Unsettling Apple Blossoms
2024, color, stereo, 10:13 minutes
This movie is a speculative imagining of perceiving things differently, in this instance apple blossoms. I live on the land of Muh-he-con-ne-ok, the Hudson Valley; apple trees are everywhere. Apple trees are not native to North America. They were brought here in the 1600s. The apple tree is a reoccurring narrative in medieval patriarchal thinking. Where I live, apple trees had a significant role in settler colonialization as a signifier of a settler’s validity to a particular “parcel” of land. Reimagining apple blossoms, our relations to things in the world, to each other seems necessary to changing the crisis in which we live. The apple blossoms in this movie were filmed on 16mm film and processed with an analog video/audio synthesizer where the cross modulations of feedback electrical signals generate “random” shifting colors and sounds. The resulting live signal was recorded to video tape and transferred to digital formats via an AI program.