SPECIES PIRACY (2024)

Species Piracy is a live cinema ensemble inspired by the dark arts of de-extinction (full information here). A Blu-Ray DVD is being released of the linear format of the film project, combining artificial cinema, lab science experiments, and artificial intelligence, alongside a short booklet of essays. The film explores temporal slips and the ways a biological medium can disobey basic concepts of irreversibility in digital bio-images, ghosts, clones, dreams, progeny, and ushers of the uncanny, as humans continue to create new scientific fantasies for dying, splicing, grafting, mourning, reviving, and surviving.

We Were Foolish Like The Flowers (2023)

I have primarily stopped uploading films and film samples here in favour of live cinema and commissioned feature projects. This is an extract from AV experiments in progress. It’s a sample from a film project deliberately using only waterlogged devices and a waterlogged phone, inspired by the "anti-geography" of Nancy Holt's Swamp (1969). Filmed in Sehuaya canyon, home to the last living river in Mexico city.

Between the Avenues (2021)

This track by Lines of Flight draws on the insights of walking in San Francisco and witnessing its disparity of wealth. The video translates these themes along lines of restriction and escape in lockdown. It filters static shots through closed and open skies in altered and combined horizons, inspired by the divided experiences of 2021 in access to green or open space. Remembered or dreamed landscapes frustratingly co-exist in stationary locations, with footage in central Leeds, on Almscliffe Crag, and even the view from the my first post-lockdown train out of London. (It was also entirely filmed on Yorkshire Day 2021.) Releasing on this Youtube link at 7.45pm on Thursday 9th Sept.

To Stop Time (2021)

This was an abandoned music video which animated the song’s Romantic principles of time and memory. Monochrome archives are balanced with eerie injections of colour, suggesting a spacey strangeness, moving through the massive scale of galaxies and constellations. Inspired by the sounds of synth dreampop as well as gendered traditions of the “muse of memory” and its motifs – roses; waves of the sea – the video is a comment on these media histories as much as it is on the song’s existential languishing. It includes the triptych film panels of an unknown director’s 1925 setting of Thomas Bailey Aldridge’s poem ‘In Youth Beside the Lonely Sea’ – perhaps also itself a precursor for this song.

Disappearance (2021)

Obsolete media and obsolete animals, running to survive. The song’s theme of lost futures is explored via ghostly or captive lives on an ark heading nowhere. From Prelinger home movies to night vision cameras to the last surviving footage of endlings (the last individual in a species), this multi-format film exposes the fate of the electric animal in the mausoleum of cinema.

In 2021 I am collaborating with the band Lines of Flight to create a film each month, for each of the tracks in their lockdown album, Signs of Life. Each music video will be released on their Youtube channel on the same day as the song’s release.

The Video Book of Orchids (2021)

Sponsored by the international Empire & Ecology research group at UCD, this film and video essay is a response to the imperialism of orchid collection, as well as an anatomy of a picture book, or the herbarium re-mediatised. Taking orchids as the 'ambassador plants' in focus and drawing on traditions of botanical illustration, it explores the virtuality of the image as well as contemporary flower life during lockdown. Read more and watch the film here.

I Remember Everything (2021)

Drawing on the song’s references to political foreboding, abandonment, and a coming storm, the film balances rain and rust in urban edgelands. The crows are harbingers, but also a throwback to the flying bodies in the earlier music videos.

In 2021 I am collaborating with the band Lines of Flight to create a film each month, for each of the tracks in their lockdown album, Signs of Life. Each music video will be released on their Youtube channel on the same day as the song’s release.

Signs of Life (2021)

In 2021 I am collaborating with the band Lines of Flight to create a film each month, for each of the tracks in their lockdown album, Signs of Life. Each music video will be released on their Youtube channel on the same day as the song’s release. This film and song released on June 4th. From Dorset to deep time, the video combines Super 8, VHS, animation and geology watercolours to suggest at the “fragments of answers” in the song. The spirit of Mary Anning is hinted at by balancing the men of fossils and science with the young beachcombing girl and Watson Kintner’s rare archival fieldtrip footage of a seashell market.

