Director of Photography: Pascual Sisto
Score: Konrad Black
Additional Music: Natalia Escobar and Troy Pierce/DAIS Records
Color: Alaa Abdullatif
Animation: Pascual Sisto
In the two-channel video, a monstrous plant-human hybrid (Bob Villain) serves as a guide through three studies. The performances include gestures inspired by fitness influencers, survival tutorials, and rave culture. As a symbol of extraction and self-depletion, they engage in activities in the redwood forest, ranging from performative actions with outdoor gear to techno-fueled collapses.
Bob's display of “connection” through branded gear and commercial wellness practices (like Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees, forest bathing, and grounding techniques) demonstrates settler-colonial extraction: believing in connection while causing harm, caring while depleting. Anthropologist Katy Overstreet describes this as “care/production logic.” Dairy farmers may “care” for cows, but benefit from their eventual slaughter, just as Bob seeks transcendence through his actions in the forest, but ultimately accelerates collapse.
The three sections lead to Bob’s final transformation into a digital immortal: a motion-captured ghost performing optimization gestures in an endless loop. This represents the idea that we can upload our consciousness to escape physical limits, that consciousness can transcend the destroyed body and planet.