In the 17th century the tales were rewritten for a sophisticated audience, and were transformed into stylish, dream-like, magic fairytales with happy endings. The European fairytale-fable, deceptively fluffy and transformative, saturates media, theatre, film, literature, politics, and visual art.
The magic animals of myth and folklore talk, give advice, and aid the hero. They may be deities or vehicles for gods, or the hero in disguise, or enchanted, or under spells. In London I found the beautiful carvings on Assyrian palace walls c. 880 BC of magic animal guardians. The images were more important in protecting the palace and king than physical defense. Animal cartoons beginning with the first McKay animation of Gertie the dinosaur are the descendants of the magic animal. Super heroes adapt their special animal abilities.
Cold Mountain contemplates human relationships with the natural environment, the title is attributed to the legendary Tang era (618–907) Dao-poets Shide and Han Shan..The two hermits living in nature, have been depicted in Asian painting for centuries, laughing and pointing at the moon. Poet Gary Snyder’s 1950’s translations of selected Cold Mountain poems, and characterisation of the hermits, are depicted in Jack Kerouac’s 1958 novel, The Dharma Bums.
FILM
Hunters Heart
Surfers Soul
Farmers World
2023 A*str0P00L asks questions about the future in these speculative, humorous and poetic films composed with clips from early sci-fi B movies, 'Are we ready? Can we accept varied life forms, challenges to beliefs, perceptual changes, space travel, transhumanism, and artificial consciousness designed within our bodies?'
WORKS
FILM
In dreams the subconscious communicates with us, using images, memories, sometimes words, always working on problem solving and creativity.
Probing the dreamstate as a way to develop self knowledge and critical thinking in an age of increasing planetary crisis and cosmic consciousness, Planet of Dreams proposes radical methods of stewardship for the future of humanity and earth and solar system commons. Alternative dream-based processes are suggested in: native land tradition, speculative-futures architectural schemes, magic, Shaman-led practice, Jungian dream work, poetry, time-based works, asemic code, and conceptual performance, for guardians of earth and solar system commons.
Inspired by the words: "I've known rivers..." Langston Hughes. "I am a passenger on spaceship earth," Buckminster Fuller. "We are all ....tied into a single garment of destiny," Dr. Martin Luther King.
FILM
Goose Moon Owl
Nuclear Forest
Wolf Queen
Magic Dream
Nomad Dreams, the Sorceress, the Flying Saucer and the Moon
Last Time Tomorrow
DreamTown USA
Dream Come True
SpaceLife Dreams
WORKS:
Oracle Books, two books, drawing, print
I Have Known Rivers, 3 watercolors, Cape Cod, South Carolina
Shaman Trees, 4 photographs, Aiken, South Carolina
Nuclear Forest is filmed in Aiken, South Carolina's Hitchcock Woods, the country’s largest privately owned urban forest, and the Savannah River Site Museum of the 198,000 acre reservation for America’s plutonium storage, tritium production and military and space dreams. The SRS produces the US’s only source of tritium for space travel and weapons.
The SRS is one of America's many nuclear arsenals, and one of the most contaminated places on earth. Today, the legacy of that creation in sick, dying and dead nuclear workers troubles the US government. And no one can agree on where to permanently bury the deadly radioactive remains that will last for a quarter million years and cost untold billions of dollars to safely contain. A run-off pond is home to two radioactive alligators dubbed by workers as Tritagator and Dioxinator — after two of the wastes, radioactive tritium and toxic dioxin.
Aiken and nearby inhabitants live under constant threat of environmental annihilation, by the two products, plutonium and tritium, that allow us to leave a planet we are destroying through their production.
“No one ever talks about it,” a friend said.
It was not possible to film the Savannah River Site because of covid and government restrictions. Documents, photographs, artifacts in the museum, and found archival film and NASA video have been used.
Nine haiku films, made in response to the dystopic year of the covid virus, examine the only constant in our life, love.
3 films to each chapter. Excerpt in FILM.
ONCE IN A BLUE MOON
i hear your voice in my ear
asteroids blaze earth
comets threaten life
midnight pierced in shooting stars
300 million
planets in the galaxy
without you
FENG SHUI FIESTA
follow social distance guides
dont go outside
harmonize with rose
wineglass and candle
a flaming party for one
SHIPWRECKED, castaway,
reefed, stranded, runaground, beached
watched by coyotes and crows
i have the treasure
not waiting for your return
TOMORROW IS FOREVER
a train going east
memory tracks deep
smoking velvet dream
bare fields pass infrared dawn
morning aching noon
black storm thunder dusk
did i leave you or lose you?
racing thru the night
i got your letter
soon you’ll get my card
sighs fill empty sails
deck rope twisted net
high tide fools the shame
night winds turn offshore
north star in the fog
mist falls on my skin
waves WHISPER AQUAMARINE
in the FALLING SKY
everything looks small
sadder than the twisting air
down below on ground
things seem to be tall
hiding what i can not find
under cloud covered sun
traveler with no tracks
without your map, lost
send your LOVE ELECTRONIQUE
peace, wavelength and
high frequency mantras
advise conditions
confidential transmission
shoot jpeg or mp4
at constant of speed
receiving your consciousness
message delivered
all units secure
awaiting the next message
mission completed
you signed the declaration
of high disobedience
inside your CHEMICAL SKIN
and lost your low job
no reason to stay the same
its only a game
and it takes dedication
firm resolution
to experiment
to change skin you’re in
everyday, what’s the real me?
