards in a conscious and present movement. In the mangrove school the learning happens with the whole body.

An over thirty-minute static long take of a grass lawn in front of a lake. A camera is set still to capture a day trip of a group of people around the lake. The causal conservation suggests they are having a picnic on a breezy day, where a wind chime occasionally rings, alongside the random blowing of a horn. The video processing focuses on the keying of two distinct areas: the lake and the surrounding grass lawn and trees. 

This is the clinamen of our times, sparkling bodies into the spiral vortex as well as its chaotic spatial present. Part of the Scattered Geology Audiovisual series.

"In late December 2020 I began making videos of bouquets of Anemones using a microscope lens. The very limited focal length of the lens requires that the lens touch the subject to obtain focus. This imaging process developed into an odd intimacy between subject, apparatus and my body as I moved the handheld camera through the bouquets. The audio is made up of processed sync sound, samples from the Forbidden Planet soundtrack and computer voiced words from the Algorithms for Indeterminacy series.

In these lunar paths the moon is the celestial body of brilliant colors that crosses with its cyclical and mythical dance the dark space of our present time and in whose dance the moon enters, moves away, approaches and lies on itself in a cycle rhythmic of celestial agitation. These are the shamanic ways of the moon. Part of the Lunar Films series.