Rotunda

Rotunda

2008 · 15 min

Designed by Thomas Jefferson to represent the “authority of nature and the power of reason,” the Rotunda is the physical and symbolic center of the University of Virginia, founded by Jefferson in 1824 as the first secular Liberal Arts university in America. Composer Judith Shatin and filmmaker Robert Arnold have created a portrait of the Rotunda that combines its timeless majesty with the ever-changing hum of daily life. Sounds and images recorded over the course of an entire year from season to season, are presented as a single day, from dawn to sunset.

Directed by Robert Arnold

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Echolalia

Echolalia · 2003

Echolalia is the meaningless repetition of words or phrases associated with forms of dementia and aphasia. In the build-up to the war in Iraq certain phrases were endlessly repeated to the point where these empty rhetorical phrases were confused with concrete facts. I tried to record as many instances of people repeating the phrase “weapons of mass destruction” as I could stand and represent these statements in a way that draws attention to the deadening effect of their repetition, however emphatically they are expressed.

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The Morphology of Desire · 2000

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