Catalogue > At random

This is a film about plants. It was made by plants. They transmitted their instructions to the human director through artificially intelligent means. “Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction.”- Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," (1935) in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, (New York: Shocken, 1969) Prior to the nineteenth century, western philosophers thought of eyes as broadcast centers, producing images of the world. As this perceived center of the universe shifted away from humans, and the Earth, it became more difficult to see the natural world exactly at the moment that industrial society’s exploitation began driving entire species towards extinction. Since that time, increasingly complex machines and algorithms do the work of seeing and recording the effects of the global climate emergency. Lost Prairie Valley investigates this moment at ecological research stations in the American state of Minnesota, with a little object recognition help from artificial intelligence.

Steve Rowell is a human, artist, and educator who works with photography, moving image, sound, maps, and spatial relations. His research-based practice investigates terrains of perception, nonhuman intelligence, extinction, and technology, exploring the landscape as a site of political imagination. Steve contextualizes the morphology of the built environment with the surrounding medium of Nature, appropriating the methods and tools of the geographer and archaeologist.