Guest
“What if humans used the media archive to resurrect former ecologies?” asks designer and composer Robert Gerard Pietrusko and filmmaker Courtney Stephens, who have come together in collaboration for The Room: Restoring Eden, a beautiful, quietly probing video collage featuring ‘The Room’, a track from Robert Gerard Pietrusko’s latest album, Elegiya. Stitching together footage lifted from 20th century Soviet archives, Stephens ruminates on what he terms the “hyper-natural beauty” of the natural world caught on film in an exploration of our changing biosphere. By charting a through-line between 16mm archival footage, early video and computer graphics, Stephens seeks to enact a filmic resurrection of our fallen world, reconfiguring our focus through the magic of light and sound. “Scientists now estimate that human-induced climate change was underway by the mid-19th century. This means that the entire history of non-fiction cinema, regardless of its original intent, has also been a documentation of our c
