Set between Swaziland and South Africa, in a region still struggling with the divisions produced by an apartheid government, Greetings to the Ancestors documents the dream lives of the territory’s inhabitants as the borders of consciousness dissolve and expand. Equal parts documentary, ethnography and dream cinema, herein is a world whose borders are constantly dematerializing.
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.
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.
A young man recovering from emotional wounds, defiantly re-enters the outside world that welcomes his return with all its abundant miracles.
Bee Film is a collaboration between filmmaker Cathy Lee Crane and composer Beth Custer that explores the life of bees in Hilo, Hawaii and their human caretakers who are working to preserve an endangered species.
The artwork was originally presented as a three-channel film installation including a live score by Beth Custer, with the world premiere at Aurora Picture Show, in Houston, Texas in 2015. Bee Film is available for distribution as a three-channel composite.
This video captures the playfulness of the Videofreex as they frolic in the first snow of 1971. With joyful excitement, David, Bart, Chuck, Nancy and Skip pass the camera back and forth to explore the possibilities for video under the new weather condition offered by flurries. While Nancy tapes, David and Bart create fictional characters stranded after a plane crash. Annie, Francis and the resident dog, Mushroom, join the group for further snowy shenanigans. Later, Bart tries to interview the local snowplow driver for an episode of Lanesville TV, but without success.
This is an over-the-top Video bouquet audaciously delivered by flamboyant "Pan" – like poets determined to paint the world pink.
As profecias da Orixá Oxum (The Prophecies of the Waterfall Spirit Oxum) was filmed at Iguaçu Falls, Brazil/Argentina, and is intended for viewing in Virtual Reality. The intent of Prophecies is to transport the viewer to an alternate reality that exceeds the boundaries of the everyday visual experience, evoking faces, emotions, the visualization of sound waveforms, and mystery.
From the green ooze of a haunted forest arise lonely shamans in red gowns alongside twisted creatures from nightmarish cartoons with the long suppressed belief in pagan ways now real and raw in the sun and shadows of neighboring field and flowery meadows. Here, spirits of the woods seductively cavort behind tree and bush to weave their spell upon visitors who enter the wild zone!
Mid-day light illuminates a pond of decaying lotuses and turns black plant forms against a white background into scenes of abstract calligraphy, loose and flowing yet taut within its own geometry. Central to the meaning of The Death of the Lotus is the metaphor of life, death, and resurrection expressed through the image of the lotus. Written reflections on the illusion of permanence, the perception of images, and the capriciousness of nature integrate text and image. The Death of the Lotus&
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
This animation short translates Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy - Inferno into a catastrophic narrative about the environment. Incorporating extinct wildlife and vegetation, the animation aims to create a parallel between Dante’s depiction of 9 worlds of hell and the probable outcomes of climate change.
Rosa Barba produced a science fiction film based on interviews with local residents and individuals involved in the land suppletion project for Maasvlakte 2. Barba asked the interviewees to imagine what this new land could look like in the future. While we see images of the new land, the slufter: a storage reservoir for heavily contaminated sludge from the new Meuse river, the construction of the huge docksides, basalt blocks, empty containers and the mechanical movements of the transhipment process, we listen to a story apparently taking place in the future.
Forest Law underlines the persistent fact that we are yet to learn to live otherwise in an age defined by the colossal consequences of a new socio-geological order we ourselves have created through irresponsible interactions with Earth’s systems.
Intertwining associated experiments in image and sound generation using AI, Nearest Neighbor focuses on language acquisition and mimicry between humans, birds and machines, asking fundamental questions about consciousness, learning and understanding. The film is a contemporary reflection on the state of technology in relation to the natural world. It asks us to think about what we want from inter-species communication and what we expect from technologies that aspire to substitute for living beings.
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.
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.
At sunset a large orchestra, a choir and a group of young people position themselves against the backdrop of a mountain landscape. The musicians play the first section of Mahler's 8th Symphony, moving in precise choreography. Then, almost unnoticed, groups of them start disappearing in the dying light. Soon the landscape and the sound similarly dissolve into twilight.
"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.
It’s a delight; not fragile yet.
It’s not hockey bashing and blades.
Not the escapades, or a snake.
It’s an expanded definition of drawing.
A silent 16mm film shot in Nebraska during the total solar eclipse in 2017. The work was shot on film to capture this light-based phenomenon on a light reactive medium, as opposed to on digital video. Meditating on the metaphysical, in the work we observe the slow alignment of the moon eclipsing the sun, super-imposed onto the open landscape where it was shot. Wind, insects and plants all become active receptors for this phenomenological shift from mid-day to mid-night, as the sun transforms from a primary source of life into a fugitive void.
The historic Great Blizzard of 1978, one of the most severe blizzards in U.S. history, hit southern New England with paralyzing effects. When no one could drive, and thousands of cars were buried under five feet of snow on local highways, people took to the streets, including Laurie with a Portapak. The tape features commentary provided by local citizens, a National Guard helicopter invasion, the five-day traffic jam frozen on the I-95 highway, and an optimism-in-the-face-of adversity speech by the Governor of Rhode Island.
Reclamation is a documentary-style imagining of a post-dystopian future in Canada after massive climate change, wars, pollution, and the after-effects of the large-scale colonial project which has now destroyed the land. When Indigenous people are left behind after a massive exodus by primarily privileged white settlers who have moved to Mars, the original inhabitants of the land cope by trying to restore and rehabilitate the beautiful planet they belong to.
Both Vermont Landscape and Pond Life followed two opera collaborations with composer Steve Reich. The operas were a new genre called a Theater of Ideas, which said a great deal about the world cultures in which we all live. In contrast, these two small works are quiet, with no words.