who is the real you?
does it matter who is who?
you just love me on the screen
in my chatgirl live
you said ‘let me come around’
right? you need to understand
my rents not paid and
my utilities are late
you are thinking what I say
that it is all lies
and maybe it is
I can read your lips and eyes
in my mediated guise
I know why you sneer
its a digital frontier
and you just can’t cross
that LITTLE RED LINE
WatchFiends: 100 seconds to midnight, reflects on challenges humanity faces in six short films. From plague, weather instability, AI surveillance, ethics and choice, apocalypse, space mining and migration. The title ‘WatchFiends’ is a line from Blake: ‘What the Watchfiends cannot find.’ With Jeff Crouch.
What is it with Marty? This Stop ‘n Shop robot employee, responsible for alerting store employees to spills in the aisles, is a giant, a rolling camera recording everything around him. He freaks out over a sprig of sparsely, a tiny food label, or a twist tie dropped on the floor. He freaks out when he finds spillage or dropped cans. But Marty cannot quite manage the clean-up. Yes, Marty is a mess spotter, a floor drone. Marty finds a mess, and out come the humans for the clean-up. The set-up is a reverse-action Fukushima scrub. And, indeed, the Marty scene is quite a show. Stop ‘n Shop customers are puzzled, amused, and bewildered by this beeping, bumping, lurking giant. “Mama, he’s cute.” Just wait until Marty creeps up on you in the canned-goods aisle reaching for a can of fruit cocktail. Just know that kids love Marty and run to find him. Jeff Crouch.
Vacation culture, consciousness and capitalism. The vacation migration is compared to early nomadic tribes led by their shaman on the tracks of game. But now, the game pursued is a state of mind advanced by corporate interests to produce a workers' consciousness tolerant of capitalist slavery. Club Paradise examines the marketing of adventure absent in workers regulated lives, the colonisation of vacation areas, tourist protest and a native's political strategies, worker migration, the use of nostalgia and memory to control workers’ minds. A nomadic shamanic consciousness is proposed, anima mundi, connection to nature, and mindfulness of the interconnectedness of all.
Club Paradise: don’t be a tourist @Interalia Magazine 1/2020
Surrounded by a burning world at war with itself, only vacation sites are conflict free. Here we encounter an on-call Al mixologist crafting custom memory enhancing drinks for vacationing workers. Rafael Gonzalez music and photographs. Destany Foley.
FILM
Welcome
Moon on Fire Meditation
Race the Sun Meditation
Last Exit
Tears in the Night
Club Paradise
'Posted' with Rafael Gonzalez. 'Sent' with Jeff Crouch. 13 postcards, mail collaboration
Also:
Cruise Collection. Silkscreen t-shirts: Don't Be A Tourist. Memories Are Made Here.
Tourist Activities photography: Bone Tree, Adventure Park, Pirates Cove, Skull Island (here), Float Choices
What is it to be human in the age of the drone? Drone Drama: Music for the Dead is a collaboration between filmmaker Cecelia Chapman and composer Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt's drone music. It is based on Chapman's interpretation of Marquardt’s original titles to question the militarisation and commodification of knowledge, and the friction between technology corporations and local communities on the San Francisco Peninsula. 2015-2017
Chapter 1. ‘I love watching the movement of your limbs when they tremble from the wind’s gentle caress.’ This chapter was filmed on the full moon summer solstice four hundred miles away from Aliso Canyon gas storage that was leaking a methane plume visible from space into the air for four months in 2016. It was one of the worst unreported environmental disasters in U.S. history. Christa Hunter.
Chapter 4. Offerings of the Oracle examines two repositories of knowledge and prediction in split screen. An online psychic-oracle, descendent of transgender shaman who used mask, costume, mood, and herbs to find answers within and in nature for the survival of tribe. And Oracle software corporation, a militarized knowledge editor named after it’s first CIA contract, their headquarters, salt pond and Oracle Team USA American Cup Challenger. With Rickey Crowe.
Chapter 7. ‘Only the Sufferers Know How their Bellies Ache.’ Winter storms prevented filming for weeks. By the time rain stopped, I learned San Francisco city was removing the north side of the freeway camps where the homeless 'drug-users' lived. The south side, the 'non-drug-users-just-homeless' side, was visibly frantic about the possibility of losing their much cleaner camps. “...it's a game," a man said drinking beer, with his canoe and giant teddy bear, hanging back and waiting for the city workers and police to leave so they could return. San Francisco and Peninsula housing is the highest in the nation due to tech workers employed in San Francisco Peninsula’s Silicon Valley. Once base to the Vietnam war munitions industry, and previously the greatest WWII ship builders, San Francisco Peninsula is now home to military contract technology industry. The link between homelessness and drone warfare is a straight line.