de rerum natura

A pizza cook who's never left his college town meets the woman of his dreams before finding out there's a huge roadblock to them being together.

Amazonia is a live-narrated essayistic meditation on one of the key sites where the virtual world of e-commerce becomes physical: the Amazon.com fulfillment centers where the millions of items available for purchase with the click of a mouse await our orders. The film visits the four cities - New Castle, Delaware; Fernley, Nevada; Coffeyville, Kansas; and Campbellsville, Kentucky - where Amazon's four original fulfillment centers were located to meditate on the impacts of our online purchases on the people and places "at the other end of the internet."

A hand-processed lament for the loss of a 200-year-old sycamore tree, felled to make way for a luxury apartment complex.

3 found fragments, perfect as found. Fragment 1 appears to be reversal camera original and was found in the bottom of a trim bin of uncertain provenance at the University of Florida sometime in the mid-2000s. Fragment 2, discovered as the sole content of a 1200' can labeled "What is a Cop?" is a Levi's commercial distressed only by the forces of nature (bacteria? mold and mildew?). Fragment 3 is one of a series of vignettes from "Assertive Training for Women, Part 2," purchased from the College of San Scholastica in Duluth, MN for the princely sum of $1.

A lazy man's Biblical concordance. A new start for the start. A mechanical rescrambling of a(n all-too) familiar audio text that produces concrete poetry and an ideological unveiling. An experiment in "contracted cinema" or a "zero-projector film."

"The Strip Mall Trilogy" is a series of three city symphonies that attempt to liberate color, sound, and form from the sprawling consumerist landscape of postmodern America. Part 1, "Green Means Go," presents fragments of color over a musique concrete soundtrack composed of sounds recorded at the strip mall. Part 2, "The Abecedaire," wrestles (and later plays) with alphabetic form extracted and abstracted from the signs of commerce of which they are normally a part. Part 3, "X-formations," tries to argue that there is, in fact, beauty after strip malls. Let's hope so. (Roger Beebe)

A trip to Michael's becomes a (very late) Modernist investigation of form. Six-foot loops of clear leader crisscrossed by washi tape produce pulses of sound and image slowly built into a densely layered cacophony. The film defies gravity as the projectors are flipped on their side while operating.

Lineage is a loop-based “orchestral” film performance for four 16mm projectors. Using as a point of departure Norman McLaren’s abstract animations in Lines Horizontal as well as reworked footage from two documentary portraits of McLaren in his prime and in his later life, the film explores how abstract marks made in a variety of ways—laser printing and etching, contact printing and hand-processing—result in strange and surprising sounds.

A multi-projector meditation on the mysteries of space. Originally made for an installation/performance in a planetarium at the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Macon, GA, the film attempts to recapture some of the excitement of the early days of space exploration and the utopian aspirations of expanded cinema. Made as an orchestration of a number of different elements, both original and found: handmade cameraless film loops by Beebe and Jodie Mack; 16mm educational films about eclipses, asteroids, comets, and meteorites; and a super 8 print of the East German animated film"The Drunk Sun."