art and video

Shadow Trees compiles and animates images of urban nature. Focusing on shadows cast by trees onto walls, buildings, pavement, and the trunks of other trees, Jody Zellen is able to investigate places where natural and built environments overlap and touch.

The short video disrupts audience expectations of nature films and photography, which are often framed to limit or erase the presence of humans, so that trees are shown to exist in forests, not in city blocks. In so doing, such photographic conventions comfort us by removing our role in the precariosness of their existence, particularly in large metropolitan places like Los Angeles where carbon emissions choke human and nonhuman life alike.

(Source: http://thenewriver.us/shadow-trees/)

Scrolling Landscapes (2020) is a three-channel work of net art that explores the relationship among nostalgia and our perception of technologically mediated landscapes. For the virtual iteration of the ELO 2020 conference, the work will be presented in a web format with three continuously running video channels. Each film in the series was created by appropriating footage of speedruns of older 8-bit video games and then editing together their scrolling landscapes to produce unfolding Rorschach patterns of gameworlds. These landscapes have then been corrupted using glitch techniques to generate psychedelic abstractions that rapidly accelerate through two-dimensional space. With each film in the series, the same landscape is multiplied and arranged so that the scrolling patterns become increasingly complex. Through the viewer’s interfacing with these retro visions of technology, the web version serves to challenge the knowledge that underlies our perception of scrolling motion. In this way, the work operates through a kind of post-gaming, or rather, it considers the medium of interactive gaming (and particularly the mechanics of scrolling) not through functionality, utility, or its capacities to offer incentive and reward, but as a pure aesthetic form; sensual pleasures derived from the dynamics of abstract patterns composed of pixels, tiles, and color palettes.

Jonah is working at a shelter for asylum seekers in Austin, Texas. Zander is a filmmaker and dancer based in New York City.

bedbugs is a video version of a talk presented at a couple different WordHack events. Talk presented circa 2014, video finished circa 2017.

The Book of Hours is a calendar of poetry films. There is a poetry film for now and for different times of day, for every month of the year.

The Book of Hours is a contemporary re-imagining of a Medieval book of hours. These were collections of exquisitely hand-illustrated religious readings and accompanying images. They were created in a handy size so they could be carried by the owner and read on a daily basis. They can also be seen as interactive texts as these books were not intended to be read chronologically. This Book of Hours is secular but the general mood is contemplative and reflective.

All the films have been made in collaboration between Lucy English, a UK based spoken word poet, and an international community of film makers. 

“The Stone can only be found when the search lies heavily on the searcher. – Thou seekest hard and findest not. Seek not and thou whilst find.”

Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

[(DES)CONEXÃO (2018), by artist collectivewreading digits, in collaboration with media artist Pedro Ferreira, is a cyberpoetic artifact developed under the artistic residency “Realtime Runtime People”, promoted by the INVITROgerador (Universidade Aberta). Having its first instantiation [realtime], in July 2018, at Atelier Concorde Lisbon, as a #cyberpoetic installation complemented with #livecoding #liveremixing#performance, (DES)CONEXÃO was also presented at ARTeFACTo 2018, without its digital component. The intention at stake here was to reinforce itsinitial questioning – a reflection on the ways technologies alter our perception of time –, by giving visibility and expressiveness to textual and poetic layers behind the surface of the artifact. In dissecting the machine and its fragmented layers of different data, certain experimental writing techniques used, that allow us to extend the word, and therefore the text,  – such as combinatorics, literary cut-ups, or fold-ins – are cut wide open. Beyond the circular walls of its anatomical theatre, the remains of these mediated and transmutated philosophical stone(s), once modified, filtered, sublimated, multiplied, and sometimes even self-generated were revealed. In runtime.

This book allows a user to navigate a choose-your-own-adventure story through folding patterns that physically trace her journey and decisions. Near the end of any particular path, a smartphone and QR tag can be used to link to an online video segment that brings the story to an interactive conclusion.

Source: MoMA

Material Studies is a series of videos that engage the viewer in a synesthetic experience. The work is a poignant act of resistance against the meat industry. It proposes vegan and feminist perspectives of our embodiment of reality. Witty poetry meets “networked vegan edible language sculptures,” says Claire Donato. The studies are based on a work-in-progress titled “Gravity and Grace, The Chicken and the Egg, or: How to Cook Everything Vegetarian.”

(source: https://conference.eliterature.org/sites/default/files/ebook_elo17_fina…)