Song of Extinction
For millennia, art has concerned itself with the natural world. Our relationship to nature-our awe of, fear of, love of, and worship of nature has been the animating force behind uncountable numbers of artworks, poems, pieces of music and songs. Put another way, nature is one of the great subjects of art. This has been especially the case since the late 18th century, when the concept of awe at the immense, inhuman and unforgiving spectacle of nature became thematized in the concept of the sublime. SONG OF EXTINCTION is a 45-minute film and music piece, envisioned as a part of this very long lineage, with the telling and tragic difference that any work concerned with the natural world in 2017 must necessarily be seen as a work created in the midst of, and in response to, an incommensurate ecological crisis. The work was conceived in 2015 by myself and the composer Rose Bolton, as a particular and unique type of experimental film. Forgoing obvious "experimental" techniques that pertain to the manipulation of form and materiality, the film and the music, working seamlessly together, seek to rather produce an experiment in generating emotion.
