CARBON 1
CARBON is a new short film series that imagines ecological collapse experienced through various perspectives. CARBON 1, the first in the series, deploys an algorithmically mediated lens, symbolized as “pixels” or pixelated noise. Inspired by Len Lye’s early cinematic techniques of filmic collage, the two-minute film presents a layered landscape. The film begins with a fictional future landscape featuring my Slipstream and WIDOW sculptures (the symbolically charred spawn of the original Slipstream installations), layered with footage of live oaks and Spanish moss, petroleum plants, swamps, animal skins (elephant, leopard, snake, and frog), and other ecological features, including AI-generated footage of plastic botanical elements. In the distance, viewers glimpse brightly colored fire plumes. We push in on the fires, and as we advance through the landscape, additional “pixels” appear, distracting from and distorting what they hide. Their colors refract and reflect much of what is pictured, contributing to a growing confusion and conflation of vision/perception. Viewers experience a fractured glimpse into the charred, ashen aftermath, only to have it almost fully occluded in the end by monochromatic, pixelated “noise,” a complete erasure of the natural ecosystem in service of algorithmic distraction and data processing.
Artist: Nancy Baker Cahill
Director: Nancy Baker Cahill
VFX: Nancy Baker Cahill and Local Formations
Sound Design: Anna Luisa Petrisko
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