Badlands is a speculative, linear, 4K video (although the version here on Vimeo is 1080p) that speaks to anxieties surrounding the climate crisis, extinction, deep time, AI and extractivist capitalism.

The video is composed of footage shot in situ in what is known as the Badlands. This area, which is located in the south eastern prairies of Canada, in the province of Alberta, is home to stunning, alien-like landscapes, with the signature features of what are known as Hoodoos. These iconic pillars rising out of the wind scorched and baked clay glacier fields have been sculpted by the air currents of time, and tower over the empty, eerie moonscape.

This area is also one of the largest archeological sites in the world where dinosaur remains are located.

The video is a hybrid work, in the sense that the real footage has been inscribed with glyphs that seemingly are the remnants and traces of a vanished peoples. These pictographs are derived from AI hallucinations trained on cave drawings. The images show machines and peoples in our anthropocentric era engaging with technology (using laptops, taking selfies) and totemic emblems such as oil derricks. There are also scenes of conflict and skirmishes alongside images of drones and drone warfare.

The accompanying audio is generated and composed from field recordings and aural artifacts which originate from the area itself.

The absence of any people or life, a kind of successor to Michael Snow’s canonic “La Région Centrale” film, is intended as a rumination on our precarious position in our endangered social, psychic, environmental and political ecosystem and as such, is a missive from the future to our present selves…