Emptiness Can Hold Things

Emptiness Can Hold Things

2017 · 82 min

Places—like stories, but different—are structures of communication and collective memory. A place is an organization, and memory is often an articulation of space. Something about space escapes our attempts to look at it from above. At intervals and thresholds of an urban landscape, EMPTINESS CAN HOLD THINGS improvises on techniques of polylinear perspective long practiced in Japanese painting and landscape design, in order to explore experiential principles inherent in the definitions of place. Merging architectural space with cinematic construction, this experiment pursues a cinematic language for the genius loci, captured in manifold perspectives and composed with reference to a mobile viewpoint that is propelled by feet.

Directed by Rachel Strickland

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A taxonomy of manipulation, gesture, and touch for a computer research project with touch-sensitive displays, Super 8 film, MIT Architecture Machine Group.

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Just when twilight gathers the day's lingering colors, fresh air musicians can be overheard in the process of nocturnal arrangements, and musical scales swell the space where cars had parked from 9 to 5. Four times a week the band players congregate here to practice their instruments.

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This exploration in combinatorial media and the morphology of narrative integrates motion picture, sound, and text elements in a story construction environment for children. Introduced through a series of card games that elicit spontaneous, improvisational creation, a collection of fanciful characters, unexpected events, and imaginary viewpoints, fabricated in the storyteller’s own backyard, are shuffled and revealed like a deck of Tarot cards. 174 movie intervals furnish scenes and threads from which children construct and narrate original stories. The project was developed in Los Angeles, CA at Alan Kay’s Apple Computer Vivarium Lab.

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Kalopashka · 1975

Good Easter. Super 8 film. Observance of Holy Week in the island of Patmos. The monastery that rises above the village, founded in 1088, is consecrated to Saint John the Apostle, who wrote the Book of Revelation while living in exile on this Aegean island.

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Shuffled Stories · 1990

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In this prequel to PALLADIO POTATOES PIANO PIANO, 2 timelapse sequences condense 3 years of the villa's construction to 10 minutes 33 seconds.

Folia

Calculating how short-duration cinema might set about to examine the experience of a tree that plays out in year-long cycles, this 24-minute video experimented with polylinear construction and polytemporal scaling of sound and image that were recorded during one 24-hour slice of street life in the span of a city block. A preliminary study for THE SOCIAL LIVES OF URBAN TREES, Folia combined observational cinema techniques with interval recording to trace characteristic rhythms, humors, drifts, and parallel passages through the sidewalk forest.

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Who is a Java developer? How would you know if you met one on the street? What is the picture of a software engineer’s work practice over the course of a day? What resources, inspirations, and artifacts do they employ, in what states of mind, with what concentration and how many parallel processes over what periods of time? What are their algorithms for troubleshooting and information finding? In the interest of learning about processes of the developer’s art, Sun Microsystems commissioned Strickland to undertake a series of video portraits. Dramatis Personae, shown here, is a compilation of excerpts from the collection.

Olive for Steve

Olive for Steve · 2022

Olive for Steve

At a streetcorner in San Francisco's Mission district, on February 12, 2022, Friends of the Urban Forest planted a tree to honor the memory of Steve Gano. Come listen to Steve's tree, the birds and the emptiness, when the wind carries you to that vicinity. Olea europaea (olive) habit: evergreen tree up to 30 feet tall native range: Mediterranean Europe, Asia, Africa location: 37°45'25.6"N 122°25'10.8"W planting date: 20220212 source: Frantz Nursery, Hickman, CA

Allons-Y Alonzo: Souvenirs of a Landscape

Allons-Y Alonzo: Souvenirs of a Landscape · 2001

Allons-Y Alonzo: Souvenirs of a Landscape

In 1998 a 260-kilometer stretch of the Loire River—and its adjoining parklands, vineyards, chateaux, churches, abbeys and prehistoric sites—from Sully-sur-Loire to Chalonnes, was nominated by the government of France as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Focusing on dynamic and ephemeral dimensions of the cultural landscape, Strickland adopted the shorthand of “microcinema” to portray a collection of local characters and environmental transitions that would lend animate perspective to the Loire Valley World Heritage web site. Adding the glimpses together in a 27 minute movie, Allons-y Alonzo reflects a filmmaker’s quest to glean the senses of a place and to register its Genius Loci. The web site with Strickland’s video was produced as a design prototype for UNESCO World Heritage Centre.

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Recess: Incidents in the Playground · 1987

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