Nature

Lunar Pond is part of an audiovisual series about lunar cycles and rhythms in an attempt to evoke, integrate and develop the mythical presence of the Aztec lunar goddess Coyolxauhqui, thus evoking the eroded contemporary landscape of our time.

In these lunar paths the moon is the celestial body of brilliant colors that crosses with its cyclical and mythical dance the dark space of our present time and in whose dance the moon enters, moves away, approaches and lies on itself in a cycle rhythmic of celestial agitation. These are the shamanic ways of the moon. Part of the Lunar Films series.

This waltz is a set of circular and fragmented compositions, in which a rhythmic and haunted dance hides an eroded lunar landscape. The microscopic rubble of our contemporary civilization. Part of the Lunar Films series.

Nobody counts the hours and nobody cares how the years are piling up. Souls begin and end. Then comes the night. A snow landscape of souls.

This video-lament for Mother Earth is a collaboration among Jim Barbaro, sound; Tobe Carey, cinematography and video editing; and Brenda Hutchinson playing a long tube.

"Made right after Covid lockdown, my art gave me an opportunity to rejoice, grieve and sonically face impermanence via sounds and a Chicken Dance I’ve been performing for decades. The beauty of this video is that it looks like Chicken Linda can finally FLY!! Please interact if you wish and dance, sing, cry, and FLY HIGH."

–– Linda Mary Montano

In the film Mad Ladders, the prophetic ramblings of an unseen narrator recount fantastical dreams of the coming Rapture, as crystalline imagery of rolling clouds gives way to heavily-processed video of moving stage sets from The American Music Awards telecasts of the 1980s and early 1990s. Blooming and pulsing in and out of geometric abstraction, this swirling storm of rising curtains, spinning set pieces, and unveiled pop idols forms an occult spectacle, driven by its impassioned narrator and an 8-bit leitmotif.

The Making and Unmaking of the Earth turns to geology as both a metaphor for and a psychic container of women's emotional states and embodied experiences of physical pain. Combining archival footage of earth processes with interviews describing mysterious physical experiences and emotional attachments, this film explores how everything we bury deep inside eventually speaks through the geology of the body.

We recently went to Guinea Bissau to research the guerrilla schools of the mangroves. Instead, we soon became ourselves the apprentices and the first lesson we had to learn was how to walk. If you walk straight, placing your heels on the ground first, you promptly slip and fall in the dams of the flooded mangrove rice field or you get stuck in the mangrove mud. You need to lower your body, flex your knees and stick your toes vertically into the mud, extend your arms forwards in a conscious and present movement. In the mangrove school the learning happens with the whole body.

We recently went to Guinea Bissau to research the guerrilla schools of the mangroves. Instead, we soon became ourselves the apprentices and the first lesson we had to learn was how to walk. If you walk straight, placing your heels on the ground first, you promptly slip and fall in the dams of the flooded mangrove rice field or you get stuck in the mangrove mud. You need to lower your body, flex your knees and stick your toes vertically into the mud, extend your arms forwards in a conscious and present movement. In the mangrove school the learning happens with the whole body.

This is the clinamen of our times, sparkling bodies into the spiral vortex as well as its chaotic spatial present. Part of the Scattered Geology Audiovisual series.

In these lunar paths the moon is the celestial body of brilliant colors that crosses with its cyclical and mythical dance the dark space of our present time and in whose dance the moon enters, moves away, approaches and lies on itself in a cycle rhythmic of celestial agitation. These are the shamanic ways of the moon. Part of the Lunar Films series.

An abandoned rural house, the Ravel Quartet in F major and then rain, wind, snow and fog are the elements of which this video is composed. In an impossible procession, one take presents four atmospheric agents to strike against the house. The musical instruments which follow the quartet each become an audio track which corresponds to each one of the atmospheric agents. So the sound of the first violin drips like the rain, that one of the second violin is muffled like the snow, the sound of the viola moves like the wind and that one of the cello vibrates like the fog.

Intertwining associated experiments in image and sound generation using AI, Nearest Neighbor focuses on language acquisition and mimicry between humans, birds and machines, asking fundamental questions about consciousness, learning and understanding. The film is a contemporary reflection on the state of technology in relation to the natural world. It asks us to think about what we want from inter-species communication and what we expect from technologies that aspire to substitute for living beings.

Intertwining associated experiments in image and sound generation using AI, Nearest Neighbor focuses on language acquisition and mimicry between humans, birds and machines, asking fundamental questions about consciousness, learning and understanding. The film is a contemporary reflection on the state of technology in relation to the natural world. It asks us to think about what we want from inter-species communication and what we expect from technologies that aspire to substitute for living beings.

Nest-Cams features footage from cameras placed in and around nests. Animals showcased include: black-capped chickadee, red squirrel, house wren, horned lark, red-breasted nuthatch, black tern, brook trout, and song sparrow.

Collaboration with Joseph Scheer (print making artist specializing in moths) and Rebekkah Palov.
Choreography and editing by Eiko Otake, assisted by Rebekkah Palov.
Eiko is deeply grateful to Institute for Electronic Arts, Alfred University.

This is the arche-fossil and the presence of the decay-image rate of his radioactive nucleus as an omen of interesting times. Part of the Scattered Geology Audiovisual series.

The Observers portrays one of the world's last staffed weather observatories in two different seasons. Extreme and unpredictable, the land and sky of Mount Washington, New Hampshire form a varying frame for a climatologist as she goes about the solitary and steadfast work of measuring and recording the weather.

‘ODDS AND ENDS’ is a dazzling patchwork of moods, lost and found, for the eye to savor.

A video work that documents the annual orchid show at the New York Botanic Garden, Orchid Show critically observes notions of spectacle, gender and beauty as a query into the staging and imaging of nature. For the audio, the sounds of the garden fold into a classical composition for piano, Kaleidoscopic Changes on an Original Theme, Ending with a Fugue (1924) by Ruth Crawford Seeger, one of the few celebrated female composers of the early 20th century.

Outwardly from Earth's Center is a fictitious narrative about a society on an unstable piece of land that is in danger of disappearance. The situation requires the population's collective initiative in order to secure individual survival and to allow the society to remain. The concept's background is somewhat realistic since Sandön moves approximately one meter per year.

In these "plays" for the camera, the lushness of an afternoon tryst with it’s perfumed colors is displayed center stage. You’ll experience too, the oppressive moods that permeate the lonely streets of a city at night and witness the antics of it’s desperate, guilt-ridden inhabitants.

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.

A man with two dogs crosses a landscape. A person walks along a ridge and stops to look at the skyline. Other people run while nature shrinks back to its enigmaticness. In this video landscape doesn’t evolve according to simple time curves, but according to the particular mode of crossing of a weather element: fog.

George Kuchar has been invited to Francis Ford Coppola’s vineyard for a large family picnic. Walking around the property with a friend, the two look on as a team of workers picks grapes for winemaking. The visual wonder of this setting is not lost on Kuchar, who spends little time filming those in attendance. Instead, Kuchar turns his lens to all things natural, ranging from small goats and swans to the simple beauty of light reflecting off a stream.