Sinkholes

Director: Karen Russo

Year: 2005

ECONOMY OF EXCESS is comprised of footage of the sewage pipes of Essex, shot by a small robot camera that is normally used to locate blockages. The film creates an entrancing movement into the ever-expanding circles of a subterranean parallel universe, which mutates into a hypnotizing voyage of impressionistic colour and light. Humble in its origins yet dazzling in its effects, this video epitomizes the way in which the work continually straddles the line between the sublime and the mundane, turning society’s excess into a spiritual initiation journey.

Director: Karen Russo

Year: 2009

TARGET: 090313 977 explores the application of Remote Viewing – the psychic ability to see and describe remote geographical locations, or ‘targets’ – developed by the CIA during the Cold War for intelligence-gathering purposes. The work centres on an attempt by a Remote Viewer to psychically access an undisclosed target using only a set of map coordinates as a reference. This experiment, however, has a unique twist. Unlike in most RV experiments, the target in this session is located in outer space. The viewer is set the task of accessing and describing a target on the dark side of the Moon. The Remote Viewer’s impressions were documented and then delivered to a professional sci-fi movie model maker, who was commissioned to build a model based on the descriptions provided. The resulting sculpture presents a fictional lunar landscape based on psychic information, where a poetic and fictional proposition becomes more tangible than an actual physical place.

Director: Karen Russo

Year: 2016

HAUS ATLANTIS conjures a glittering sci-fi fairy tale from one of the stranger corners of Nazi Germany’s cultural history. Through voice-over, archival images, documentary footage and fictional scenes the film weaves together fragments of history and myth into a seductive fantasy, creating something new out of the old.