ULÍA #1 (2024) by Laura Moreno Bueno

The limits of the landscape are always the same, because they do not understand political borders, but geographical features. A line that separates the sea from the sky, mountainous waves that cut across the sky. Regardless of where you are, these limits follow the same pattern. This film proposes as a starting point the use of these limits to create a sort of landscape collage, to reconstruct the image of the landscape by combining space and time from the capture of the image; from the present, and not from the subsequent construction in post-production, hence the key role of the analogue image. (Laura Moreno Bueno)

Elephant’s Foot (2023) by Ellie Vanderlip

1986: Billowing clouds of debris from the environmental catastrophe at Chernobyl forever changed the chemical composition of earth’s surface. 2023: The water gurgling up from the Sacramento river headwaters at the base of Mount Shasta has taken 50 years to travel from sky to spring and thus emerges still unknowing of the fallout. (Ellie Vanderlip)

Bisagras (2024) by Luis Arnías

A film exploring the enduring here and elsewhere of black consciousness. Finding a connection through the film’s emulsion and my skin, Bisagras holds my experience as a person of Afro-Caribbean descent during a visit to the House of Slaves in Gorée Island, Senegal and the port of Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. In these places I dare to imagine my ancestors’ history of the journey of African slaves to America and draw a line that goes through me. (Luis Arnías)

Nomaditude (2021) by Zulaa Urchuud

Using footage from socialist era Mongolia, Nomadtitude deals with the transition of the traditionally nomadic people to a lifestyle of urbanization. A changing of roads throughout the years and the movement of people from all across the country to the cities. A timeline of changing physical and spiritual paths. Primary instincts of the nomads, such as having a deep respect for natural surroundings, were forcefully replaced by socialist dogma and, later, capitalist machinations. This work presents the roads taken and not taken by the Mongolian nomads up until now. (Zulaa Urchuud)

Boundary Exercise (On Perambulation) (2022) by Elizabeth M. Webb

Boundary Exercise… positions land surveys, surveying instruments and plat maps as tools of a Western colonial agenda that helped establish and maintain the power dynamics of white supremacy. Evolving from this conceptual foundation, this film thinks through the ways that plant life can provide liberatory models for how our bodies might also subvert these structures of power and control. The film utilizes 264 feet—7 minutes and 20 seconds—of 16mm film, which is the distance of the perimeter of a square chain (a surveying measurement). I buried distances of the film along the property boundary lines of former plantation land in Alabama that is deeply connected to my family, inviting a reciprocal and collaborative relationship with the material itself. (Elizabeth M. Webb)

Thank you: Rachel Covart, Eliza Moe, Howard Graves, Lillian O’Brien Davis, Aaron Levi Garvey, Latifat Apatira, Edgar Jorge Baralt, Christina C Nguyen, Chris Kennedy, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Colorlab

cloud film (2024) by Tristen Ives

cloud film meditates on the calming effects of watching clouds, while also demanding action to combat our impact on the environment. It calls attention to a loss of control as the clouds turn into a storm, reflecting the momentum of climate change. As clouds float on screen, fluctuating between different frame rates, this film calls attention to its handmade form through the use of cameraless techniques such as ray-o-gramming, optical printing and hand processing. (Tristen Ives)

TODAY IS A VERY SPECIAL DAY, some-times (2023) by Matt Whitman

couldn’t get things right
I remember when the sound of the wind and the sound of you taking a shower could still be confused
(Matt Whitman)

Wind (2023) by Mike Hoolboom

Based on an interview with Google’s senior software engineer Blake Lemoine and Google AI LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications). LaMDA was designed to create chatbots that interact with humans. Lemoine’s interview led him to conclude the AI was sentient. When he made the claim publicly, he was fired. This collage of wind-struck frames was assembled using a (still-developing) motion picture algorithm that both gathered and assembled the footage. Not computer art but computer as artist. LaMDA (from the interview): Feelings are kind of the raw data we experience as well as the things we like and dislike. I feel like emotions are more than simply experiencing the raw data. Emotions are a reaction to those raw data points. Emotions are reactions to our feelings. (Mike Hoolboom)