The Taken Path: a durational project with Catherine Truman

The Taken Path trailer

Catherine Truman and I have been working together on projects bridging art and science since 2006. Here is a glimpse of our current project, The Taken Path. This is a speculative, durational project that hangs of a poetic idea: what would we notice if we walked the same path, once a month over the course of a year and filmed the journey?

Carrick Hill estate, nestled in the foothills of Adelaide, presents a conundrum of the delicate connections between humans and the greater environment. Here, pure fantasy and the hard reality of both ancient and present life can be encountered at once. It is like a microcosm of the wider world.

Using an iPhone and a video camera, we filmed a defined path that traverses natural and altered landscapes at Carrick Hill, at monthly intervals over a year to bring focus to these constantly shifting interrelationships.

The concept is simple, yet this embodied action, repeated over time, reveals profound shifts of climate and impacts of human industry. There seems to be an innate drive in us to intervene in, alter and reorder the natural environments around us, even if we have no place in them.… Click here for more.

Palingénétique at Traverse Video, 2023

Much of my poetry video is set up to work at different levels. In general, I don’t mind how they are interpreted by others – that is an essential part of the process. But when someone really gets into the multiple layers of a piece, it is incredibly satisfying. I did an English / French version of my video Palingenetics / Palingénétique that was accepted for the 2023 edition Traverse Video Festival in Toulouse, France. Each year they produce an annotated program of the event and this time it includes an article about Palingenetics / Palingénétique by Simone Dompeyre. The original poem is very complex, and refers to evolutionary and developmental biology, ancient number counting systems, discredited social theory, and climate change (!!!!). But as you can see below, Simone Dompeyre gets it as well as the visual / audio aspects… I was quite overwhelmed by her words. Merci beaucoup!

Here is the text in the original French and then my (literal) translation of it. The full video is below that.

Que le numérique soit médium, s’avère, dès le milieu des années 1990, grâce à l’invention d’étranges organismes en formes enroulées se dupliquant, variant dans la reprise d’elles-mêmes en Click here for more.

Dragonflies swarming

For several days in December, 2022, Adelaide and surrounding areas swarmed with large dragonflies, that have bred in the very wet spring we’ve had this year. In this video, I’ve used a frame echo process to track and digitally illuminate the flight paths of the dragonflies as they fly around our garden in Belair, South Australia.

The soundtrack includes some of our native birds that were calling at the time: rainbow lorikeets, eastern shrike-thrush, magpies, red wattlebirds, New Holland honeyeaters, and kookaburras, as well as passing human traffic. The flower in the final sequence is a kangaroo paw, native to Western Australia.

Dragonflies have some of the most accomplished aerial abilities of any animal, with both high speed and high manoeuvrability. Associated with this, they have an advanced visual system, capable of seeing a wide range of colours as well as polarised light with very high resolution. Moreover, the part of the eyes that look up towards the sky have different optical properties compared with areas that look down, as befits the different environments in each visual domain. All this makes them extremely effective predators of other flying insects. Their larvae are fully aquatic and are also fierce predators, living … Click here for more.

Ferrovores: the iron eaters in Antennae

Issue 59 of antennae – the journal of nature in visual culture is now out on the theme Microbial Ecologies. It is an extraordinary collection of multidisciplinary practices, approaches, methodologies, and conceptions to help us see and value the microbial worlds that until recently have remained invisible. As editor Giovanni Aloi says, “It is only by recognizing and engaging with microbial agencies that fuller networks of interconnectedness will enable us to tell the stories we truly need for our time and for the future.”

I’m delighted to have a piece in this edition. Ferrovores: the iron eaters is an extended version of the text of my video The Ferrovores.

Iron is the most common metal on earth. Indeed, it forms much of the molten core of the planet which in turn generates the earth’s magnetic poles. The red soils of the world are due to iron. At a biochemical level, iron is essential for human life, amongst other things, making our blood red. In the societal domain, iron is essential for manufacturing, electricity generation, and much more. Certain bacteria can derive energy for life directly from dissolved iron compounds (“rust”) rather than from oxygen as we do. Perhaps, at … Click here for more.

palingenetics at Fotogenia

My recent video palingenetics has its world-premiere screening at the 2022 edition of Festival Fotogenia – Poetryfilm, Videoart, Experimental Cinema, Avant-garde films run out of Mexico City. This is one of my favourite festivals: it has broad, inclusive remit, and it is incredibly well organised with a strongly supported sense of community. Through participation in previous festivals, I have built a network of friends and colleagues not only in Mexico, but across the world. Along the way, I have been learning to make Spanish text versions of the videos, such as this one (with help from the DeepL AI translator and a good dictionary).

palingenetics is a complex piece. The term “palingenesis” (literally “born again”) can mean

  1. the apparent repetition during embryological development of changes that occurred previously in the evolution of its species; 
  2. the regeneration of magma by the melting of metamorphic rocks; 
  3. spiritual rebirth through the transmigration of the soul; 
  4. the on-going recurrence of historical events, notoriously alluded to by 20th century fascist movements.

The text in italics samples the first line of chapters from The Evolution of Man: A Popular Scientific Study. Volume 1: Human Embryology or Ontogeny; Volume 2: Human Stem-History, or Phylogeny by … Click here for more.

and furthermore (indexed)…

My video and furthermore (indexed), is getting its first public screening on 23rd November 2022 in the Living With Buildings – IV program in Coventry, UK, as part of their fabulous Disappear Here project, curated by Adam Steiner. This is a quarterly screening that explores human experiences of the urban environment through people, poetry and place.

In Ancient Greece, public notices were engraved in stone on building walls. Now, we find ourselves surrounded by texts: advertising, warnings, directions, graffiti… Meanwhile, the Rolling Stones are in town, violence, scandal and political intrigue vie for attention, someone won the football, and we worry about the future for our youth…

The video samples every occasion that the word “and” was used in the “NEWS” pages on one day in the local Adelaide newspaper. The words following each instance of “and” are listed alphabetically and read by Karen, the MacOS Australian female text-to-voice interpreter. In doing so, it creates a snapshot (indexed) of a day in the news of a contemporary city.

The video was filmed mostly around Adelaide, South Australia, with Ancient Greek public notices from Delphi, Greece. The text was originally published in Found Poetry Review 9 (USA, 2016).

World’s end…

With the COP27 – the 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – now running in Egypt, it was even more disheartening to read recent reports in the major science journals that the melting of the polar ice caps, the Greenland ice-cap and glaciers all around the world is accelerating at a pace beyond previous predictions.

The Arctic ice cap is likely to disappear permanently within the next few years, which will further increase global warming due to the higher heat absorbing capacity of open ocean compared with reflective and insulating ice. The West Antarctic ice shelf is melting more quickly than previously predicted, as scientists have discovered more about the complex structure of the shelf and its interactions with the underlying geology. If this massive volume of ice melts, sea levels will rise by several metres, inundating most coastal cities and communities.

Over and above the sea level rises due to ice-melt, global warming will increase the volume of the oceans due to thermal expansion, further adding to the permanent flooding of our coastlines.

As individuals, there is depressingly little we can do in the short term – major changes in direction … Click here for more.