Film Categories: Anthropocene

  • CORNUCOPIA

    The interior Plateau of British Columbia is a confluence of volcanism, plate tectonics, and glaciation punctuated by intermittent cycles of fire and droughts. The perennial constant in shaping the plateau is the influence of storms from the Pacific Ocean and the multiple mountain ranges (including the Rockies) that carry glacier silt and other minerals through the myriad of rivers and lakes. For 1000’s of years First Nations Peoples thrived in this region with civilizations and customs that remain a powerful guiding presence today. In 1858 gold rush fever gripped a region in North America that would later become part of…

  • M3RM41D

    based on past research to find gender radicalism in the wild, this rock was !discovered! with a moderately blown-out tri-colour weave and wearing a mad decent lipstick. I danced with it for a few minutes before i realized it wouldn’t be able to survive outside of its natural habitat, thus i released it back into the wild.

  • How To Stop Watching a Video That Never Ends

    An abstract inquiry into the subconsciousness of an individual overloaded with the endless amount of options, possibilities and opinions of the world of digital media. Three linearly connected monologues are imitating a timeline as we know it from social media, posing a question about the possibilities of deep contemplation in the time of instant answers and ubiquitous power play of server-made content.

  • It Matters What

    Absences and translations motivate this experimental animation in an exploration of the methods and materials of reproduction and inscription. The inquiry is set within a framework of practical and critical human relationships with other-than-human-species elucidated by the theorist Donna Haraway. A fragment from Haraway’s essay “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene” is reworked here as a poetic manifesto. Enigmatic found-footage calls into question human violence over animal species. Plant life is both the subject matter of the images and assists the means of photographic reproduction.  The techniques used include in-camera animation, contact prints and phytograms created by the exposure of 16mm film overlaid with plant…

  • vulture

    “vulture” sets its sight on farm animals and their surrounding flora. Static shots and slow-moving zooms, follow the grazing animals in their minute inter-species exchanges. When left to roam together the sensibilities of these “beasts” are allowed to surface. The film was shot and processed with various means including flower/plant processing carried out as blooming occurred, from 2016-18. In some cases a salt bath was used for fixing the film which was left soaking in the dark for three days. “Vultures hover over the barn, from high, with razor sharp eyesight, and a keen sense of smell. Together, they stalk…

  • Water once ruled

    Collaging appropriated footage with original imagery, Water once ruled collapses the past, present and future into a single repeating loop. Linking the introduction of satellite imagery with the colonization of our own as well as other planets, the video considers water – and the lack there of – as the distressed resource connecting Mars’ history with Earth’s present and future. There is nothing here to breathe.

  • ∆ (when the cities burn)

    “Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.” [Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451] [note: in this case, ∆ (opt + j) is defined as it is in chemistry: ∆ = the addition of heat in a reaction and also references the general definition in math & science: ∆ = the change of any changeable quantity]

  • The Quoddy Fold

    “The Quoddy Fold” is an intimate interaction between a woman and a derelict coastal house. In this one-hour film Phillips dismantles and studies the movement from wood to dust, damp paper to mold, and ponders the house folding back into the land and sea. Phillips’ performance constantly seeks evidence of dissolving boundaries, thingness, history and intersubjectivity of space, place and species. Through the poetics of the ruin “The Quoddy Fold” is an interrogation of dwelling and landscape giving space to entertain the ecological, cultural and societal anxieties surrounding impermanence.

  • The Shouting Flower

    A work about collaboration and process, “The Shouting Flower” approaches political resistance from multiple subject positions–plant, child, filmmaker–in an attempt to model what Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing calls “work across difference.” Using images processed in plant material that was gathered at key locations throughout the city, as well as direct animation and audio recorded on a child’s toy, the film documents its own creation within a landscape of hostility and neglect. A collaboration against cooperation, it becomes as it refuses. Refusing, dispersing, it shouts, “No!”

  • Livestock

    “Livestock” is a documentary study of one stage in the production of motion picture film. Most of the animals at the Warren Livestock Auction will be sold for industrial meat production. Their bodies will be slaughtered and processed, their bones prepared for rendering into gelatin that might one day suspend silver halide on a strip of acetate.