An orb-weaver spins its web, captures prey, and filters light. How does other light get filtered or created? Digitally and energetically, light and its origins drive our circadian rhythms, our internal clocks, and affect the retina. Blue light, in the realm of 400 to 500 nanometers, has become...
Our imagination is equally confounded, said the 18th-century Swiss naturalist Charles Bonnet, by the infinitely great and by the infinitely small. Confounding, too, can be the instruments and empirical mechanisms we have to gauge immensity, particularly in their seemingly insurmountable...
In his introduction to the 1909 edition of The Golden Bowl, Henry James wrote, "My instinct appears repeatedly to have been that to arrive at the facts retailed and the figures introduced by the given help of some other conscious and confessed agent is essentially to find the whole business—that...
A film for A.R. Ammons, author of Garbage: A Poem (1993), and baculovirologist Lois Miller. 10 quintillion insects live on the planet—that is, 300 pounds of insects for every pound of human flesh. They drive decomposition, dissolution, and decay that makes way for the new. Specifically, darkling...
Three years ago, honeybees started to disappear. Today there are at least 33% fewer bees in the U.S., and with bees helping to pollinate one in every three bites that we eat, everyone is at risk. We set out to discover what was plaguing these hives and learn how non-commercial beekeepers keep...
Here, a group of women tell of how they came to arrive at an isolated ashram atop a mountain and what life there has been like both before and after the death of their guru.
The myth of the black mirror as a source of knowledge provides the platform for a deeply original film, which bridges scientific diligence with artistic freedom.
A queer contemporary re-imagining of the Odyssey. Odysseus wracked with guilt for the loss of his crew returns home in search of a lost love. An experimental narrative told through still photographs, collage, video, found footage and animation.
Underwater creatures—snapping shrimp, bearded seals, sperm whales—populate the soundscape here, alongside the ghost voice of biologist Lynn Margulis, who rails against authority, societal amnesia and easy answers to explain the beauty of complex inheritances.
Using found sound from Disney's 1940-50s nature documentaries, this trilogy creates a mismatch between the digital image and historic/histrionic voiceover. It confounds traditional nature documentaries by adhering to strict time and spatial limits, and ratchets up false expectations about wildlife;...
Try as we might, we cannot autopsy (from Greek, to see for oneself) the whole natural world. As diversity of life reduces, we further lose the ability to be amphibious (from Greek, to lead dual lives), to be above a surface and below, not to mention "achieving focus" in a single plane. Texts...
Radicals organize the chaotic swarm of characters into a logical system. Traditional Chinese groups all characters according to 214 radicals (simplified uses 189), which are organized based on the number of strokes into a chart called the bushou. Each radical is itself a freestanding...
Boletus, amaryllis, anolis, listeria, wisteria, nematoceara: nothing is linear in evolution, nor in life nor in light. We radiate out on waves, then flux along the spokes of an orb-weaver’s web, the barbs of a boundary fence. Species in a constant state of exchange: elements, acids, sugars,...
10 quintillion insects live on the planet—that is, 300 pounds of insects for every pound of human flesh. They drive decomposition, dissolution, and decay that makes way for the new. They run counter to the Anthropocene, which is about accumulation, consumption, and unsustainable accretion.
what am I to do with my imagination—& the person in me trembles—& there is still innocence, it is starting up somewhere even now, and the strange swelling of the so-called Milky Way, and the sound of the wings of the bird as it lifts off ... what is coming, what is true, & all the...
