Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 Chapter five and land by Joel Toms. This chapter describes the end land video artwork by Joel Toms. Please note that the description is not in sync with the video. The chapter is four minutes and 19 seconds long.
Speaker 1 00:00:17 You are now in front of a large flat screen TV mounted on the gallery's wall. This chapter will describe specific parts of the video. It is approximately 17 minutes long and runs in a continual loop. It includes the following intersecting components, video footage that Tom's shot at snow lab, sweeping views of the surrounding wilderness of Northern Ontario marshes and forests, 3d rendered images of the laboratory spaces, text graphics, and voices of physicists. These components weave together, historical geographical, indigenous, and scientific contexts for the physical site of the sub remind in which snow lab operates though, you might hear a scientist voice at some points. There are lengthy parts of this film with no audio, pause this track to listen. Most gallery visitors don't take in the video in its entirety. They might arrive in the middle and leave when they want this Frank mentoree experience echoes the technique Joel has used in creating the visual and verbal assemblage of the video.
Speaker 1 00:01:30 The video begins with a gray and white checked pattern on the screen. This pattern is commonly used as the blank slate in the graphic design software Photoshop on top of which layers of images, graphics, and text are imposed. This checked pattern reappears throughout the video. The first sound we hear is a woman's voice. One of the scientists that Joel interview during his residency, she speaks about the need to change our worldview in order to understand the nature of subatomic particles, a shadow of the spinning steel sculpture appears text stylized as a three-dimensional font appears over top
Speaker 0 00:02:11 And land unvisible energies and forces bend defract interfere.
Speaker 1 00:02:21 The video then continues as a portrait rendered in fragments. These fragments include a geological map of the region that visualizes the geological impact of the media that created the Sudbury basin. 1.85 billion years ago, a black and white photo of the opening in the rock represents the Creighton mine that has operated here since 1901 images of the nor right rock, a dense Crystalyn igneous granite that surrounds the snow lab are shown. It also includes Joel's footage of moving through the dark tunnels and brightly lit labs at snow lab where work in lab coats and hardhats as well as beautiful views of the marshland and forest in the fall season with blue skies and fiery leaves. This footage is juxtaposed with texts that describes the ongoing fight by the 21 first nations in Northern Ontario, including one, a potato first nation and Mrs. Saga first nation to receive annuities from the mine promised to them in 1850 together, these video components tell a story of this place. Halfway through the video. This text appears over the images,
Speaker 0 00:03:38 The landscape laboratory attempts to have intelligence with radical otherness matters beyond vision unphysical yet ubiquitous legible in the rotations of the galaxies to find relevant ways to think with such entities, researchers devise all manner of assemblages to burst the bubble of unknowing.
Speaker 1 00:04:03 The video is sometimes opaque, sometimes fragmented and sometimes poetic. It combines and recombines, knowledges, and worldviews in an attempt by Joel to sense the unknown
Speaker 0 00:04:17 Stay at this stop and go to the next track to hear interpretations of the video and some prompts for further reflection or move to the next stop, which is three and a half meters behind you and play chapter seven.