Skronktronic set (for Psychiceyeclix), May 2021

This video was for the live improvised set by Pyschiceyeclix at Skronktronic (New River Studios, 26th May 2021). Pyschiceyeclix performs with circuitbending, robot drumming, self made fx and hacked toys/synths. He has created work about transmuted pyramids and ancient spaces. The video therefore draws on landscapes, computerised fossils, and the Ancient Astronaut Theory.

Heading Out To You (2021)

In 2021 I am collaborating with the band Lines of Flight to create a film each month, for each of the tracks in their lockdown album, Signs of Life. Each music video will be released on their Youtube channel on the same day as the song’s release. The second is Heading Out To You, released on Friday 7th May. The emotion in the song is echoed by the film's splintered, chilly nostalgia. Rather than using digital effects, it journeys into winter through a hand-held overlay of lantern slides, snow globes, and other souvenirs. This creates a shimmer between 2D and 3D worlds, suggesting an alternative space and time in memory.

Moth Eaten Heart (2021)

In 2021 I am collaborating with the band Lines of Flight to create a film each month, for each of the tracks in their lockdown album, Signs of Life. Each music video will be released on their Youtube channel on the same day as the song’s release. The first was Moth Eaten Heart, left, which premiered on 23rd April. Channelling the song's narrative of escape and solace, the film is inspired by lifting bodies. It combines animation, public domain footage, and filming inside my London housing estate during lockdown.

LUDCHURCH CHANNEL (2020)

Commissioned by Stoke Festival 2020, this archival film re-mixes private and public ecological histories to consider individual and shared landscape, including work with the Staffordshire Film Archive, and fieldtrips to Lud’s Church with a Yashica Dental Eye camera. The project also aims to understand how a festival commission – and a festival itself – can connect us online. In particular, it draws on moving image histories of the Garden Festival in Staffordshire and its links to regeneration, as well as being inspired by legends of seasonality connected to the Green Chapel / Lud’s Church. Read more and watch the film here.

You Call It Sundew (2020)

A feature length film commissioned by Animate Projects and Fermynwoods Contemporary Art, excavating and re-mixing the archives of steel extraction and metallurgy in Britain. The film creates new sound and footage about extractive politics, multi-species storytelling, limestone, fossils, factory symphonies, carnivorous plants, underwater warfare, and the techno-masculinist voices of the Anthropocene. It can currently be viewed in full online as part of the Triple Harvest virtual exhibition. Full details on the film, process, score, and limited edition artist’s prints are available here.

PILOTS (2020)

Created as a daily collaboration in the first UK lockdown, this is a video book of 31 short “audio-visual specimens”, based on the pilot fish, and also the pilot episode or experimental broadcast. This project also exists as a livestreamed performance based on a mini laboratory of specimens, drawing on the meaning of specimen as ‘way of seeing’. All 31 films can be seen here.

Guitar Tests (2020)

Less of a film, more of a video sketch of some outdoor memories from 2019 which are impossible in 2020. I’ve been using these miscellaneous outdoor film scraps/ flashes of hindsight from last year in my first few days of teaching myself the guitar in the early mornings (while anticipating the isolation/boredom of a second lockdown in my estate in central London). All sounds and video editing are done at dawn on successive days waking early and being unable to get back to sleep. First attempts at sound textures with guitar, while learning the harmonic minor scale.

Test Landscapes (2020)

A short film made with test cards and field-trip landscapes, during a residency on an uninhabited island in Finland. Sound and film by Amy Cutler; a “pilot” or “trailer” for the project Örö Tape: Fieldtrips of the Damned (2020).

