A POTENTIALITY (2020, digital, 16mm film, 16 minutes)
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Winner of the Alice Guy Prize Special Mention at FID Marseille 2020. Notes from the Jury: A film which meticulously reflects upon the materiality of time following specific histories. While focusing on details, the images prevent us from accessing the whole. This gesture reflects the subject where voice has been violently stripped from the people, left silenced. The Special Mention for Prix Alice Guy goes to “A POTENTIALITY” by Dana Berman Duff.
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A POTENTIALITY is a continuation of my interest in using film to shoot printed material, as in the Catalogue series. I'm especially interested in the equivalence of the film grain to the halftone print dot at the base level of the construction of reproduced image and language.
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This piece is built on a graphic project by Susan Silton in which she reprinted five pages of the New York Times from the 1930s. Her project has a disturbing resemblance to present day newspaper reports.
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Opera "The Emperor of Atlantis" composed in 1944 by Viktor Ulmann, libretto by Peter Kien.
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2-MINUTE TRAILER
BIRDSONG
Proposal/work in progress
Billions of birds have vanished from north America since 1970 and a mass die-off was reported in 2020 in the southwestern US. Like most of us, I’ve been haunted by the implications. In response, I designed an installation where a person can simply pause to listen to birdsong and, when exiting into the park, they can hear the sound of a native bird that's been extinct since the nineteen-sixties.
Example: The trees in Barnsdall Park at LA Municipal Art Gallery
Approaching the gallery through the park, the viewer will have a chance to hear the call of the extinct Santa Barbara Island Song Sparrow as it is sung by real birds. I have been working with ornithologist Zena Casteel at the Cornell Ornithology Lab in New York to create a simulation of the song of this missing bird using measurements of its beak morphology taken in 1925. The living mockingbirds in the park outside of the gallery will “learn” the call of the extinct song sparrow by our playing the simulation into the park until they mimic it in their own calls. Hence, the lost bird will be resurrected—brought back to life in song through the living bodies of other birds.
After listening to mockingbirds mimic the song of the extinct sparrow in the park, the viewer can enter the building to hear birdsong issuing from various locations. The "dawn chorus" as it might have sounded in 1925. It’s subtle and dynamic, and, with the help of the Cornell Ornithology Lab, will sound as if the viewer was sitting on the hill prior to the city’s building; they will hear the original creatures.​​
Mockup with rough video proposal of Lament for the Song Sparrow, (digital video with CGI, dimensions variable)
​The three-minute CGI video will be a fabrication of the natural, a re-creation; since there are no recordings or surviving photographs of this extinct bird, it seems fitting that the “natural” here would be entirely artificial.
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An original song written by the accomplished composer Garry Eister is performed by soprano Risa Larson as the voice of the mouse. I directed the animation which was realized in CGI by Sonya Sofiya Fayzieva. We hope to accomplish a fully realized rendering eventually and install it in a gallery space.
For the visitor, the “Birdsong” project provides a structure for experience—a durational frame to process the recognition that nature is failing. It’s distressing, yet time spent in the room is consoling and uplifting.