Playlist
<p>Plastic Aortas is a portrait of the black plastic encasing the Fells Reservoir in the unceded land of the Massachusett, Pawtucket, and Naumkeag indigenous peoples. The lining was placed there by conservationists in order to mitigate the invasive Common Reed, which is killing native plants. However, the lining also interferes with wildlife and contaminates the water.</p>
<p>The film When Land Becomes Earth looks at Earth; as a self-regulating planet; earth as material both multiple and singular; from its granular form to mountains terraformed by extractive technologies. It encounters scientists, farmers and activists working like soil, using nature-based solutions, resisting in determined, communal and beautiful ways, moving towards matters of reparation.</p> <p>The camera drifts dreamily through imagery drawn from landscapes transformed by beavers as nature restorers, industrial wastelands polluted with heavy metals, a community compost project processing food waste, mob-grazing cattle rebuilding the soil health of exhausted farmland, moorland drained after generations of peat-cutting.</p> <p>It shifts from huge expanses of land towards the intimacy of dirt and earth - life held in human hands or the vitality of micro-bacteria invisibly remediating soil polluted with heavy metals. A group of wandering children are tender in their care for each other, seeking shelter, working together for Earthly survival, living well in the ruins.</p> <p>With kind permission of Meredith Monk, we’ve worked with her soul-calling voice to remind us that this could be our Last Song, to embody life’s elemental capacity for repair and care.</p>
<p>An examination of three weeds - coltsfoot, dandelion, and goldenrod and each weed’s direct effects on film stock via hand-processing with eco-processing techniques. The film reveals not only the visual characteristic of each plant but also of filmic qualities that each plant imparts on the film stock.</p>
<p>Botanist Julio Betancur and his disciple, young Cristian Castro, return to Colombia's tropical forests to explore once again their passion for nature. Through the lens of Director Guillermo Quintero, former student of Julio, we will travel in the middle of a delirious expedition that will lead us to understand the strength of their friendship and the importance of their legacy. In the diverse and almost infinite world of the tropics we will get lost next to them in the time of the jungle. Homo botanicus, what is the meaning of collecting plants forever?</p>
<p>A Perfect Storm is a landscape film or, more precisely, a landscape imprinted on the film's emulsion. The artist has used seeds, tiny composite flowers and other small elements of cultivated plants that grow in his garden and wild plant species gathered from a nearby nature reserve. The film consists of sequences that are intricately composed and parts that are completely 'self-organised'. As such plants appear not merely as inanimate objects but rather as characters who are expressive in their own right. Such otherworldliness is also reflected in a sequence of gargoyles, providing a link to the hidden animist tendencies that prevail in human culture. This primordial expressiveness is underlined by an improvised guitar solo by the inimitable Florian Magnus Maier.</p>
<p>"Our Body is a Planet" is an art/science collaboration between Léonie Hampton of Still/Moving and scientists at the MRC Centre for Medical Mycology at the University of Exeter. This short film challenges the way we think of ourselves as individual genetically prescribed entities, independent from our surroundings. Without fungi and bacteria our bodies and biosphere would not exist; we are in partnership with the microbial world. Our bodies are made up of more microbial cells that our own ‘human’ cells. This symbiotic life sustaining alliance is under threat, partly as a result of the colossal scale of the destructive practices wrought by humans on the planet during the age of the anthropocene. The delicate balance between living bodies and the world is in danger. Fungi are being forced to adapt to changing environments and this is leading to an increase in fungal pathogens and the spread of new diseases. Today, mostly as a result of modern medicine, HIV, and climate change the number of lethal fungal infections is increasing, killing 1.5 million people a year. If these practices continue to grow scientists warn that we will face a medical emergency with an increase in drug resistance, and the threat of fungal virulence due to climatic change.</p> <p>Simultaneously there is so much to be gained from the study of fungi; about which we still understand very little. They offer us collective, resilient, regenerative ways of being that might in turn lead us back to a more balanced partnership with the microbial world and one another. The symbiotic and pathogenic pathways of fungi challenge our animal imaginations and mechanistic modern systems of life, offering new possibilities of how we might learn to “live and die well together on a damaged planet” *</p> <p>*Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the end of the World</p> <p><a href="http:// https://stillmoving.org/projects/our-body-is-a-planet">Our Body is A Planet Webpage</a></p> <p> </p>
<p dir="ltr">A contemplative film about the boundaryies between natural and technological beauty. Can an AI-generated image recreate the beauty of a flower?</p> <p dir="ltr">In 1772, artist Mary Delany imitated flowers through decoupage. By pasting together hundreds of paper cuttings, she managed to depict flowers with exquisite botanical precision. Centuries later, a programmer is working to invent an algorithm that can also replicate the patterns and radiance of fauna. With the help of an artificial intelligence, the beauty of plants is recreated down to the smallest detail. The technology is groundbreaking, even though reproducing nature is not new. ‘Algorithms of Beauty’ moves across science and beauty, technology and emotion in its examination of the AI inventions of our time, questioning the limits of our vision. Can we tell the difference between a computer-generated image of a flower and the real thing?</p> <p dir="ltr">Can a picture contain all the beauty of a flower? This is what the narrator is looking for. To try to make it, she takes a revolutionary tool, an Artificial Intelligence. Through the film, she creates a link with Mary Delany. Indeed, the flowers created 300 years ago by the English botanist are strangely in resonance with those created by the algorithms. Between technology and emotions, Algorithms of Beauty questions the limits of our gaze when faced with AI images.</p> <p dir="ltr"> </p> <p dir="ltr"><strong> </strong></p>