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.
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.
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.
It’s a delight; not fragile yet.
It’s not hockey bashing and blades.
Not the escapades, or a snake.
It’s an expanded definition of drawing.
A silent 16mm film shot in Nebraska during the total solar eclipse in 2017. The work was shot on film to capture this light-based phenomenon on a light reactive medium, as opposed to on digital video. Meditating on the metaphysical, in the work we observe the slow alignment of the moon eclipsing the sun, super-imposed onto the open landscape where it was shot. Wind, insects and plants all become active receptors for this phenomenological shift from mid-day to mid-night, as the sun transforms from a primary source of life into a fugitive void.
At sunset a large orchestra, a choir and a group of young people position themselves against the backdrop of a mountain landscape. The musicians play the first section of Mahler's 8th Symphony, moving in precise choreography. Then, almost unnoticed, groups of them start disappearing in the dying light. Soon the landscape and the sound similarly dissolve into twilight.
"In late December 2020 I began making videos of bouquets of Anemones using a microscope lens. The very limited focal length of the lens requires that the lens touch the subject to obtain focus. This imaging process developed into an odd intimacy between subject, apparatus and my body as I moved the handheld camera through the bouquets. The audio is made up of processed sync sound, samples from the Forbidden Planet soundtrack and computer voiced words from the Algorithms for Indeterminacy series.
Within a backdrop of the natural world, a woman explores a personal relationship with the home artificial intelligence (AI) device, Alexa.
AI and I asks questions as to the nature of what it is to be alive and human, confronting our complex co-dependence with technology.
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.
"In Some Dark Place, filmmaker Cecelia Condit explores the dislocations of identity and memory that aging forces upon us, without losing sight of life's beauty."
— Milwaukee Film Festival, 2016
"I have always explored the eerie, dark side of human nature."
— Cecelia Condit
Reclamation is a documentary-style imagining of a post-dystopian future in Canada after massive climate change, wars, pollution, and the after-effects of the large-scale colonial project which has now destroyed the land. When Indigenous people are left behind after a massive exodus by primarily privileged white settlers who have moved to Mars, the original inhabitants of the land cope by trying to restore and rehabilitate the beautiful planet they belong to.
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.
Next Atlantis is a video/sound collaboration between composer Sebastian Currier and filmmaker Pawel Wojtasik. It premiered at Carnegie Hall on January 29th 2010 and had another performance at Philadelphia's Annenberg Center the following night, Jan 30th, 2010. American Composer's Orchestra performed the musical score both nights. In addition to the video images and live orchestra the piece utilizes a surround soundtrack of taped and electronic sounds.
A two-part study of the self-sustaining lifestyle of a communal farm in Vermont.
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.
Endless Dreams and Water Between is a feature film with four fictitious characters sustaining an epistolary exchange in which their “planetary thought” is woven with the physical locations they inhabit, visual and aural characters in themselves: the island of Manhattan, the island of Majorca, in Spain, and the islands and peninsula that form the San Francisco Bay Area. The characters’ reflections and dreams enact what could be described as “an archipelagic mind,” linking worlds, time, and space.
Extractions parallels resource extraction with the booming child apprehension industry. As the filmmaker reviews how these industries have affected her, she reflects on having her own eggs retrieved and frozen to make an Indigenous baby.
“Trypps #7 (Badlands) charts, through an intimate long-take, a young woman's LSD trip in the Badlands National Park, before descending into a psychedelic, formal abstraction of the expansive desert landscape. Concerned with notions of the romantic sublime, phenomenological experience, and secular spiritualism, the work continues Russell's unique investigation into the possibilities of cinema as a site for transcendence.”
-- Michael Green, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
In a remote area of northern Spain, the wind has a name: Tramuntana. Tramuntana takes what it wants—clothes, trees, boats, and the people of the landscape who live with the endless threat of being carried away by its force. This film is a lyrical portrait of this furious wind, woven from the stories passed down by local villagers.
Sound mix and design by Julian Flavin, Color by Ye Xi, Graphic Design by Studio Lieneman, With the support of "la Caixa" Foundation
A cinematic place where the mountains crash into each other in a field of magma and fire. A landscape of events.
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.
Primate Cinema: Apes as Family is a drama made expressly for chimpanzees – and the chimps' reaction to its screening at the Edinburgh Zoo. Chimpanzees watch television as a form of enrichment in captivity. But no filmmaker had made a film for a specifically ape audience.
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.
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.
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.
