A billboard looming over the 5 Freeway advertised a mortuary called “Eternal Valley.” In Green Valley, California, the road stops, eroded and dysfunctional, but continues to be nothing other than a road.
Camera: Ramzi Hibri, Matthew Lax
Edit: Matthew Lax
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.
This is the flowers under attack. An entire ecosystem under attack. This is the omen of the bugambilia. This is the pulsation of the nervous trance of petals in the anthropocentric times. Part of the Hauntology series.
Pitayas are the sacred Mesoamerican fruits that grow on Mexican nopales, an ancient plant. This is the colorful body, the vibrant blood and the radiant skin of the open life.
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.
Appealing concurrently in this video essay to various meanings of the term “Subatlantic” — a climatic phase beginning 2,500 years ago, as well as the submerged regions of the Atlantic — Biemann immerses her camera deep in oceanic waters to ponder upon the entanglements of geological time with that of human history.
An excerpt from Assassin of Youth: A Kaleidoscopic History of Harry Anslinger’s War on Drugs [University of Chicago Press (2016)] as written and spoken in voice over by Alexandra Chasin. “Charadrius Dubius: A Play of Birds, Plants, and People in the Contact Zone,” inverts Book 9 of Homer’s Odyssey, taking the perspective of the Lotus Eaters—and then inverts that perspective too. Disciplines from the Northern Hemisphere—Literature, Botany, Anthropology—go swirly in Equatorial climes.
“A soldier’s trip to Syria is complicated when he accidentally impregnates a friend. Meanwhile, a horse breeder from Ohio is driven away from home by her own desire to become pregnant. In Hard as Opal the lines between truth and fiction, fact and fantasy, are reined in and treated not as fixed, divisive markers but as malleable threads of narrative potential. Buckhiester and Leventhal perform alongside other non-actors who are filmed in their own varying domestic and professional environments.
This is the liturgy of the sacred fangs, a forgotten syntax of ancient scripture. In the secret of the ritual fangs the holy syntax used to be a dance. A germinal dance of the language.
High Water was filmed in post-Katrina New Orleans and the surrounding Louisiana wetlands, one of the fastest disappearing coastal areas on the planet. The work engages viewers in a contemplation of a landscape damaged by human intervention that nevertheless struggles to retain its vitality. High Water is accompanied by Stephen Vitiello’s moody soundtrack.
Music by Stephen Vitiello
Gian Pablo Villamil, technical/creative consultant
Denise Markonish, MASS MoCA, producer
Kenneth Terry, trumpet player
THE GREAT CURDLING is a Folk-Sci-Fi film. It’s a darkly comic musical exploring the feeling that collective reality is at tipping point. A middle-class family are adjusting to a new kind of happy, now they have consumed a transformative liquid technology that helps re-structure them from the inside.
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.
Sister City channels moments of paradoxical experience — of being a superhero or being for sale — into reverberant conduits, articulating a nature divided by panes of glass or suspended in watery solitudes. Each shift begets a kind of origin story: one encounter traces the specific azure of a James Turrell installation to a pet shop jellyfish, in another, a modern-day putto purifies a horrific tale by blowing bubbles in a tub. Sister City, like water, seeks its own level; cresting and displacing continuous bursts of life, spiritualized, succulent, and ultimately alone.
Behind the yellow gates is a realm that sparkles like diamonds under a desert sun. It is a realm ablaze with outrageous flowers, fragrant and poisonous… A realm populated by bare skin scared by flashing swords and marked with stone idols… It is that subterranean consciousness; a land of Mind-in-Time that sends unholy incense up toward Heaven.
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.
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.
