Vision Quest

2021-2025

Actual and virtual intervention (2024)

Vision Quest (film)

Digital video, 20 minutes, color, stereo, 2024. English. Country of origin: USA

In the near future, robots will make videos to be watched by AI. Humans will be free to live solitary lives without meaningless entertainment or stimulation.

This film begins as a traditional documentary recounting the efforts by archeologists to rescue petroglyphs from the rising waters of a hydropower plant under construction in 1952. The film then shifts to focus on the stylistic characteristics of the petroglyphs themselves and the footage is gradually replaced by AI-generated scenes. In the final segment, the film returns to a camera-captured footage, but we realize that we'’re watching it be interpreted by the Google Video Interpretation API, housed in Google’s first data center, powered by the very dam whose construction resulted in the inundation of the petroglyphs.

Lithograph on Magnani Pescia, cream. Paper size: 14 x 18 in [35.56 x 45.72 cm]. Image size: 15 x 12 in [38 x 30 cm] edition of 10, 2022. Printed by Studio Souterre/Lee Marchalonis

This lithograph is a reproduction of an indigenous petroglyph, which was submerged by the reservoirs created by hydroelectric dams along the Columbia River. A vision quest was an intentional hallucination that Pacific Northwest tribes would induce through starvation, smoke tents, and self-flagellation, as a rite of passage through puberty. The images likely represent a shaman wearing a headdress and the spirit animal, a dear or similar forest creature.