Environment

This is the arche-fossil and the presence of the decay-image rate of his radioactive nucleus as an omen of interesting times. Part of the Scattered Geology Audiovisual series.

Our Non-Understanding of Everything is a series of 16 videos that explore how the structures of architecture, semiconductors, and circuits become forms of expression reflecting hierarchies, cognitive processes, and relationships to the natural environment.

The project presents the blurring of the Green Line for Israelis and its consolidation for Palestinians, through important planning and legal decisions.

The seemingly groundless debate as to whether a river is "riley" or "roily" can be interpreted as an example of language's descriptive failure. A shouting match over how to describe the river has no effect; the face of nature continues unchanged. Riley, Roily, River graphically illustrates the gap of meaning that exists between the natural, empirical world and the language we use to describe it.

In a motel in El Reno, Oklahoma, George observes the weather and copes with leaking air conditioning, food shopping, loneliness, television, and eating, among other things.

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

Among the leading pioneers of the eco-art movement, the collaborative team of Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison (often referred to simply as “the Harrisons”) have worked for almost forty years with biologists, ecologists, architects, urban planners and other artists to initiate collaborative dialogues to uncover ideas and solutions which support biodiversity and community development.

The first video work created collaboratively with DonChristian Jones as a part of Eiko's The Duet Project: Distance is Malleable. The video was projected as part of The Value of Sanctuary: Building a House Without Walls exhibition at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine in 2019.

Performed by Eiko Otake and DonChristian.
Camera by DonChristian Jones, Inci Eviner, Merián Soto.
Edited by Eiko Otake.
Created during the 2017 Rauschenberg Residency for The Duet Project.

Black Sea Files is a territorial research on the Caspian oil geography: the world's oldest oil extraction zone. A giant new subterranean pipeline traversing the Caucasus will soon pump Caspian crude to the West. The line connecting the resource fringe with the terminal of the global high-tech oil circulation system, runs through the video like a central thread. However, the trajectory followed by the narrative is by no means a linear one. Circumventing the main players in the region, the video sheds light on a multitude of secondary sceneries.

Future From Inside is the last in the trilogy begun in 2016, by Dani and Sheilah ReStack (also including Strangely Ordinary this Devotion and Come Coyote.) The work traces the ReStack collaboration, as it manifests in life and in work.

A weather diary of sorts where my mouth is pretty much shut but the window is wide open to various cloudscapes and local color tinged with a twang. Spring on the prairie with a sprinkling of Porky Pig pixie-powder on the lips of he who crunches in protein paradise.

If second lives have grown into the landscape of social network space and avatars engage a full range of human emotions and experience, it follows that they would eventually encounter existential questions. A plot of land is purchased in the online network of SecondLife and a simple questions is asked: Where do discarded 3D objects go and can we build a dumpster to accommodate them? To find out eteam set aside a year to let this virtual land use problem unfold and what is captured in Prim Limit is the lived experience of avatars managing and recording this dumpster.

The Earth Is Young takes as its starting point a series of interviews conducted with Young Earth Creationists, who find evidence of a six-day, six-thousand-year old creation in their reading of the fossil and geological record. The film frames these encounters with depictions of the slow and patient work of young paleontologists, and the strange, shimmering life in a drop of pond water, both of which point toward a world far older and more complex, if no less fantastic.

3 Church Walk is a film made with writer Jonathan P. Watts and sound composer Simon Limbrick about the empty and neglected Suffolk house of modernist architect H. T. ‘Jim’ Cadbury-Brown.

A series of unnatural deaths and departures (almost all, of men) disrupts the lives of nine families sharing an apartment building in Jerusalem.

Strangely Ordinary This Devotion is a visceral exploration of feral domesticity, queer desire, and fantasy in a world under the threat of climate change. Utilizing and exploding archetypes, the film offers a radical approach to collaboration and the conception of family. Dani and Sheilah collect and arrange images and moments that are at once peculiar and banal, precious and disturbing, creating resonance and contrast through experimental modes of storytelling.

A silent film portraying winter across three continents.

An abandoned rural house, the Ravel Quartet in F major and then rain, wind, snow and fog are the elements of which this video is composed. In an impossible procession, one take presents four atmospheric agents to strike against the house. The musical instruments which follow the quartet each become an audio track which corresponds to each one of the atmospheric agents. So the sound of the first violin drips like the rain, that one of the second violin is muffled like the snow, the sound of the viola moves like the wind and that one of the cello vibrates like the fog.

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.

Our Non-Understanding of Everything is a series of 16 videos that explore how the structures of architecture, semiconductors, and circuits become forms of expression reflecting hierarchies, cognitive processes, and relationships to the natural environment.

Filmed during a trip sponsored by UCLA CAPS in 2019.

Camera by Alexis Moh.
Edited by Eiko Otake.

Based on live testimony, historical documents from my Egyptian Jewish family’s archives, and fragments from the renowned Cairo Geniza discovered in the 19th century in the Ben Ezra synagogue in Cairo, which includes documents from the 9th-19th centuries. Fatherland Archives illuminates the vanished world of Egyptian Jewish life and culture.

“Animists are people who recognise that the world is full of persons, some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others.”

-- Graham Harvey, Animism

Trance dance and water implosion, a kino-line drawn between secular freak-outs and religious phenomena. Filmed in a single take at a sacred site on the Upper Suriname River, the minor secrets of a Saramaccan animist's everyday are revealed as time itself is undone. Rites are the new Trypps -- embodiment is our eternal everything.

“The tape ultimately addresses all the big questions — death, origin and family, religion — as well as the small discomforts of the body, only to reverse their order of importance.”

— Margaret Morse, Framework (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions)

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.