I live in the Hudson Valley near the Hudson River. Historically, Muhheakunnuk, a river that runs both ways was a waterway for the colonization of North America. This film combines old footage I shot of the river in winter when the ice flowed with a live video/audio synthesizer performance as a meditation on settler colonialism and its ecosystem.
— Les LeVeque
Located on the Lofoten Islands in Northern Norway, Acoustic Ocean sets out to explore the sonic ecology of marine life. The scientist as an explorer and important mediator of the contemporary understanding of our planetary ecosystems is a central figure in this video. She makes her appearance in the person of a Sami (indigenous of northern Scandinavia) biologist-diver who is using all sorts of hydrophones, parabolic mics and recording devices. Her task is to sense the submarine space for acoustic and other biological forms of expression.
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.
Designed as the centerpiece of Eiko & Koma’s three-year Retrospective Project, Raven is a radically scalable work. It can be performed in a theater, a gallery, outdoors, or at any other special site, and its length can vary depending on the context of the presentation. Raven’s genesis is in the concept underlying Eiko & Koma’s 1991 Land. The earth is precious in part because it can be unyielding. The landscape does not squander its riches on us; we have to negotiate our survival.
In Rotten Apples, George Kuchar explores the themes of life, lust, decay and death, all through the act of grinding apples for cider. As Kuchar walks around an orchard with his friends in an attempt to enjoy the natural beauty of their surroundings, his creeping hand gestures make it clear that the threat of destruction is always looming. However, this destruction can also be understood as the simple transformation of a thing’s physical state.
Alone in an Oklahoma motel room with a mute companion, the talkative one speaks the language of memory as pussycats feast from a canned cornucopia. Murals plaster the vacancy intrinsic to American angst as horse tails whip from annoyance the nagging gnats of tomorrow’s dung: a heap of uncertainty made impotent by the swashes of chipped paint that depict a netherworld of faded dreams and nostalgic neurosis for the future impaired.
The Night Visitors is a movie about moths. In large and small fragments, looking both inward and out, through a critical lens that is by turns social and personal, the film closely examines these under-known creatures. While The Night Visitors is interested in moths as organisms, with fascinating life histories, staggering biodiversity, and a functional importance as indicators of climate change and habitat degradation, its engagement with them is not primarily entomological.
In imaginary landscapes where trees talk and frogs turn to handsome princes, Pizzly Bear is a story of a cross between a Grizzly and Polar Bear. Like in so many fables, the story is based in fact and this small animal is an archetypal stand-in for humanity.
American sculptor and land artist Robert Smithson made art as a meditation on transition and change. Perhaps best known for his Spiral Jetty, an earthen berm that sits, occasionally submerged, in the Great Salt Lake of northern Utah, Smithson understood that his earthworks would be subject to natural and human forces and processes: erosion, rising water tables, and changing land use.
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 rumination, a series of borrowed 'dialogues' out of an ongoing argument with myself. It meanders, mentally and physically, reflecting on the conditions of being human; on transience, consciousness and desire. It uses landscapes as provocations, as sites of contemplation. And between the landscape and the thought, i.e. between the radical presence of the physical world and the idea, there is, more often than not, a distance, disbelief or irony."
–– Ken Kobland
Water and oil form the undercurrents of all narrations as they activate profound changes in the planetary ecology. After the oil peak, ever dirtier, remote and deeper layers of fossil resources are being accessed. Aerial recording of the devastated crust in Alberta opens the view into dark lubricant geologies. Climate change, exasperated by projects such as the Canadian tar sands, puts the life of large world populations in danger.
Originating from personal affection toward Seoul, Twelve Scenes portrays the spectacles in daily life by juxtaposing urban space in a twelve month sequence. As the individual particles in a kaleidoscope create splendid illusions by being reflected on a mirror, Twelve Scenes shows our individual life, seemingly separated by time and space, actually composes the scenery in the kaleidoscope of Seoul. Twelve Scenes represents a 'moment for self-reflection' or 'small, but precious enlightenment on life'.
An uncompromising look at the ways privacy, safety, convenience and surveillance determine our environment. Shot entirely at night, the film confronts the hermetic nature of white-collar communities, dissecting the fear behind contemporary suburban design. An isolation-based fear (protect us from people not like us). A fear of irregularity (eat at McDonalds, you know what to expect). A fear of thought (turn on the television). A fear of self (don’t stop moving).
China Town traces copper mining and production from an open pit mine in Nevada to a smelter in China, where the semi-processed ore is sent to be smelted and refined. Considering what it actually means to "be wired" and in turn, to be connected, in today's global economic system, the video follows the detailed production process that transforms raw ore into copper wire--in this case, the literal digging of a hole to China--and the generation of waste and of power that grows in both countries as byproduct.
Urban parks consist of two major elements: nature and man-made forms. Parks play an important role in the urban environment, offering relief in everyday life. While parks provide green spaces, they are not natural spaces; they are highly designed. Nature and Geometry in the Park is a series of short videos that explore parks, focusing on form. Case 3 features WNYC Transmitter Park, a relatively new park located on the waterfront in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, which opened in 2012.
Nocturne is a 5-minute film shot entirely at night in deserted streets of London. The film attempts to find images of the city that reveal the presence of the past, or the presence of the dead, hinting at a concealed history. The deserted streets around the east end of London and Docklands reflect an echoic city filled with shadows. Nocturne is composed of long static viewpoints, each shot slowly unfolding in time as though by looking long enough the city's secrets will be revealed.
This is a rhythmic invocation of the ancestral fire, in which dazzling flames reanimate bones and natural elements. This is the shining of color.
China, Beijing, I Love You! is an animated film about extraction of nickel and cobalt along China's Maritime Silk Road. The film focuses on the character of NICKEL DUST who is exiled from her home in Sulawesi Island due to nickel excavations there. On the other side of the world, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, cobalt is being extracted by artisanal miners. Both nickel and cobalt are the main components of batteries used in Electric Vehicle(EV) and mobile phones.
We asked 12 people to walk 4 identical routes through the course of a day and a night, always attempting to repeat the manner of the first time. As they moved they concentrated on their steps and their rhythm and the repetition immunized them from having to make sense of their movements. They moved as if consumed by a single thought. Unaware of the passage of time. They re-ran the night during the day, and mixed the darkness with the light.
— Flatform
A two-part study of the self-sustaining lifestyle of a communal farm in Vermont.
Offering was co-commissioned by Dancing in the Streets (New York), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, where the proscenium version premiered January 9, 2003) and the University of Arizona (Tucson).
Offering is a ritual of regeneration after loss. People everywhere have lost ideals and landscapes that were dear to them. Offering was originally developed as a mobile outdoor work. This transportable dance or living site "installation" can be brought into communities to serve a communal need for a ritual of mourning.
In this irreverent and hilarious videotape, renowned street performer Stoney Burke leads us on a subversive tour of the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston’s Astrodome. Burke disregards the traditional terms of “political debate” offered by the network news establishment, and zeroes in on the questions that never get asked, confronting such Republican luminaries as Oliver North, Neil Bush, Pat Robertson, Jack Kemp, Sen. Alfonse D’Amato, and Rush Limbaugh (among others), on issues that are glossed over during the convention.
Jem Cohen assembles images that demonstrate the economization of public space; the stock exchange on a LED display board, the company logo on cars, the mobile phone as tool of e-commerce. This Climate is not about the change of weather but the change of mental constitution.
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.