I am living, and it is proving to be a strange way to be (2019)

Coastal glamours, Margate, Solstice 2019. This is a sample from an ongoing project, This star makes us want to lie down, in which unearthly planetary events are depicted more obliquely by looking down at the ground (beginning with Dartmoor Interlude, a depiction of the Perseids meteor shower 2017 via constellations of dew). This solstice episode is titled with a line from David Spittle's All Particles and Waves (2019), with piano from Natalia Beylis' Green Bird Fountain.

This star makes me want to lie down (2019)

Portrait of a horizon which doesn't exist, made after re-reading Han-shan's cold mountain poems for the first time in 14 years. These poems were written over 30 years of hermit life at Cold Mountain, and alternate between the Zen spiritual and the bitterly grudging, cold and self pitying ("what's left of my life isn't worth mentioning"). They are a strange mixture of "in the world and not of it".

The music track, ‘Lost’, is written and performed by Ashtoreth (ritual ambient / landscape drone by Peter Verwimp).

The sun is a spinning top (2019)

Based on Francis Ponge's Le soleil placé en abîme and Le Soleil toupie à fouetter, written on the day of the Summer solstice 1950. This film was made on another Summer solstice, in 2019, with a street lamp and cars reflected in a London gutter puddle outside my estate. It uses Ponge’s thinking around the “missing” of sunlight and reflection/eclipse, relevant to film, light, cinema theory, and not looking at the sun (only at its copies). The sun is not an object but rather a hole, a metaphysical abyss; life is a lukewarm mediocrity, “the degradation of solar energy”. This film also draws on lines about the black sun, an ages-old image of the darkness in individual lives and in life itself.

Some of us will be breathed in by animals (2019)

Slow cinema for a dandelion seed, with diegetic sound recording (with one obvious exception). Made for live accompaniment at Polypore sound & spore festival at Chalton Gallery, on spore/audio dissemination. What would a love song karaoke / lounge music look like for non-Linnaean taxonomies? For the Flowering of the Strange Orchid or Erasmus Darwin’s nightingale-rose (the bastard offspring of bird and flower in Loves of the Plants)? Made for audience karaoke for the music of cryptogramia, via individual & choral selves. Note the 1979 voice describing the spore as “aware of love, hate, & the whole spectrum of human emotions”.

All Her Beautiful Green Remains    In Tears (2018)

This short film consists of re-edited footage from Walt Disney's Nature's Half Acre (1951), with its sexist parables about domesticated post-war suburbia: nest building, chick rearing, mother love, industrious insects, and traditional gender roles. In this case, the new voiceover - replacing the paternal voice of Winston Hibler - also focuses on romantic anthropomorphism. The difference is this voiceover has been generated by a neural network in collaboration with filmmaker Amy Cutler and data artist Anna Ridler, using an A.I. which has learned its existence entirely from reading the female protagonist voice in 14 million passages of romance novels. Using image recognition/ closed captioning, it tells an entirely different story of the “birds and the bees” of nature documentary: one of female desire, trauma, masochism, and emotional fantasy. Soundtrack by the musician Leafcutter John, who specialises in creating natural landscapes and ecologies from generated noise, often using DIY gadgets.

Incantations from Yin Valley (2017)

Memory of rugged landscape becomes memory landscape drizzle, paired with experimental drone musician Bridget Hayden's consistent landscape groove of lo-fi blues and murk. The sound of 'daw haul a fryn eto (sun will return to the hill)', with its oily drones and swells, is also a solo tape from Fort Evil Fruit.

Eudaimon (2017)

The first film made for the French composer Delphine Dora's bewitching piano settings of the poems of Kathleen Raine, from the esoteric label three:four records. The figure of the eudaimon spirit recurs in Raine's mystic nature poems, although this good demon to which we are bound is somehow lighter, and free to part way with us in dark waters.

Cry of the Hunter (2017)

This is the third in a series of films by Amy Cutler in collaboration with The Left Outsides (Alison Cotton and Mark Nicholas), whose chilly, haunted reverbs are brought together here with a film inspired by the idea of frozen time in the forest, or what Mark Fisher called "the eerie": 'What happened to produce these ruins, this disappearance? What kind of entity was involved? What kind of thing was it that emitted such an eerie cry?'

