Climate Crisis + Media Arts Showcase, Night II: Forecasting

In 2022-2023, the Climate Crisis + Media Arts working group of the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University (CC+MA) announced a one-time grant of up to $10000 to support the production of film and media art that creatively address the human and nonhuman experiences of climate crisis. From the over 150 submissions, CC+MA’s panel of Northwestern graduate students, scholars of environmental history, and industry professionals selected 10 promising media projects. The supported works adopt a range of unconventional approaches to sound and image, collectively addressing everything from declining bee populations to undersea mining to worm farming.

Throughout 2024-2025, Block Cinema will be welcoming Climate Crisis + Media Arts Fund-supported artists in person to showcase completed and in-progress projects. Many of these screenings will be the first public presentations of these works, allowing Block audiences to help shape the dialogue around innovative and throught-provoking films that address the cutting edge of climate transformation and adaptation.

CC+MA’s November showcase features two nights of Chicago debuts of short and feature films, all shown with artists present for discussion.

Works screened on Night II include:

THE ENTOMOLOGISTS

(dir. Jiayu Yang, 15 min, USA/China, digital)

In a humble worm farm in Southern China, a young filmmaker retraces her family’s decades-long relations with wax worms, pondering many entomological, economic, and environmental questions. Often deemed pests due to their diet of beehives, wax worms nevertheless show promise in solving farm pollution and plastic waste. In working with the wax worms, the film and the family embark on a transformative entomological quest.

A VERY BAD WIZARD

(dir. Courtney Stephens, 20 min, USA, digital)

A Very Bad Wizard will be an experimental documentary that explores unstable geographies, centered around the legacy of The Wizard of Oz and weather in Southwest Kansas. Centered in the town of Liberal, the film follows the seasons during years of rising temperatures, increasing storms, and draining aquifers, as well as the employees of a Dorothy’s House museum. Teenage girls enact the character of Dorothy while showing visitors around a farmhouse full of antiques. The film will move between real and imagined versions of place, and link these ruptures in time and register to shifting weather patterns, tracing the history of meteorology from fortune-telling to data sets that project out decades into the future. Moving between dust storms, the observations of young Dorothy’s, and tornado archives, the film will explore how landscapes of the past, future, and the cinematic imagination inflect our experience of the shifting present.

S̶T̶R̶A̶Y̶ D̶O̶G̶ HYDROPHOBIA

(dir. Patty Chang and David Kelley, 49 min, USA, digital)

S̶T̶R̶A̶Y̶ D̶O̶G̶ (HYDROPHOBIA)is primarily filmed at the International Seabed Authority’s (ISA) headquarters in Kingston, Jamaica and at the London Natural History Museum and the Oxford University Museum of Natural History in England. The video’s filmed sequences and 3-D animations hold together the multiple time scales of the deep sea: the millions of years it took for organic matter, such as shark teeth and whale bones, to become potato-sized nodules of rare minerals critical for the deep sea’s biodiversity; 150 years of modern oceanography, initiated by the 1872 expedition of the HMS Challenger which discovered the mineral trove in the Pacific Ocean; thirty years of the ISA’s legislative efforts to permit commercial mining along the ocean floor; and the immediate climate crisis. The score is produced by composer Yasna Vismale featuring drummers from the historic Maroon community of Charles Town, Jamaica; musician and singer Bongo Herman; and a chant from native Hawaiian elder Solomon “Uncle Sol” Pili Kaho’Ohalahala. These sonic elements elaborate a genealogy of struggles against extractive systems—such as slavery, settler colonialism, and plantation economies—and foreground a range of human and more-than-human perspectives. 

Presented with support from the Climate Crisis + Media Arts Working Group of the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University.

About the artists:

Patty Chang is a Los Angeles based artist and educator who uses performance, video, installation and narrative forms when considering identity, gender, transnationalism, colonial legacies, the environment, large-scale infrastructural projects, and impacted subjectivities. Her museum exhibition and book The Wandering Lake investigates the landscapes impacted by large scale human-engineered water projects such as the Soviet mission to irrigate the waters from the Aral Sea, as well as the longest aqueduct in the world, the South to North Water Diversion Project in China. Her most recent collaborative project, Learning Endings, is a multi-part interdisciplinary research project that examines the work of scientists who perform necropsies of dead marine mammals as unacknowledged forms of attention and care, and explores how various kinds of art practice can support this care work. Chang’s work has been exhibited nationwide and internationally at such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; New Museum, New York; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; BAK, Basis voor actuele Kunst, Utrecht; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester, England; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Times Museum in Guangzhou, China; and Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. She has received a United States Artist Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Grant, a Creative Capital Fellowship, a Guna S. Mundheim Fellowship in the Visual Arts at the American Academy in Berlin, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Art and the Environment grant, and an Anonymous Was a Woman Grant. She currently teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA.

David Kelley is a Los-Angeles based artist working with photography, video, and installation. His recent projects draw attention to the effects of global capitalism, resource extraction, and shifting physical and political landscapes. Influenced by a range of visual traditions, Kelley draws upon elements of experimental documentary, ethnography, performance, and avant-garde cinema. Working at the intersection of these strategies, he encourages an understanding of his subjects that is simultaneously direct and speculative. Recent exhibitions include the Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Fotofest Biennial, Houston. Other exhibitions include Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles, The Bank in Shanghai, the de Cordova Biennial in Boston, BAK in Utrecht, MAAP space in Australia, and the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok. Kelley received a Master of Fine Art from the University of California, Irvine, and was a 2010-11 resident at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. He is currently a PhD Student in the Media Arts + Practice Program in the University of Southern California and an Associate Professor of the Practice of Fine Arts in USC’s Roski School of Art and Design. 

Courtney Stephens is a writer/director. Her essay feature, Terra Femme, composed of amateur travel footage shot by women in the early 20th century, was a New York Times critic’s pick and has toured widely as a live performance. The American Sector (co-directed with Pacho Velez) questions the legacy of the Cold War on American self-understanding, following dozens of fragments of the Berlin Wall installed around the US. Invention, an experimental fiction feature, premiered in 2024 at Locarno. Her films have been exhibited at MoMA, The National Gallery of Art, The Barbican, BOZAR, the Walker Art Center, the Thailand Biennale, and in film festivals including the Berlinale, Viennale, IDFA, RIDM, Mumbai, Hong Kong, SXSW, and the New York Film Festival. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship, fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Union Docs, and the Wexner Center, and grants from California Humanities, the Sloan Foundation, and the Foundation for Contemporary Art. In addition to co-curating the miniature cinema Veggie Cloud since 2014, she has organized film screenings for The Getty, Flaherty NYC, Human Resources, and Museum of the Moving Image. Her writing has appeared in BOMB, Film Comment, Cabinet, Filmmaker, and The New Inquiry. 

Jiayu Yang is a Ph.D. candidate in Documentary Arts and Visual Research at Temple University and earned her MFA in Documentary Media at Northwestern University. Her fields of interest include eco-cinema, critical animal study, and multi-species and multi-sensory ethnography. She is currently teaching a writing intensive course on animals and cinema at Temple University. As a scholar and a filmmaker, she often invites theoretical research into her visual art practices and challenges the bifurcation of science and art. Driving by her entomological upbringing, her work-in-progress, The Entomologists, is a visual study of the human-insect collaboration in a South China worm farm.

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