Canaries in the Mine2015

CANARIES IN THE MINE is a four-part essay on the grossly out of balance relationship between our rapidly evolving digital and technologic world and our degenerating natural world. The video travels through the recent past to the futuristic present, chronicling the natural world as it evolves from tourist pleasure, through scientific examination, to a subject of exploration on the internet, to its eventual existence as an archive of a disappearing world. Throughout the video, attempts to replicate the natural world with technology collapse and the landscape falls into the language of abstraction (line, shape, movement, repetition, texture). Images from Google Earth show a natural world that has disappeared with climate change, a referent lost to time, that the medium of video can no loner find and record. Sospira focuses on nine women of various nationalities I befriended, each of whom left their old lives behind and moved to Italy for love. In the film they discuss the challenges, compromises, and joys of their new lives.