Clouds / Invocation (2018)

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's an insubstantial dissolving love song in empty clouds / cloud imaginaries for absent yearning forever.

This simple short is a first initial experiment towards a commissioned artist's film (2019) on the recording or transcription of storm-clouds and their emotional and political invocations, including: painters' weather annotations, scientific prose, natural philosophies of clouds, and the ways film might navigate the "atmosphere" of previous meteorological imaginations.

On A Deserted Shore (2017)

This miniature film accompanies the French composer Delphine Dora's setting of Kathleen Raine's 1973 sequence of loss and mourning, 'On A Deserted Shore'. Following the death of nature writer Gavin Maxwell, this sequence tracks the movements of the soul in the rings of bright water, flowers, and stars he leaves behind. The film takes on Raine's attention to specific, pearl-like moments of nature to which memory attaches, and follows the sound of Dora's piano keys to try and present a landscape glimmering and blurring at the same time.

Passages of October (2017)

This film travels through a dour stretch of London October with a few garish last autumn colours – “this fabrication of autumn roses” – in mostly grey wetlands. The soundtrack, by The Hardy Tree, is from an album on the seasons of bygone London, Through Passages of Time (Clay Pipe Music), and has an upbeat, pastel wistfulness; music box tones in one speaker, woodwinds in the other, and a long spectral whistle. The toy-like melodic templates re-play as the film filters between the kitsch of the red deer rut and the ebbing light of grey willows.

Lily of the Valley (2017)

A tiny film inspired by the double-meaning of Kathleen Raine's phrase 'out of time moves not a leaf', suggesting both a frozen moment of evergreen eternity, but also and in opposition, the certainty of leaf-fall. Fairy-gold, Raine has written, 'is made of a few dead leaves', hence her poems about ash trees and mirages in winter bark; but in others of her visions, trees do allow a magical space for love and faith against time. Thanks to the delicacy of Dora's setting, the amulet in the cobwebbed, rotting tree can be read either way.

The Invisible Kingdom (2017)

One of the films made for the French pianist Delphine Dora's Eudaimon cycle of Kathleen Raine settings. This is one of Raine's nature spells, which describes the woven patterns and harmonies in the world which we are attuned to without knowing, with threads 'slender as light'. The visuals build jewel-like kaleidoscopes from leaves, dew on stalks, and bracket fungi.

Last Light (2017)

A tiny landscape/light film with baroque ambient synth and slow motion. Filmed in an urban marsh, the last rays are seen through flowers, or caught in a prism in the hand. The music is by Chilean synthesist Chiodata, from the underground cassette label Fort Evil Fruit.

The White Princess (2017)

A short film after Jean Painlevé, pairing Robbie Basho's mystical instrumental, 'The White Princess', with the water's fringe (not underwater or out in the sea, but in the immediate rock pools, salt farms, and under the reflection of boardwalks and dock - the intrusion of slowly waltzing aliens.)

The Dark Leaves (2017)

Alison Blunt and David Leahy (aka Lode) improvised this music with stringed instruments, toys, and objects. The film was created in the rain, in a wander through undergrowth in notorious dogging spots in Burgess Park in South London. It's a mix of dark trees, seeping strings, and ascending sap horror - the strains of music mixed with the darkness of the wet leaf becoming a prism, and the lifting pitch crawling up the tree.

If That Wild Black Willow (2017)

"if that wild black willow / would only give the wind a chance..." The syncopations and rhythm of wind, sunlight, and rickety plants, to Robbie Basho's 'Black Mare Moan'.

Postcards (2017)

Scottish landscapes, with slide patterns made from mud and tree rot; filmed in a site of electronic darkness, Galloway Forest Dark Sky Park. This is a technique practice for a series of films on an interior/exterior theme, morphing nature-patterned wallpapers and fabrics (domestic interiors) with rugged isolated landscapes (exterior).