Environment

In this early black and white, reel-to-reel video, small game traps are set to catch the rain.

This title is also available on Sympathetic Vibrations: The Videoworks of Paul Kos.

The close collaboration between internationally celebrated artist-filmmakers Ben Rivers (Two Years at Sea) and Ben Russell (Let Each One Go Where He May) has yielded an intriguing ethno-trance aesthetic that finds its stunning summa in their much anticipated co-directed feature A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness. An immersive, at times mesmerizing experience, Spell follows a nameless protagonist — played with Bressonian restraint by musician Robert A.A.

"In Some Dark Place, filmmaker Cecelia Condit explores the dislocations of identity and memory that aging forces upon us, without losing sight of life's beauty."

— Milwaukee Film Festival, 2016

"I have always explored the eerie, dark side of human nature."

— Cecelia Condit

Through a successful eBay bid in January of 2004, 1975 eteam dollars turned into 10 acres of personal U.S. property. The lot, a generic square within the larger American grid of townships, is located in the desert of Nevada. The closest settlement, Montello, "The town that refuses to die", is eight miles away, and the almost abandoned airbase Wendover, at the edge of the Salt Flats, is located about 30 miles SE. It's the 10-acre lot and its surroundings that started the eteam's search for solutions to problems, which were created by big systems that had made some small mistakes.

A rock. Buildings. Trees. Nothing happens. But something is always moving. People walk by. Time passes by. Seasons change. The Earth’s tectonic plates are in constant but imperceivable motion, which slowly move apart or crash together.

This absurdist, microscopic film noir follows the activities of an underground network of ill people, desperate to create alternative methods of self-care in a world where natural resources are disappearing. While examining the meaning of health, disease, and well-being in the post-industrial world, Apple Grown In Wind Tunnel imagines the development of a culture at the margins, linked by illicit radio broadcasts, toxic waste sites, the highway, and ultimately by the overwhelming desire to find a cure.

Over 6,000 gold prospectors invade the reserve of the Nambiquara of Sararé, and loggers raid the mahogany-rich forests, which are threatened by extinction. Pressure on the World Bank (with whom the government of Mato Grosso is negotiating a loan) could end prospecting, but the pillage of the forest continues.

In Portuguese with English subtitles.

Directed by Vincent Carelli, Maurizio Longobardi, and Virginia Valadão; edited by Tutu Nunes.

The Videofreex tape a group of young people working on a farm run by Chris Locke and his wife in Shandaken, NY.  After learning how to take care of the chickens, they are taught how to kill and pluck one.  Later they sit down for a communal dinner, and one of the group exclaims "Mmmmm, tastes good!"

Petrolia takes its name from a redundant oil-drilling platform set in the Cromarty Firth, Scotland. The film looks at the architecture of the oil industry along the Scottish coastline where oil and gas supplies are predicted to run dry in the next forty years.

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.

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.

Taking its title from the four consonants of the ancient Hebrew name for God, Tetragramaton contemplates the relationship between man, technology, and ecological systems. The sweeping camera movements, sudden changes of scale, and layers of natural and man-made sound, result in a visceral, turbulent and hypnotic dialogue between the artist's camera and the environment.

This title was in the original Castelli-Sonnabend video art collection.

A documentary fiction inspired on the first accounts of the natural and ethnographic explorations in America by colonizers, missionaries, and scientists. Shot in the Tropical Greenhouse of Lille, France, the film uses both the architecture and the plants of this enclosed botanic garden as narrative supports for an exploratory journey. Led by the voice-over of an explorer, the film explores the notion of exoticism, evokes the violent origins of the so-called "New World" and the endurance of the imagery they engendered.

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.

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.

The interior of a trash processing plant. The rhythmic intensity of the machinery as it deals with an endless river of refuse becomes a reflection on the madness of unbridled consumption. 

Music by Sebastian Currier. Produced at Voom HD Lab.

Subtitled: The Struggle for Western Shoshone Land Land activists Mary and Carrie Dann confront Federal Bureau of Land Management officers determined to impound the women's livestock until they pay grazing fees on land the Shoshone have never sold or otherwise legally transferred to the U.S. government. Part of an ongoing conflict over who will control ancestral lands in Nevada, this videotape depicts a standoff between the two groups, as activists speak about their ties to the land and their determination to keep it at any cost.

An experimental documentary video project about individuals who have been transformed from so called “ordinary” citizens into activists, Witness To The Future seeks connections that unite people of all cultures, communities, races, and economic classes as they struggle for environmental and social change.

Hidirtina (Sisters) is based on a mythology from Eritrea and northern Ethiopia. It is part of a larger story collection project that began in 2004. Folklorist Alan Dundes describes mythology as "a story that serves to define the fundamental worldview of a culture by explaining aspects of the natural world and delineating the psychological and social practices and ideals of a society". For this project, I sent out an open call for folklore to a Habesha diaspora (Ethiopian and Eritrean) New York City community email group.

Waves crash on rocks as tongues flap in the wind about all things cinematic. People chirp and chew in various states of dress and undress as the climate shifts from coast to coast on the tide of a national pleasure/treasure: film festivals, lectures and art happenings.

The Spender House in Essex was designed in 1968 by Richard and Su Rogers (Team 4) for photographer and artist Humphrey Spender. The film is a biographical portrait of both architecture and inhabitant.

Spender died in 2005 but his spirit is still very present in the house and studio. The film explores the unique architectural qualities of the house and studio and provides a glimpse of its former inhabitant’s life and work as a painter, textile designer and photographer of British life in the 1930s for Mass Observation.

“The individual is not an autonomous, solitary object but a thing of uncertain extent, with ambiguous boundaries. So too is matter, which loses much of its allure the moment it is reduced to an object, shorn of its viscosity, pressure and density. Both subject and matter resist their reduction into objects. Everything is interconnected and intertwined.”

— Kengo Kuma

Forest Mind is a video work that emerges from the artist’s longstanding interest in the human interaction with the natural world. In a series of recent art projects, she has shed light on the cosmology of Indigenous communities and their political struggle to keep their forests alive.