Two-channel Video
2023-24
Visible Landscapes is a two-channel video piece in which the same journey is taken twice. On the first channel a virtual camera flies across a geographically accurate and photorealistic CGI model of the Western United states, capturing a wide range of simulated vantage points. The virtuality of this landscape becomes clear as the camera no-clips through the surface and into the digital mesh below, and brightly colored filters representing a variety of political boundaries overlay the scene. On the second channel the same journey is taken, this time with an actual video camera in the real world, recording on foot, from cars, and sometimes from a low flying drone. This camera encounters the terrain with all the detail and difficulty of the material world. The two videos are synched to the same timeline, and show different views of the same places simultaneously. The public landscapes depicted in the videos are the Backrooms of nature and culture in the American landscape; from wilderness conservation areas to oil fields, uranium mines to national forests, lost highways and liminal spaces. Throughout the video, ways of seeing are contrasted. On one screen we see the world through the omniscient eye of data, on the other through the accepted stand-in for human vision, the camera. Some scenes are shared between the two channels, collaged into the frame as mirrored insets. These shared views show weird encounters with land use, extraction, or natural elements, and are meant to represent a kind of non-negotiable reality or contact zone between the world of images and the world of things.